January Around The Farm

January has given us some brutal cold, big snows, dangerous ice storms - and other fun and games. I increased the cows' feed allotment. I stopped chaining them at meal times, though, because it was so cold I didn't want to take my gloves off. I continued to pet their heads, adjust their collars and reach over the rail to rub their back and sides, all in an effort to accustom them to being touched:

In nicer weather, I locked them outside the barn all day, allowing them inside only at night. But on days with terrible weather, I left the door open for them all day long. Of course you know what that did to the amount of manure I had to clean up the next morning:

 I began using the ancient hay in the hay loft for bedding hay, forking it down through a hole I'd chainsawed in the floor boards. But then I also began using a leaf rake to get ALL of it, raising a mighty cloud of dust (as you can see in the sunbeam). I also began wearing a dust mask on those days:

 And the cows seemed happy. Here's one of them, trying on a bit of hay as a fright wig:

 We had so much snow that I had piles 7 feet high and more. Even in the protected corner of the barn, it became difficult to walk, especially when the snow crusted over with ice. I couldn't have let the chickens out if I'd wanted to (which I didn't), because their door was buried in snow:

Every morning after feeding the cows, I'd shoo them out of the barn, fork the manure and wet hay into the tractor bucket and drive it out to the manure pile. I'd pass right by the cows at their hay bale feeder with the tractor and they became so used to it that I often had to stop to keep from hitting them. They didn't want to get out of the way and the snow was too deep for me to take a different route:

 My five girls consumed a 4' X 5', 1000lb bale of hay every 4-6 days. Plus two hearty feedings of grain each day, of course. Whose idea was it to get cows?:

 A windstorm knocked more frozen, rotten apples onto the snow pack. I'm sure the mice and rabbits liked that although the wild birds stayed at the bird feeder and seemed to ignore the apples:

 The chickens began laying eggs so I bought a backpacker's egg carton in which to keep them:

I ate the eggs for awhile, but then decided not to take chances with my cholesterol level. So I started scrambling a dozen at a time and feeding it to the dogs. They loved it, but then the chickens slowed down their production for the winter. But the dogs will get lots of scrambled eggs this spring when egg laying resumes:

And one cold morning I entered the barn to find these gems dotting the hay and looking like geodes. They were cow manure, frozen so quickly that their steam crystallized on the surface. As January progressed, these "frosted cow pies" became a common morning sight:

Every so often, I would slip out to the barn after dark and turn on the lights to see how the cows slept. They all slept together on the bedding hay, one big happy family. Of course they also wind up sleeping on their own manure sometimes. I imagine it's not comfortable when it's frozen, but I often find flattened cow pies which were obviously slept on before they froze. They probably felt warm and soft in their unfrozen state. Yes, there's a lot of manure talk around livestock: