New Weaned Pens

We were finally able to make the changed to the weaned calf pens that we had wanted to do. While at the barn we took down the gates and fully extended them to reach the aisle where we drive the tractor. This was done so that the calves now have an even larger pen (more than doubled the pen size) and so that feeding up in the morning will become easier. In the future we would like to turn the aisle into concrete and fix the large metal door so that the feed truck can drive through the calf barn in the morning during feed up hours as an additional stop on their routine. 

In the past we would drive the tractor to collect the silage from across the road and pour the silage into the feed troughs. For some bizarre reason that I still have yet to understand is that some calves would actually jump into their feed and stand on all of the fresh silage. The feed troughs were in the pens with the calves, so perhaps the temptation to play with their food was too high, comparable to a toddler with finger foods... I have even caught some of the calves standing in their feed and relieving themselves, yuck! The benefit to our new setup is that the weaned calves can not climb into their feed anymore, instead they reach their head through an opening in the wooden fence to reach the silage. I am very excited to see how this will impact the health of our calves. Now that the pens are nearly doubled in size we can keep them in the calf barn for a longer period of time before they get transitioned to the heifer barn. In the first picture we just finished setting up the new pens and since there was still a decent amount of silage left in the feed trough we left it in the pen for the girls to clean up, and as you can see they completely circled the feed. The second picture shows the weaned calves learning where to access their silage from now onward in the aisle. 

There were no calves born today.

Today we shipped 4,761 gallons of milk.