A Walk Back to the Barn In Late August

It's late August and it's very hot and humid.  The mosquitoes are thicker than I've ever seen 'em.  Every animal and human on our little farm is looking forward to fall.  It is about a 150 foot walk back to the barn.  As I walk out in the afternoon, I see a very familiar sight - the cows and chickens are laid up under the shade of the pecan and oak trees.  They'll go out and eat grass in the early morning and then they'll stay in the tree's shade out in the pasture until the sun's course in the sky is overhead and eliminates any shade.  When the shade disappears, the cows head back to the always shady area on the southeastern side of the property.  They'll sit there and pant until the late afternoon.  Then they'll head back out to eat grass when the setting sun casts long shadows.

At this time in the season, the grass is diverting energy toward producing seed heads.  As a result, the grass is less nutritious.  This coupled with the fact that it is just too darn hot for them to eat grass all day has resulted in the cows all have lost some weight.  They'll be okay, though. 

I began to think about fall/winter feeding.  We have around 90 square bales in the barn.  I called the farmer that supplies us with round bales to reserve round bales this fall/winter/spring.  We keep records that show that last year, we used 24 round bales.  I reserved at least that much for this year.  In December, we'll put out a round bale and keep one on hand for them at all times until the latter part of April.

Back in the barnyard, I threw some henscratch to the hens and they begin scratching and eating.  Our flock is getting old.  A couple of years ago, we had over 100 in total when we captured them in the barn and counted them one by one.  We've lost some to old age since then.  I'd estimate that we have about 90 hens now.  In the past, I'd add about a dozen new pullets each year to replace those that died during the year.   We haven't added any new ones in a couple of years.  The hens (mostly) lay their eggs in the red hen house.  Benjamin would always collect the eggs and package them, but since he's  gone off to college, Tricia and I gather them each day, wash dirty ones, and put into cartons.

In the photo above, you can see a new addition to the barnyard - we moved a trough inside the corral.  The water trough is positioned where it catches rainwater off the barn roof.  We watched during a short rainstorm this weekend in which 5 inches of water was quickly collected from the run-off.  This is a good development as the calves are kept in the corral all night and it wasn't efficient to fill water buckets every night.