Dairymom's Duck Tape Tool

How many ways can you use Duck Tape? I'm pretty sure the number is limitless if you have any imagination! Sponsors of the Arkansas Women Bloggers Conference gave us a treasure bag full of useful and fun products. I was so excited to see that one of those treasures was a new roll of black and white zebra stripe Duck Tape. A farmer can never have too  much Duck Tape and baling wire for those unexpected emergencies!

Actually, Duck Tape is a tool I use every day raising baby calves. As soon as we bring a new calf to the calf raising area, we place it in an individual hutch. Each hutch is marked with a number as part of my record keeping system. After years of trying to keep wooden boards painted and updates with numbers, I decided to try using Duck Tape and a permanent marker for writing numbers. It works perfectly!

 With so many colors of Duck Tape to choose from, it was a hard decision but it seemed obvious that the girls (heifers) should have Funky Flamingo pink and the boys(bulls) would have Island Lime  green.Girls are always pretty in pink--and these calves are no exception!

I haven't decided how I will use my zebra stripe Duck Tape, but I'm sure it will be something useful and fun and it will stay in my dairymom tool box!

Dairy Tools of the Trade

Keeping up with information about our dairy cows is an important part of our dairy farming operation to insure healthy dairy cows and quality milk. One of our best tools for managing our herd information is through Mid-South Dairy Herd Improvement Association. This association is a complete professional testing,management and reporting system for dairy farmers.

Once a month, Greg, our Mid-south Dairy Herd Improvement technician, will come to the dairy farm to collect milk samples from each dairy cow during the morning milking. Each sample will give us information about the individual cow's milk production and qualities of the milk that include butterfat,protein, and somatic cell counts. Before Greg comes to the farm for this testing, I will have recorded all herd health information, breeding and calving records into the computer system. After each cow is sampled, Greg will enter the milk weight information on our computer system , transmit all of our records to the Mid-South office in Springfield,Missouri and send the milk samples to the lab for analysis. A few days after the test day, we will receive paper copies of the test information and be able to download the test information to our computer system.

Managing our dairy herd with information that we obtain from tools like our dairy herd improvement records assists us every day in making sure that our healthy herd is producing quality milk.

June Dairy Month--it's all about healthy cows,quality milk, and the dairy farm families that work everyday to produce a great product!