The Bovine Bugle

Sorta like the Wells Fargo Wagon...supplies come to the farm

Every third Monday you can hear a diesel truck rumbling up Beaver Meadow Road towards the barn, and then it slows to a stop in front of the milkhouse. The white truck with the red and white shield on its side belongs to Dan Larivee, the IBA dealer who covers this area of our county. IBA stands for Independent Buyers Association, and Dan's truck is a farm supply store on wheels. If a farmer needs it, Dan has it. His wares including anything from detergents to clean your milking equipment; medicines and herd health management products to keep your animals in top form; boots to keep your feet warm and dry; to a new hose handle to replace the one the cow just stepped on and broke.

Dan--who lives here in Franklin and who I have known since from when I can remember--has been coming to the farm for more than a decade. He's another member of the "team" that keeps our farm going. He always has a pleasant word to say, often knows what we need before we tell him, and is always ready for a wrestling match with one of the boys if they happen to be around. With the cost of fuel today, it saves us some money not having to drive into St. Albans, 15 miles away, to pick up items Dan delivers right at our barn doorstep.

Today we needed another jug of powdered teat dip, a gallon of keto-aid drench, and a gallon of acid detergent for the milking system. Dan printed up our bill on his computer in the back of the truck, brought our purchased items into the milkhouse, gave the boys another quick tussel, and was on his way to the next farm. Like the tin peddelers and cobblers that went from farm to farm over a hundred years ago, Dan traverses the countryside selling his wares to farmers on his way.

--Jonathan (left), Howmars Farm
Franklin, Vermont

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It's a bird! It's a plane! It's...logs?!

While waiting for the sap to start running again, I finished cutting some more hardwood logs to fill out the load I had started almost two months ago. The ground had frozen up just enough so I wasn't skidding the logs through the mud or rutting up the road through the woods. My neighbor, Art Davis, had offered to truck the logs to a mill in St.Albans once I had the load ready.

Art came this afternoon to load up the truck. He supervised, while his son-in-law skillfully operated the knuckleboom loader and placed the logs on the back of the log truck. I had logs located in three different spots off our road, but it didn't take him anytime to have them loaded. Art actually had to go back to his place and get another truck to be loaded with some of the logs. I guess I had more cut than I thought. With the logs all loaded, they headed to Hudak's Mill to sell the black cherry, red oak, and white ash that the boys and I had worked to cut and skid over the last few weeks.

Just before leaving, Art said he had checked some of our sap buckets and a few of them were almost full. It looked like tomorrow would be a busy day gathering sap. That was something we had been looking forward too for the last two weeks!

Look for a "Moo-vie News" video of our team tapping the maple trees to gather the sap, here in The Bovine Bugle on Monday!

--Jonathan (left), Howmars Farm
Franklin, Vermont

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Light bulbs go on: Ways to save electricity in the dairy barn

We've been using some new products, and reusing an old piece of equipment to cut down on electricity use in the barn. With electricity rates slated to rise as much as 14% this year, anything we can do to lower the amount we use will help the total on the electric bill.

The newer fluorecent light bulbs are better in price, come on very quickly, and provide a very bright light. Besides the bulbs for use inside the barn, they are also making floodlights to use in outdoor applications such as our barnyard. These floodlights are great, and I can replace a bulb that would normally use 120 watts with an Ecobulb that will use only 23 watts. Another bonus is that a state agency, Efficiency Vermont, is offering a in-store refund of $2 per bulb when you buy these energy saving bulbs.Each time I visit the store at the St. Albans Cooperative Creamery, I pick up a couple more bulbs to replace more of the incandescent bulbs in the barn.

The old piece of equipment we are reusing is a timer (above)that was installed on the electric hot water in the barn. When we switched to an oil-fired hot water heater, the timer just stayed attached to the wall the past 8 years until I took it down while cleaning the office. I was looking for a way to control the lights behind the feed bunk and in the barnyard, since the wire supplying electricity to those lights is only controlled by the breaker in the breaker panel. When I took down the timer, I guess you could say a "light bulb" went on in my brain, and I knew how I could cut down on electricity used for lighting those areas of the barn. In about an hour I had the lights hooked up to the timer, and it has been working like a charm ever since.

--Jonathan (left), Howmars Farm
Franklin, Vermont

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Draining the watering system before the snow flies

A November sky threatens snow in northern Vermont.

We had some snow flurries go through today, and it motivated me to drain the watering system that feeds the grazing paddocks in the summer time. We have between three and four thousand feet of 3/4" black plastic waterline bringing water to all sections of the grazing system. If we don't drain it before winter really sets in then the water-filled line may freeze and burst.

I took the four-wheeler to save time, and to have light from the headlights since it was getting dark. I went to the end of each line that T's off the main line and opened the faucet so the water would drain. Once this was done, I used the four-wheeler to pull the two large stock tanks, used for watering the cows, back to the barn. These would be rinsed out and stored for the winter.

