Pictures of winter 2014

My youngest son was helping me scoop snow out of the driveway when he asked me "Dad why are there three suns?" I looked up and told him that it was a Sun Dog and they are real rare to see them here. It's the first one that I have seen. I couldn't get all of it in the screen on my phone's camera.


A field of wheat stubble, it did a good job of catching this last snow and will have a good start for grain sorghum or corn next spring.


It's hard to make it out in the picture, but on the right hand side of the road is a turkey crossing it. It took about three tries to get a picture of one crossing the road from a field that was in grain sorghum last year.


Turkeys had been scratching and digging through the snow to get to find some grain sorghum in this field. Our spring calving cows are also in this field so I'm sure they're recycling whole grain out of the pats. It reminds me of a story old timers told of having a cow, pig and chickens in a corral. The cow was the only one that was fed and the pigs and chickens would scavenge what went through the cow. I would guess the pig got scraps from the house also.


Cow number 10 posing for the camera while here "sisters" are eating hay. Even though they are being pastured on grain sorghum stubble I have made hay available for them. They have gotten about all they can from the stubble and will be moved to the calving pasture in the next week if all goes well. They are due to start calving the end of February they could start earlier since they were bred to a calving ease bull and that can have them calving a couple of weeks earlier.

These photos along with many others can be found on my flickr photostream.

Snow down on the farm

Grain Sorghum harvest is on hold because of a blizzard earlier in the week. Other than cleaning the drives at the farm we have been pretty idle. If we had cattle, like in the past, then we would have been busy making sure they had water and feeding them. For a great read on how a Kansas cattle rancher handles winter weather read Life on a Cattle Ranch, the author does a great job of telling about her day on the ranch during snow and cold.


Here is a snow drift that I was lucky to get out of.


The wheat stubble did a great job of catching snow and not letting it blow away. This field will be planted to grain sorghum this spring.


The snow drifted up to some unharvested sunflowers. The sunflowers acted as a natural snow fence. The sunflowers should be harvested in a week or so, as soon as grain sorghum harvest is finished. This field will be planted to corn next spring.

We should restart sorghum harvest next week and should finish in 2 or 3 days. Then we will start on the sunflowers.