Miserable Winter Days...

good morning everybody we are once again heading into a deep freeze currently minus 23. apparently the forecast is going to be getting down to -37 again super cold weather that's fine um we're currently about to get a load of starch pellets a b train should be rolling up to the farm here any minute the way he's going to be unloading this b train once it does show up here is uh we're going to be belly dumping it so we're just going to dump it on the floor of the silage pile our guy costa he just rolled up with the wheel loader there focuses wow that is bright our guy costa just rolled up with the wheel loader so i'm gonna steal that thing from him clean it up and um get ready for this truck to dump okay well scraping the ice off didn't really work it's pretty clean so i'm just gonna grab a tow strap have it ready because when he's dumping that load of grain onto the concrete like this he kind of has to drive over it and it's pretty icy out here so he doesn't have a lot of traction to begin with and it's pretty easy for him to get hung up and then it's just kind of annoying you got to get him going again so i'm just going to grab a strap just in case he does get hung up now then we'll have it ready to go that's our truck right there it's fully loaded now he's going to try and back up into this silage pit here see how it goes that's a pretty sweet looking truck if you ask me so so so so good thing that we grabbed the chain here because he got hung up there you can see what the belly dumping is driving through the grain and he kind of got hung up just pure ice there so okay so that went quite well he just pulled out and dumped all of that grain on the ground there you're looking at about 40 tons of starch pellets just on the ground there not including the pile that's right now up against the wall just what's on the ground where he just dumped does not look like 40 ton at all that's what it is so we're going to push it up onto that pile right there and get this mess cleaned up and just like that we got a whole another load probably 20 minutes in total dumping and pushing it up here so not a lot of time at all i'm a huge fan of just dumping it on the ground like this pushing it up onto a nice big pile it's got to go in here anyway why run it through an auger i like this style kinda and uh that's our nice big fat pile right there the next thing that we're gonna be doing this afternoon is i got four jugs of washer fluid on the ground right there and i'm gonna basically put that in a jug and spray it over our overhead doors in the main caliber i remember last winter somebody commented on a video when i was explaining how we struggle with those overhead doors how they ice up completely someone said to soak them in that washer fluid let's get up to -40 degrees celsius it does this just so that when it's in your vehicle it says minus 40 degrees celsius right there and the reason for that is when it's in your vehicle it won't freeze break lines and stuff and so it stays liquid so apparently spraying this all over the doors is gonna keep the ice off of them which i thought was pretty interesting and if that worked that'd be a pretty gnarly idea so i'm gonna drain this all into a jug pump it up and we're gonna go and douse one of these doors see how it works so you guys have seen me use this jug before pretty simple you just pump it up put the air pressure in here and then you've got the nozzle that you can spray so i think this is the perfect thing to use to get this stuff on the doors and the main cow bar now and this is the door we're going to be testing it out this is the north door this is the door we usually struggle with the most with ice because the sun never shines on it from the outside it's always facing north so it's cold the south doors are usually a lot better because the sun is constantly shining on them so let's go ahead and soak what we can reach on this door [Music] just walking into the back of the barn we've got some fans following us here you doing girl you guys are lucky because you guys are going to find out the result of how well this works by the end of today's video i have to wait a couple days but i would definitely check back on these doors by the end of this video another thing that we did kind of to try to avoid the frost buildup on these doors we put fans aiming directly at the doors here just to constantly blow nice warm air against them and the idea behind this obviously warmer barn air is constantly moving over the door and hopefully less frost will build up on there so i turned it off just to spray that stuff on there make sure we turn it back on now there she goes all right so we finished soaking those doors in that washer fluid i just ain't a heifer in pen two and now i just got a phone call from my sister saying that the crowd gate doesn't back up anymore so we're gonna go and check that out okay so that's the crowd gate it's supposed to go all the way back i guess they've started to load group two already so we're gonna try and get this thing to back up should go all the way to the back of the holding area [Music] so you guys can see it still goes forward [Music] oh [Music] not good not good at all so i guess we're gonna check the pressure in the air compressor because maybe there's not enough psi pushing that crowd gate back so we got just under 150 psi that should be more than enough to move that thing backwards so it's still stuck all the way up at the front it's kind of awkward this is group two bunch of younger heifers not a lot of them are overly stoked about walking underneath this crowd gate um the gearbox that takes pressurized air is right there you can see the gears and stuff and that's what's supposed to drive it forward i don't know if it's a problem with that thing kind of just visually inspecting this entire thing making sure there's nothing big and obvious wrong with it before we call somebody to get them out here just making sure the chains and everything are still lined up make sure everything is the way it's supposed to be i can see that it is a little bit crooked it's all the way up to the front right there but on the other side there's some room which is kind of bad i think and i can see right here that it's not sitting straight i don't know okay so this tends to happen quite a bit when things go wrong i was just holding the reverse button a little bit longer than i usually would and the crowd gate starts to back up so i don't know what the heck that's about you can see it's clearing all the ladies just tall enough to get over them it's monday morning right now um this crowd gate for this entire weekend now has not been working i think it quit working saturday morning the first time i had issues with it was friday evening and if there's any other dairy farmers watching right now they know friday evening is the worst time for something to break down the weekend is always really expensive to get a service call out so if it happens friday afternoon you got to go the entire weekend unless you want to pay a big fat bill which we never really want to do that so we just waited until monday morning which is right now hopefully later today we can get a service guy