Harvest Marathon

Harvest  sometimes feels like a very long marathon...

we wait to plant,

we wait for the crop to grow,

we wait for harvest.

Like all silage crops,this  sorghum  silage crop is being cut

 and hauled to the silo where it will ferment before being fed to the dairy  cows.

You might think of this as cow candy!

I often wonder if our cows know how hard we work to make sure

 they have a good supply of nutritious feed to enjoy through the winter.

It's a marathon of ups and downs,

starts and stops,

but

once you've experienced the harvest of any crop,

you know why it is celebrated!

Dairy Farmer's Labor of Love

As the days grow shorter and cooler, the fields of sweet sorghum  (also called sorgo)  are calling the dairy farmer to prepare for  harvesting  this sweet tasting silage crop for the dairy cows to enjoy this fall and through the winter months.  

Growing a crop is a labor of love for my  third generation dairy farmer husband. I love seeing the smile on his face as he looks across the sorghum field.

We drove to several of the fields this afternoon to see how the sorghum  is maturing and make a plan which field we will begin harvesting first.  Most of the sorghum is seven to eight feet tall and the tops are beginning to change from yellow to a reddish brown  color as it matures. 

He thought he was hiding from me, but I could still see his smile!  

Harvest of this labor of love begins next week!

                                                                         

Celebrating Drought's Harvest

"Happy as a termite in a lumber mill" was the perfect description of the dairy farmers this week when  chopping sorghum and hauling it to the silo. Planted in late June with only a hope of rain during a drought, this field is proof of a dairy  farmer's faith and determination. It was exciting to see the chopper make the first round in the field and watch the truck fill up with chopped green feed that will become part of the nutritious diet for our dairy cows.













After the sorghum is cut and hauled to the pit silo, it is packed down with a tractor and then allowed to ferment. The fermentation process changes the sorghum to silage. Samples of the silage will be analyzed to provide nutrition information that will be used by our dairy nutritionist to formulate a balanced diet for our cows.

 
While our pastures turned brown and other crops burned up in this season of drought, this sorghum field held its own and continued to grow in spite of the dry conditions. Even the sorghum won't yield as much as in a normal year and is less mature than we would like, we feel fortunate to have a crop to harvest.

 Harvesting a crop is truly a celebration for us in this year of drought!

Sorghum Harvest

These past few days in Northwest Arkansas have been perfect for harvesting our corn and sorghum silage crops that will be used to feed our dairy cows through the next two seasons.  We feel fortunate that we have any crops to harvest considering the flooding in the spring that delayed crop planting and the severe summer drought. Actually, we are amazed that we have such a great crop of sorghum!

Today I drove to the field where Ryan and our two sons were harvesting the sorghum. Standing next to the plants, the seed heads at the top of the plants towered more than two feet above my head.  Both stem and seed head are chopped together and will provide energy and other nutrients when added to our cows diet.

After the silage is cut and blown into the truck, it will be hauled and packed into the silo and allowed to ferment for a period of time. Before we feed this silage to the cows, a sample will be sent to the lab for a nutritional analysis for our dairy nutritionist to use in designing a nutritious diet that utilizes the feed we have available to meet the specific nutritional needs of our cows.

As I watched the chopper moving up and down the field rows and the trucks filling up with silage, I know there was a big smile on my face as I watched my family working together to feed our cows  and thinking about how our  cows would enjoy eating this labor of love!