Monday night was a long night. One of the belties went into labor around supper time. Since she is an older cow we expected no difficulties. When she hadn't yet calved later in the evening, we thought it was time to intervene. After getting her where she couldn't move around, we did a pelvic exam and found she had a small upside down calf. We pulled the calf and it clearly had been dead for several days. Because it was quite small, we were concerned that there might be another. We probed as far as we could reach and found nothing else. She is a large cow and apparently we couldn't reach far enough. I went to check her later and she had delivered another dead calf. They were both bull calves and lacked any of the typical beltie hair that is present at birth. We believe that they had been deceased for quite some time before she aborted.

Everything else went well and we left for our visit with Jim on Thursday. We drove his new to him Dodge diesel. Due to some airline fare quirk, we found it would be $300 cheaper to fly back to Erie, Pennsylvania rather than Syracuse. Erie is about 4 hours along the way to Iowa. Mary found a hotel near the airport that had shuttle bus service. We stayed at the hotel and saved the parking which was considerable.

You can imagine our surprise when we pulled into the hotel and saw that the eating/ drinking establishment next door shared its name with my college roommate and lakeside neighbor. We went over and watched some NCAA basketball and got some photos for him.

We made it to Iowa in time to take Jim out for dinner. On both Saturday and Sunday, we watched him in his lacrosse games. Somewhere along the line, I came down with what must be strep throat or something similar. I am just getting over it now and Mary and Jim have it as well. Apparently lots of folks around home have it. I'm glad to be getting rid of it. Every time I go to Iowa, I am impressed with how industrious the college students are. It would take a lot to convince me that their farm background hasn't been a real positive force in their lives.

With Spring, we have had lots of people calling inquiring about cattle. We are lining up farm visits for prospective cattle buyers. I firmly believe that if you are interested in our cattle that it is well worth your while to drove here and see our animals. I don't want to sell animals to anonymous buyers. I feel that it is important to know that the buyers can care for the cattle.

It has been damp and 40ish since we returned. Starting tomorrow, it is supposed to be in the 70's and sunny though the weekend. I checked my peas today and saw nothing. Maybe the upcoming warm weather will get them out of the ground. I am also about ready to plant some onion sets.

I have also arranged to buy two feeder pigs. We have an ideal location to raise them and it will be interesting. I'll bring them home in a few weeks when we can depend on the weather.

It is also time to start preparing our planting and tillage equipment. It won't be long before we are out on the land. The cattle have access to a small winter pasture and they already are finding some new grazing. This is the beginning of our busy season. We also expect several of the lowlines to begin calving. We hope for eighteen more calves this year.

As part of her semester in France and tour of contiguous Europe, Eileen is off to Sardinia for Easter. It is amazing how places you can fly cheaply to around Europe on Ryanair which is an Irish absolutely no frills airline.

I spoke to her today and mentioned that I had read about an underwater volcano between Sardinia and Italy, Mount Marsili. It is apparently poised to have an underwater Mount St. Helen's type eruption. This could lead to a massive tsunami in that area. I recommended that she be alert. Sometimes, you can be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hopefully the volcano will remain dormant and she'll have a great weekend.

We picked up Mary at the airport early Monday morning. She had a great ski trip to Utah. The combination of a two hour time change going east in conjunction with the arrival of Daylight Savings Time gave her some jet lag.

We have had an amazing weather week. Every day has been blue sky and warm always at least mid fifties and a couple approaching seventy. With Jim's help, we got a real head start on spring work. We were able to clear a hedgerow between two pastures giving us a great spot for the cattle to get shade. All we did was clear the low brush leaving the trees etc. We also found an old abandoned barbed wire fence. Obviously our pasture was pasture once before. It is important not to have an old fence where the cattle are since they could easily get tangled or cut.

No new calves this week. The ones we have are doing very well. The red belties have been moved in with some black belties. They certainly are eye catchers.

We planted some garden peas today. I had always heard that it will bring good luck to plant them on St. Patrick's Day. I thought it was a little wet then but the conditions appeared perfect today. I have a friend who planted some on St. Patrick's Day a few years ago. He says that they really did bring him luck. They didn't come up and he thought that it was lucky since he doesn't like peas.

Things are pretty quiet at the diner. The big topic at the moment is the NCAA basketball. The marina restaurant has made it through their first winter and it looks like they will have a busy spring.

The ice went bout on the lake this week. The paper says that we had the driest winter ever. So I guess that explains how a few warm days did in the mud season at least for the moment.

Tonight, Mary and I went to a neighboring Fire Department Awards Banquet. It is always a pleasure to share this dinners and recognize the good works of our neighbors.