I'll let the lines drain by gravity overnight, and tomorrow I'll hitch up the air compressor to blow out any remaing water in the line. With that job done, the line will be ready next spring when grazing season starts and I won't have to worry about looking for leaks caused by burst sections in the line.

--Jonathan, Howmars Farm
Franklin, Vermont

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Draining the watering system before the snow flies

A November sky threatens snow in northern Vermont.

We had some snow flurries go through today, and it motivated me to drain the watering system that feeds the grazing paddocks in the summer time. We have between three and four thousand feet of 3/4" black plastic waterline bringing water to all sections of the grazing system. If we don't drain it before winter really sets in then the water-filled line may freeze and burst.

I took the four-wheeler to save time, and to have light from the headlights since it was getting dark. I went to the end of each line that T's off the main line and opened the faucet so the water would drain. Once this was done, I used the four-wheeler to pull the two large stock tanks, used for watering the cows, back to the barn. These would be rinsed out and stored for the winter.

I'll let the lines drain by gravity overnight, and tomorrow I'll hitch up the air compressor to blow out any remaing water in the line. With that job done, the line will be ready next spring when grazing season starts and I won't have to worry about looking for leaks caused by burst sections in the line.

--Jonathan, Howmars Farm
Franklin, Vermont

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Dreaded words to hear around the barn

Today my dad said to me the words I hate to hear: "The barn drain is plugged. I'll go rent the snake."

The barn drain, which comes from the milkhouse and milking parlor, travels 250 to 300 feet underground until it spills out onto a grass filter. Because of the distance, the drain plugs every once in a while. Usually we can remove the plug using a 200-foot plumbers snake. If the snake doesn't do the job, then we have to get a backhoe in to dig up the line and find the plug.

Jonathan begins the snaking of the long drain pipe, with a trusty lab Yukon standing by.

We worked at the blockage for almost three hours and it wasn't looking good. The snake was going up the drain about 175 feet before we were stopped, and over the nearly three hours we gained what seemed like inches. It looked like the backhoe option was going to come in to play. Finally, just before it was time to quit for the afternoon milking, I heard a rumbling up in the pipe and I scrambled out of the way before a deluge of backed-up drain water poured out of the end of the drain pipe. SUCCESS!!!

The blockage becomes unblocked in one explosion of stuff!

We were all glad we only had to pay for the rental of the plumbers snake instead of several hours of backhoe work. We wiped off the snake and put it in the back of Dad's vehicle so it would be ready to go back in the morning. I can't remember having such a hard time getting the blockage out of the drain. Hopefully it will run trouble-free through the winter.

Left: Farmer Jonathan and his father, Howard, after a successful day at unblocking a troublesome drain.

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When our tractor needs new tires, the "garage" comes to us

With the farm settling into winter mode, we become very dependent on our loader tractor. We use that tractor to feed the round bales, clean the freestall barn, load the compost for spreading, bring sawdust to the barns to bed down the animals, and plow snow. If the loader tractor goes down for any reason, we have to hustle to get it back in operation again. Today we replaced the front tires on that tractor since one of the tires had been losing air, and both tires were pretty worn.

A company in St. Albans, Wood's Tires, has a mobile unit that will travel to farms to replace tires on all types of farm equipment. My dad thought that instead of us taking both tires off the tractor and bringing them in to be replaced, we should just have to mobile unit come up here and replace them. That sounded good to me.

The man arrived at the farm a little after 7:30, and by 9 o'clock he had both new tires on and the tractor was ready to go. We won't have to worry about getting up in the morning and finding a tractor with a flat tire.

After our morning walk, I headed back to the barn to scrape out the barn with the loader tractor. And after lunch, I loaded and spread several loads of compost on a section of pasture. The new tires seemed to be holding air fine, and the better traction made it easier to get in and out of the compost windrow when loading the spreader.

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It's a small farm, but still we had a traffic jam

We were running low on sawdust for bedding, so I had called my supplier, across the border in Quebec, to order a load. He called this morning to say they would be here in about an hour to deliver the load. That gave me just enough time to clean out the bays and repair the back walls before the load got here. I ordered their larger load size, hoping that it will carry us through a good part of the winter. I want to avoid buying the bagged sawdust if possible because it is so expensive.

Pelletier's arrived with the tractor trailer load of sawdust and had unloaded about half of it when the milk truck pulled in to pick up the milk. The milk truck driver had just enough room to get his rig backed up to the barn. While he drained the bulk tank of its 3500 pounds of milk, the sawdust truck finished unloading and headed down the road. I joked to the milkman that it was too bad the grain truck, which was due at the farm sometime today, hadn't shown up at the same time as the other two trucks making stops at the farm.

It took me about half an hour to push what sawdust I could into the two bays of the shed, and later that afternoon I loaded the dump trailer four times and brought that sawdust around to the end of the freestall barn to put it under cover. With rain expected tonight, I wanted it all taken care of.

--Jonathan, Howmars Farm
Franklin, Vermont

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