Feeding Cows & Bedding the New Barn

morning everyone oh man haven't tried talking today yet morning everyone so i'm gonna be feeding cows this morning i milk four mornings a week and then i feed two and i have off one day so tuesday morning i'm always feeding cows casey likes to be here for this because mice like to hide under the bucket she's pretty good at catching mice even though she's getting a little old still got some quickness i guess we could check real quick i'm not ready to use a skid loader yet but she's ready to see if there's mice sorry girl nothing this morning megan and my sister cassidy are milking first thing i'll do is just walk out to the freestall just to see how much feed is in the trophs and also we'll sweep it up a little bit sweep it into some piles so they can clean it up hopefully most of the way it's nice to see them clean all the feet up don't have to do as much work but we like to have a little bit left because that means they had as much as they could eat so we got the robot feed pusher doing most of the work pushing feed but we got gotta clean the edges up a little so right before i run out feed i'll come out and clean up whatever's left in the trops but they're gonna eat a good bit of that before then we've got three ingredients out of the commodity barn to put in a little bit of hailage out of the ag bag down there i'm gonna go shave the silage off and we'll run to the feeder room get some forage and mineral and then back out to the bunk to get corn silage [Music] still working on those older latch hydraulics man trying to get to the point where we don't have to do any real work around here auto steer on the tractors robotic feed pusher auto latch on the skid loader [Music] [Music] i like having my door closed to do this job because then it doesn't throw the salad into the cab of the skid loader but problem is the silence is warmer than the air temperature and just fogs up the glass and i can't see diddly squat time changed over the weekend so now the boardings are a lot lighter kind of nice so we'll collect everything that's left in the trolls from the morning and then i'll put it in the heifer feed mix the young heifers are just a little less picky they'll love to eat it [Music] i'm back at the feed room now we're running non-vmr silage out of the last silo for the heifer batch i'm just going up to 2800 pounds there and then we'll go run that out to the new barn just gonna come out and shovel up the uh kind of the front area of the bag shovel it in we got fifth cutting halogen this bag and it's working out pretty good i definitely like bags over the colder weather a little bit more seems like there's less spoilage when it was hot out we were seeing a little bit of white mold at the top some but right now it looks really good so i just like to shovel this in because we can't clean it up too well with the skid loader a little better these heifers love to eat got everything fed so this morning i want to bed the new heifer barn up usually need to do it about once a week you can see with the winter sun not being as high in the sky we like to have sunlight shining in on the cattle now that barn there is blocking some of it but we're getting some light from the other end shining in warming it up we put the skylight type material on the south side of the top just to allow some more heat and light in top of the building you can see how the sunlight's hitting that part and that's shining and warming up these youngest calves a little bit better you see how the barns peaked closer to the front and then you have this a little bit more vertical roof there that's see-through the reason they didn't pick it in the center is just because then you'd have in that summer sun there'd be less shade in there uh when it's vertical like this you know when the sun's straight above you're not getting too much heat down on the bed pack this way they can stay in the shade when they want to then in the winter they get some more light so right now is the best time to battle up because all the heifers are off the bedpack i can just go flying down through there close all the gates all right girls i'm not trying to chase these back here so it's mid-november now this time of year is about the worst for health of the animals at this age we usually have some trouble in november with the temperatures changing so much so we are monitoring these pretty good checking temperatures been really happy with them we haven't had to treat too many we had a couple that we gave antibiotics you can hear a couple cough in there just want to watch them close make sure they're eating good it's good to see that the size is even if you have some that are a lot smaller than others that's not a good thing to see it's going to take us a little bit to learn how to manage the curtains and everything in this barn to you know the draftiness with the cavs can can be negative or positive so you need to i don't kind of have to learn how to manage that we're trying to experiment with things you know if we have to make some changes you know put some sort of blockers on the some of the gates to keep so much air movement from happening we can but we're not gonna need to do that at this point it's just things we could do if we needed to these gates like to swing open sometimes we stuck these little chains on here with snaps we can just clip them onto the wall we'll slide our door open we've really liked using wood shavings for bedding last the whole week we put four scoops in so i really like with the younger kids if i'm being smaller they really don't make it dirty back here just a lot more square footage than there was in the old barn really easy to keep them clean i think that's going to be really good for their health [Music] [Music] we'll just close the gates up it takes a little bit of time to get four scoops but if i do four then stays dry for a whole week i don't have to open everything back up until another week at first we were using round bales of the soybean stubble and we were having to bed up twice a week just wasn't keeping it dry it was just building up the pack so much faster so i forgot i walked down here but i like to walk down through first and unchain all those swing them out so that i can just as i go back through them it's good to have this all bed up so we got up to number 1000 with our ear tags and we went back to number one it's kf number one right there you see we got this curtain in the front too right above these headlocks kind of experimenting with this a little bit uh it's just designed to keep the weather out for some of these youngest ones i don't know if it needs to be down right now but we have it down this morning the custom straw chopper is coming we got a whole bunch of straw bales there to grind up so just getting the skid loader ready to go got dad cleaning the windows and i'm to grease it cleaning out our cooling system i just went had some lunch my dad got started learning the straw chopper i guess i'll take over for him now so we buy all these three by five stroll bales my cousin uh brought these over last week i got a shout out jason my cousin we're just feeding these to our dry cows right now sometimes we feed some of the cows in the milking batch depending if we need the fiber or whatever right now we don't but uh i like to chop it up it's just a more consistent uh length for the cows to eat uh that way they can't sort out it sorted out of the feed quite as easily or at all there's bigger longer pieces they're going to have a tendency to try to pick out the grain or the the goodies trying to hold a camera and operate the skittler at the same time is kind of awkward gotta use the elbow so i grab the bell in there on its side and then he's cutting the strings pulling them off and it just flips it in and runs it through the chopper we've got two baits we can fill we're gonna fill that one full of chop straw and then i'll get the rest of the bells out we'll put it in this one there's a pusher in there it's pushing it back this way into the chopper so so so so should be able to fit everything in that second bay no problem we got it all chopped up a little pretty fast okay see you guys later

Channel: 10th Generation Dairyman

Views: 168,537

Keywords: farming

Id: Whbc83apxXE

Length: 18min 3sec (1083 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 11 2021