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In recent years dairy farms have grown in size and efficiency. When more livestock are housed in one location, the volume of stored manure and the manure hauling distance to reach the land base needed for application also increase.
As a technology, anaerobic digestion offers many potential environmental and economic benefits for dairy farms. However, anaerobic digestion can pose significant health and safety hazards when not operated properly.
A power winch is one of those farm tools that’s handy to have around, especially if you like off-road driving, want to drag pallets or need to pull out a piece of equipment stuck in the mud. Here are a few ins and outs of buying a winch for your four-wheel-drive truck.
Three types
You may choose a low-voltage winch which runs off 12-volt or 24-volt DC electrical systems; a high-voltage winch which runs off 110-volt AC current; or the hydraulic-only winch, the most heavy-duty for farm jobs.
Her name was not Connie, but I’ll call her that. The company she worked for was not Cargill, but I’ll say it was. The first time I saw her was at our kitchen table, a red folder of pamphlets and fact sheets in front of her.
Age: My real age is 65, and I am lucky to enjoy excellent health. For the most part, I don’t feel any different than I did 20 years ago – except maybe I don’t quite have the stamina that I used to have!
Location: Southern Lancaster County, Pennsylvania
My dairy’s history: This is excellent dairy country, and my dad and mom started the farm in 1942. Ownership transferred to my brother Joe and me in the late ’60s. My son, Byron, and daughter, Lisa, run the farm now.
If I wasn’t a dairyman, I would be ... I really never gave it much thought. When I left the farm for college, I considered engineering or sales, but neither worked into a career choice for me.
Keeping an eye on milk fat production is important because milk fat is a valuable part of milk and is very responsive to herd management.Milk fat concentration is very variable from farm to farm and even between cows on the same farm.
Every producer has a different goal for milk fat and has a different definition of “low milk fat.”
Changes in bodyweight are not a very good indicator of the nutritional status of dairy cows. For example, while the gut contents of a 1,400-lb dairy cow weigh approximately 200 lbs, the cow has a daily intake of nearly 100 lbs of feed (fresh weight) and 160 to 240 lbs of water (one gallon equals 8 lbs).
Under ideal conditions, dairy cows produce milk during 305 days of the year and are dry the remaining 60 (Table 1). In reality, feeding for high production should begin during the dry period or towards the end of the previous lactation.
In March of 2011, at 0200 hours (2 a.m.), I stood at a forward operating base near Mosul, Iraq, with about two dozen soldiers. We lined up, adjusted our Kevlar vests and helmets, our fragmentary eye protection and noise headsets, and in the flurry of dust, the womp-womp of rotors and the darkness of night, we boarded a CH-47 Chinook helicopter.
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