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The future…
…is in good hands! Two yearling bulls we have high hopes for. In the background is one of the first calves from our herd bull Essington. He’s from a premier English herd that was the work for many decades of Brian Drake…a herd that now sadly belongs to history. In the foreground is the first American descendant of another historic English line, Champson. He’s by Champson Defender. Grandson Church came up with some Champson semen at UK Sires that, frankly, didn’t look very promising but decided to try it. He hit on the very first attempt and so we now have three pure, traditional English bloodlines on our Virginia pastures.…
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A good omen…
…as a rainbow finds daughter Carolyn inspecting one of our newly-seeded pastures. It’s been 10 days since we seeded a cover crop of ryes, clovers, turnips, radishes and cow peas. It’s the cow peas clearly winning the germination race but if you look closely you can see the ryes breaking the surface. We let the cows graze the planned seeding areas lower than usual. Otherwise we did no special prep work but depending on a no-till drill to set the seeds. Our thanks to Glen Covingtin of the MarshAll Coop for consulting on our project. David
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A partial victory…
…with Bayer pulling it’s Round-up herbicide from the home market. The major ingredient in Round-up is glyphosate…linked to cancers including non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Round-up will still be available for agricultural use despite continuing court cases against the product. The story in full David
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Proud guard dogs…
…watching over our enlarged asset base. It’s a new For-most head gate, squeeze chute and a-i cage rolled into one transportable unit. With four remote pastures now this mobile chute makes life a lot easier. No more coaxing a sick animal into a trailer to get it home for doctoring. This thing has all the bells and whistles including a scale and more controls than I had when I was flying for the Air Force! David
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Ladies in waiting…
…have been moved to the pasture closest to the house where we can keep an eye on them. It’s interesting that none of the cows in this picture is actually grazing…they’ve all adopted that far-off stare of cows waiting for birth. That event begins in just a few days! Keeping an eye on them has suddenly taken on added meaning. Two nearby farms have been struck by cattle rustlers and we’ve all gone on alert. With the number of expert marksmen on these farms, the rustlers are playing a dangerous game. Son Church, while standing in front of our house, once hit a fox 300 yards away running across this…
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Updating upgrading…
…our pastures. Four days after seeding with a mix of cover crops we see the first sign of success!! Young cow peas are the first to germinate…can the turnips and radishes be far behind? David