Jim goes back to school tomorrow by plane. When he was about eight years old, he always spoke about getting a Dodge, diesel engine , extended cab pick up. This week he got one. A 2001 just exactly like he always wanted. Mary and I are going to drive it to Iowa at the end of this week. He has three lacrosse home games next weekend that we look forward to watching. Then we will fly home. He'll have the truck at school for a month or so and then he'll be home.

He is very excited to have made it into the second round of interviews for a internship this summer with a major farm equipment manufacturer. They have sent him technical questions such as what would you do if this part failed etc. He has to get them the answers and they use them in their final evaluation.

Eileen is continuing to do well in France when she is in France. She has also been to Spain and Italy. She will also get to Tunisia, Ireland and Greece before returning home. In my junior year of college, I did get to see an away basketball game in Canton, New York.

We had a busy week. On Tuesday, we went downstate to pick up two new belted galloway heifers. These are red with a white stripe. We plan on breeding them with red Lowline semen from a bull named Bluey. Hopefully, if the genetics work as expected, we will have red belted lowlines in a year or so.

Speaking of pregnant, the vet came Friday and confirmed that all of our Lowline brood cows are pregnant. We expect calves to start around April 1 and continue throughout the spring and summer. A lot of farms like to calve all at once. In our business, I think it is better to calve over several months to spread out the ages of the animals as they mature. We are still waiting for the last two beltie cows to calve.

Also, on Friday we tagged and tattooed the four beltie calves. The tattoo paste is green. Needless to say, no matter how you grab them, the calves wriggle and squirm. They wound up with pretty visible traces of green here and there. They are ready for St. Patrick's Day.

Jim,arrived on schedule and tonight we will pick up Mary at the airport. Yesterday and today are rainy, raw and windy. You may be familiar with the expression that it takes a good spring rain to dry things up. This seems counter intuitive., However, it really works. The force of the rain tends to tighten up the ground which has been loosened by freeezing. Once, it is tight and the sun and wind come, it will begin to dry up. The forecast for the coming week is sunny and dry with temperatures in the fifties. That would be ten or more degrees above average.

It doesn't seem possible but we are only five or six weeks from beginning field work.

We did have a reasonably "big snow." About eighteen inches total of a very heavy wet snow. I spent the better part of a day opening up the road and areas around the barn. It's a good thing that I started while it was still falling because I wouldn't have been able to move it all in one push. Even six inches at a time was plenty for the tractor.

The calf that wouldn't suck must have decided that she really would prefer mother's milk to calf replacer. One evening when I went to do chores so was there sucking away and hasn't stopped since.

We had another beltie calf late yesterday afternoon. The mother wasn't disposed to let us get close enough to determine the sex. The calf immediately bonded and was nursing normally.

I was up very early this morning to take Mary to the airport. She is going skiing along with some other friends from our area. Jim will be home late Friday night for a week. Eileen is still in France. Both hope to hear soon about summer internships.

The last few days have been ideal for maple syrup production. Clear blue skies with nights below freezing and days around 40.

As I write this, we are in the midst of an alleged big snow. So far we have had about four inches of a heavy , wet snow. They claim there are twelve more inches yet to come. We are at the time of year when daytime snow has little effect on the roads. They've been bare but wet all day. Apparently, the sun is out there somewhere adding enough light at its current angle to keep the snow off black pavement.

We have been very busy. We delivered the beltie bull. He impressed his new owner by breeding a cow within moments of walking off the trailer. I called a few days later and he had bred some other cows. Sounds like he will really fit in. His new cow friends could pass for twins of ours.

He got to see the first of his new offspring that were born last week before he headed off for his assignment. We had two heifers and a bull calf within two days. The bull is remarkable in that he is a smoke colored grey with a white belt. As soon as we get enough sunlight to take his picture, I'll put it on our website.

One of the heifers was having a hard time but is fine now. She refused to suck on the mother. The mother didn't reject her, in fact, she did all the motherly things but the calf just wouldn't suck. As a result she became dehydrated. We had the vet and she gave her an IV of dextrose which quickly fixed up the calf. We then started bottle feeding her milk replacer. First we gave her two bottles of colostrum to buttress her antibodies. The bottles are twice per day. She has now progressed to drinking or maybe I should say inhaling from a bucket. The milk disappears quite quickly.

The other two are fine and on their mother. We have three other belties ready to freshen. They are in the barn where we can keep an eye on them. The other cows and calves are just waiting for spring.

