Webmaster’s note: The format of this column includes all of the Quill’s Endians participating at various times and in various ways! Phil writes this month’s column.
Winter Dairy Farming
Winter dairy farming makes for a horrible workout routine. Short bursts of activity are often followed by longer bursts of “rest.”
Winter chore time includes twice-a-day cleaning of the main area of the barn that houses the cows. We push the bedding and manure into a pile by the door and then shovel it into a pile outside the door where it can be accessed by a tractor. All well and good–gets a body moving and warmed right up.
Then, we water and feed the cows. While they are all bellied up to the feeders, we brush them clean. You can imagine this takes a bit of doing in the winter. Then we wash their udders and begin milking.
All that activity before milking is enough to work up a sweat in the coldest weather. The (lack of) activity during milking is enough of a slowdown to cool you off.
Hauling hay is an even worse workout. Our hay suppliers are around half an hour away. We drive the half hour, load a truck for half an hour, then sit and drive home for half an hour, and then unload for half an hour–a physical therapist’s nightmare.
This is all to say, by April, we are watching that sweet grass pretty closely. The sooner we have 5 or 6 inches in the fields, the sooner we can liberate the cows, stop pushing manure, and stop hauling hay. We can start just walking the cows about to do their jobs.
We love cows of grass! We love cows pooping on grass, where our labor is not needed for clean up. We love cows eating grass where our hauling labor is not needed. Here is to the coming of spring and retiring, well, seasonally retiring anyways, the winter shovel.
Heather and Phil Retberg and their three children run Quill’s End Farm, a 105-acre property in Penobscot that they bought in 2004. They use rotational grazing on their fifteen open acres and are renovating thirty more acres from woods to pasture to increase grazing for their pigs, grass-fed cattle, lambs, laying hens, and goats. Quill’s Endians are members of Halcyon Grange and publish a newsletter for their farm’s buying club of farmers in her area and generously permit us to share some of their columns with Grangers. Visit the Quill’s End Farm Facebook Page for more information.