out here to look at this crowd gate we did get it going back and forth again friday evening but it just crap to bed again saturday morning so this weekend uh milking's been taking a lot longer than usual just because we've had to push all the cows up manually by hand instead of having this handy crowd game push all the ladies up into the parlor but yeah i guess hopefully they didn't get out today and fix it all right ladies come on come on obviously chasing the ladies up into the parlor works fine manually but it's once you get to the end of this second group which has mostly heifers trying to get them to go underneath this crowd gate the odd one it's a bit of a struggle okay so it's a couple days after i sprayed that washer fluid out the doors we're here checking it out it didn't actually make any noticeable impact on the doors unfortunately when i sprayed it on the cell door was pretty clean and that washer fluid made good contact with all the metal on the door but it didn't make any difference for frost or ice build up and especially not on this north door so unfortunately that didn't work out but it was definitely worth a shot we went ahead and picked up one of these heaters it's just a diesel heater it blows a ton of hot air out you can see the flame in there and we're just pointing this at the north door right now because of how much ice actually built up on this door this is already nowhere near as bad as it was at one point but there's still a ton of ice and if it's on every single rail it adds an incredible amount of weight to the door and makes it a lot harder for that door opener to open it up so there's ice literally everywhere on this door and as soon as you come over to this side the ice is starting to get fully melted off so that washer fluid didn't work but this heater sure does [Music] all right the next order of business for today tomorrow we're actually going to be shipping a load of steers again it's that time and we got 40 finished steers so big truck's going to be coming out here tomorrow morning and he's got to be able to line up to the chute system there the loading ramp that's where we're going to load the truck and the steers are in that pen that are going to a warmer place than out here but we got to get this driveway cleaned out you guys can see look at all these drifts it's completely blown in me and dad just put up some gates like earlier this winter just completely blown right full so i'm gonna have to clean all of these drift soap basically what ends up happening out here in saskatchewan where it's super windy during the winter time with all this snow it just blows and blows and blows and it's kind of just like dunes in a desert they just get bigger and bigger and we have not maintained this driveway all winter and that's why it's so bad now so we're just gonna have to dig it out you can see look over there look how big those drifts are they're pretty much just as tall as the bales there's some even just straight up over top of the bales in that back corner there so got some massive drifts to deal with here but shouldn't be the biggest deal in the world foreign so we got this entire area behind the corrals here completely cleared to the road so the truck's going to be able to drive in through there he's got plenty of room to turn around he's going to come in turn around and then back up to the chute which is right over there so you should have plenty of room to do exactly that without getting stuck so that's awesome well i'm gonna go and touch up another one of our driveways here we got three on the farm and all of them are pretty much blowing in with snow the combination of wind and snow just blows everything in with these drifts so we're gonna go and touch up a couple more driveways and then i should be done with pushing snow for the day all right quick update here on the crowd gate the guys did come out they checked it out and they found some broken parts in there so unfortunately they didn't have them in stocks they had to quickly order them um it's like a two day order or something so they did however show me how to switch the lines the air lines that go to the motor back here and i can switch those around so i can send it to the back switch the lines again and send it to the front and use it so we're able to use it now a little bit inconvenient but at least we can use it and push the cows up into the parlor now we just come here click forward and then she just shoots back like that all right so we had the eater blasting at this door all day and you guys can see how much ice came off some parts of the door were actually dry it's already starting to drip again and build up with ice because we did move the heater pointed it at the main door here because this thing was getting pretty covered in ice as well so we figured try and thaw this thing out a bit it works pretty good it's pretty nice to stand in front of this heater but since we were blasting in front of the door all day we had to turn the juno off otherwise it would run into it so we had to put this guy on pause for the entire day and now the feed really needs to be pushed up that's what it looks like down the entire barn it's because the juno wasn't running so i'm gonna have to hop into the old clean skid steer and i'm just gonna push it all up otherwise the juno if i turned it on right now it actually would not be able to push up this much feed and you can see how slick it is on the ground it's all just humid and moist in this barn that little juno is not going to have enough traction or enough weight to push that massive ridge over anymore if it starts good in the beginning of the day continues to push it up it doesn't ever get that far out away from the cows and then it's pretty easy for the junior to keep on top of it but if it hasn't been running all day it builds up so much and it's not able to catch up anymore so i'm gonna go and hop in the skid steer and we're gonna push it up manually well guys that's gonna be it for today's video i'm pretty tired the last week of this incredibly cold weather has been super taxing on everybody those doors now going up and stuff breaking that holding area the crowd gate um just constantly being outside in the cold weather making sure that the cows and the corrals have uh good bedding out there um hacking away at water bowls chipping ice away and just making sure everything keeps running um there's some longer days than usual for winter and uh but it's supposed to get warmer in the forecast and it's supposed to get a little bit easier so that's good but that is gonna be it for today guys if you enjoyed be sure to hit those like and subscribe buttons down below check out the instagram at sask dutch kid and i hope to see you guys in the next video thanks for watching

Channel: SaskDutch Kid

Views: 85,196

Rating: 4.9837089 out of 5

Keywords: dairy farming, dairy cattle, farming in canada, canadian dairy farm, dairy, farm, farming, farm vlog, farm vlog channel, farming selfie, holstein, holstein cow, holstein farm, cow farm, farming milk cows, tractor, seeder, combine, crop farmer, land farmer

Id: tkXC7ad3oYU

Length: 18min 44sec (1124 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021