Mary has been off visiting her sister. Jim is getting ready for his Spring lacrosse. He has a game at Nebraska Friday, then games in Minnesota Saturday and Sunday. Eileen has returned to Aix-en-Provence from her semester holiday in Italy by bus along with five friends. They visited Florence, Rome and Venice among others. Their trip was delayed a day by heavy snow in the Alps. I guess global warming has taken a year off in Europe also,

I have been taking an on line class in Agronomy. I had my first test last week and the results were just posted. If you know the term a gentleman's C, you will know my grade. It has turned out to be much harder than I ever expected. It's a good thing I took Latin and Greek in school or it would have been a lot worse. The first lessons dealt with various plant parts and genus and species. The next section deals with soil and water. I have every expectation of doing better since that was the area in which I made my living. I also have high hopes that my lab score which was not yet posted will bump up my grade. The standards are quite high. The test was forwarded to our local library which proctored it and then mailed the test back to Iowa. It even featured the Number 2 pencil and putting your answer in a blacked out circle.

I went off to our Beef group meeting last Friday. It is still a very pleasant experience. Next month, we are going to deal with marketing.

I have been very busy in my fire department duties with meetings and a few weird fire calls. Progress is being made on a number of issues.

I also went to a meeting in our Town on Farmland Preservation. It's a little strange thinking about how the future might affect our right to farm.

I am in the midst of mid winter writers cramp. There isn't much going on so not much to write about.

I've updated the webpage to show our Denver award. We've gotten several calls as a result. We sold our Beltie bull yesterday. A farmer called from near Rochester. He has nine registered belties and was in need of a bull. Since we do AI, we really don't need a bull. Hopefully, by the end of the week Mc Leod will be in with his new herd.

It's quite amazing to see that Washington has had more snow this winter than Syracuse. We've only had nine inches so far this month. This in the snowiest major city in the US. We are also apparently the second cloudiest after Seattle and it doesn't look like we are in any danger of losing that distinction.

We are starting to get the cows sorted out so they can freshen in the barn pens. We hope to have twenty some calves.

Our trip to Denver was a great success. We had some extra time Tuesday morning so we took a side trip to Colorado Springs. We were able too see the Air Force Academy from a great vantage point along the highway. It has a great location spread out with the Rockies in the background. Colorado Springs is only about 45 minutes from Denver.

The National Lowline sale was on Tuesday afternoon and both of our heifers sold extremely well. In the evening, Jim and I attended the Lowline Association Annual Meeting. It was typical of most organization meetings. Election of officers and plans for a great future.

It was getting time for Jim to head back to school. We got an early start on Wednesday and headed for Grand Island, Nebraska. This is where Case-IH makes combines. Our local dealer had maned arrangements for us to tour the plant. Jim and I both agreed that it was an impressive plant with lots of hard working dedicated people.

After leaving the plant, we stopped for a Runza. This is a Nebraska and only Nebraska with one or two locations in adjacent Iowa fast food. It is basically like a large dough pouch filled with steamed beef and onions and a few secret spices. If you like a pirogi you like a Runza. otherwise it is definitely an acquired taste. Jim had a hamburger.

We then headed off on the last leg of Jim's trip to Ames and we got there around 9 after a very full day. Jim went off to his dorm and I headed to the hotel. I got up early Thursday and headed for home. Home turned out to be 1016 miles and 16 and a half hours away. I got in just after midnight. The trip in total was just under 4000 miles and my diesel truck averaged 18.4 mpg.



Friday, we had the vet coming for regular herd health checks. All is well except for a few cows that have had trouble getting pregnant. We took some blood samples to see if we could find a problem.

We had to leave Denver before the cattle show. The way it works is you sell the animal on Tuesday and show it on Wednesday. Even though it's no longer yours, you get bragging rights and any awards. My friend from Minnesota had agreed to show my two animals. So I called him to see how it went.

You might imagine that I was very pleased when he told me that our heifer, Mae, was Reserve Grand Champion for Lowline calves. The way this works is that the calves all compete against their peers in age. Then the winners of those groups compete again. The winner is Grand Champion and runner up is Reserve Grand Champion. Our other heifer did fairly well in her peer group but not well enough to move on.

Here is the picture of Mae getting her award:

I've gotten back into the rhythm here. It's been pretty easy weather wise since I got back. No storms and mostly milder days and not all that cold at night. It's pretty quiet at the diner. Several of our main contributors, conversation wise, are off to the not so sunny and mild South.

We are starting to get geared up for this year's calves. Our belted galloways were pasture bred so we don't have a precise way of knowing when they'll calve other than knowing when the bull was turned into their pasture. We don't expect any activity until March but it's a good time to get things ready.

Yesterday, Mary and I were part of a panel discussion at the NY Beef Producers Annual Meeting in Syracuse. Our group discussed how our Beef Group obtained a grant for DNA analysis of our herds and how we can use the information to better our herd.