Farm Update: Shortage
Hey everyone,
By now, most of you have learned the hard way that I’m coming up short on milk. Lots of details on this below, but first, a few quick items:
Whenever I don’t have enough milk to hit your full amount, I’ll reduce the charge to your card by issuing a credit (ahead of time) or a refund (if the charge already happened).
I turned on Stripe’s receipt and refund emails. I hope this is helpful, not annoying — let me know if you have an opinion about them.
If you want to check your payment history, you can log in here: https://billing.stripe.com/p/login/fZefZJ2WMfWT3VS8ww
You’d rather have no milk instead of a partial amount in case of a shortage, let me know and I’ll handle it that way.
That’s all for logistics.
Now, if you’re interested, a bit more detail about what’s going on:
How it happened
About two and a half weeks ago I moved the cows to the north pasture, on the far side of the pond. It had been five or six weeks since we grazed it, but it basically hadn’t rained in that time, so it was slim pickins — what had grown was stemmy, tough, and weedy (mostly foxtail and fescue). After a few days, I noticed the herd’s production going down, and it hadn’t been raining, so I knew I would be short on pasture. I separated the two heifers (not in milk) and moved them to a separate paddock with a bale of hay to eat. That way, I could save the green grass for the cows. I also started making larger paddocks for them each day.
However, their production continued to decline (from 5¾ gal/day to 4½ gal/day — for all three cows put together). It could still be due to the poor forage, and since it still hadn’t rained, I didn’t really have more green grass to move them to. So I moved them closer to the house and brought out a bale of alfalfa-orchard grass mix hay, kept dry in the barn since last winter. The cows were mostly annoyed: they vastly prefer green grass, but in the interest of letting the grass try to regrow, I was keeping them off it. I also added a small afternoon grain feeding.
After several days on hay, their production was still dropping (~3 ½ gal/day). A couple of days ago, I started feeding alfalfa hay cubes along with grain, in the hopes of getting a little more protein in their diet. (Thanks to Mariah Melgaard who suggested this!)
What I think is happening
There are a few possibilities here:
They’re likely producing less because of the relatively poor diet they’ve been on. They’re not starving, by any stretch: they’ve got meat on their short ribs and cushion on their pin bones. That’s a big upside to their New Zealand genetics, they keep good body condition even on a limited diet. A conventional Holstein would have wasted away long ago while producing oodles of milk to the very end.
Their production could be dropping because it’s been a long lactation. They’ve all been in milk over a year at this point. That duration isn’t unheard of — the vet ok’d my plan to try this timing — but it’s longer than usual. I haven’t taken them this long before so I don’t know exactly what to expect. (Conventionally, it’d be 9-10 months lactation)
Other possible factors are: splitting the herd (doesn’t make anybody happy) and one of the cows is bred. I wouldn’t expect the cow’s production to drop this early in gestation, and the other two are not bred, so I doubt that’s a big factor, but it’s on my mind.
What I’m doing about it
Changing the weather. We got some and things are greening up. Tomorrow I'll turn them out on the best grass I've got. But I'm keeping the hay at the ready: I suspect we're too late in the season to graze too much longer, but we’ll see.
Continuing supplemental feeding with alfalfa hay cubes. Within a cow's productive capacity, the protein portion of her diet is a big determinant of what she'll actually make. So I'll try to keep that up and see what we can do.
Investing in pasture and management improvements. This year, I got an old tractor, and eventually, a 7½'-wide pasture mower to go with it. This summer, I tried to mow the field discussed above, but long story short, I discovered that the tractor need new front tires, two hydraulic cylinders rebuilt, and a transmission fluid flush before it would really run the mower right. All that work got done, and I'm really looking forward to staying ahead of junky growth next year. Here's a sneak peek at the magic of pasture clipping:
White clover growing up throw a thick (but recently mowed) clump of foxtail. The good stuff! Additionally, I’m laying out contour lines to try to capture rainwater in the soil next year. Ideally this will give me a more resilience against dry spells.
What will happen next
I don’t really know. I hope that getting their diets back on line will bring production back up to the par (5½ gal/day would be enough). But it might not — and they’ll have to cross that bridge when we get there.
Alright, I think that’s the whole story… I hope you found this update helpful, and thanks for bearing with me!
Robert