Wide loads

My boys and I went on a short road trip recently, leaving after evening milking and driving all night to get to the Red River Gorge in Kentucky to do some rock climbing and camping behind the famous Miguel’s pizza restaurant. It is famous among rock climbers anyway. I don’t know if anyone else outside of Kentucky locals knows it is there. After a couple of days of hiking the hollers and climbing cliffs with pizza and guitar-accompanied evening bonfires, we drove back all day to get home just in time for bed so we could get a good night’s sleep to recover from our weekend activities before morning milking.

Thirty or so hours of driving gives you a lot of time to spot interesting things. One of them was the variety of wide loads going down the freeways with pilot car escorts: half a house, a whole house, the left and right wings of an airplane each on its own truck and trailer, and numerous pieces of farm equipment. The freeway system was designed for moving big military equipment quickly in the event of a military invasion with the side benefit of commerce being able to move materials quickly. It seems to be serving the purpose originally envisioned in 1916 quite well.

The last couple of weeks, the cows have been grazing a hay field during the day and eating haylage at night. After almost two months without rain, the hay fields I was planning to make a fourth crop on are about all that is left to graze. It turns out the cows really, really enjoy grazing the hay and come in from the pasture looking like the wide loads we saw on the freeway: big bellies on little legs. Their extra width makes fitting them in the parallel parlor a bit tough at night, but I love seeing cows looking like they should have some flashing lights and a yellow banner across their butt. They came up a bit in milk and hopefully will go up more when we start feeding the better haylage when it cools down a bit more.

We’ve had trouble feeding enough haylage to stay ahead of it heating with the 80-plus degree weather the last month as well as the delays that happened due to rain when we were bagging it. It seems like any time we must pause filling a bag there will be quality problems at feed out of that bag. There were definitely pauses during the first crop this year. When it cools down, we’ll open a bag of higher-quality feed to mix with the lower-quality first crop we’ve been feeding. Feeding grass-fed cows is tricky. We can’t just up the corn or protein mix to balance out lower-quality pasture or hay. We have to plan out feeding what we have in a way that we feed a fairly consistent protein and energy ration all year by mixing the forages we have on hand and maybe buying some high-quality hay.

We got the first little bit of snow the other day, which, after the seemingly endless summer, puts me in the mood to start wrapping up projects and getting things ready for winter. Hopefully we’ll get another few weeks of good weather to get all the things done and equipment put away before winter shows up for real. We’ve been spoiled with consistent warm weather and better get-into-winter prep mode or we will end up finishing up projects in either snow or mud, neither of which are fun to work in.

Until next time, keep living the dream and get out there to finish up those fall projects. Winter is coming as they say. If you’re already done with everything, go enjoy the fall season. Should you find yourself near Slade, Kentucky, a stop at Natural Bridge State Park is worth your time.

Tim Zweber farms with his wife, Emily, their three children and his parents, Jon and Lisa, near Elko, Minnesota.