May 20, 2007

o you guys think "Daisy" will burst at the seams? She keeps getting wider and wider and wider. We have no idea when she was bred, so we have no idea when the calf will be born. You cannot see her udder in the picture and she is standing weird so she looks more hippy than she is, but that is a dairy cow for you.

I am pulling the last 8 chicks out of the incubator today and destroying the rest of the eggs that did not hatch for one reason or another. If they do not hatch, there is generally a reason. 90 chicks from 119 eggs and with the incubator getting too cold for up to 8 hours, I think it was an excellent hatch.

Back to fencing today. I hope we have all of it done, but the sheep pasture. I think we have Amy to come help today. I did not hear from her last night though, so maybe she is really tired from a brutal day yesterday.

Mid-morning Update: I took an official count on the chicks this morning as I just took and counted  the un-hatched eggs out of the incubator. We have exactly 90 chicks. Awesome!!

I just got ahold of Amy.. she is alive and well. She went to bed at 7 pm last night. She needed the sleep. We will meet her at Mary's.

Afternoon Update:

On my way to Mary's this morning, I got stuck in the middle of a cattle drive for about 30 minutes. One of our neighboring ranches was pushing their cattle out onto summer range up in the mountains. I had to stop my truck at a driveway and block it for them. They use 2 vehicles and a couple horse riders to help keep the cattle on track, so people tend to block side roads and driveways between their ranch and where they get turned loose at. They ran maybe 100 cows out today. They seem to have 3 herds which go out in stages, each batch with a bull or two. In the Fall they will bring them back to their  home pastures to overwinter until after they calved. I took these pictures from inside the pickup. There were about 100 cattle or more.