Harvey’s dairy was a pretty modern dairy farm for our area. Harvey and Dad had talked over the situation several times in the months preceding the collapse. The last time a milk truck had hauled away Harvey’s milk, was two weeks before the electricity went out. Harvey hoped that at least that shipment found its way into the food supply. Right off the bat Harvey took two of his more gentle milking cows to Roger, a neighbor over the hill, who had hogs but no cows. He traded them for three dozen piglets. So any milk that wasn’t consumed or fed to the calves was fed to the pigs. Then some was poured into 30 gallon plastic barrels that Harvey had purchased dairy detergent in. Roger came periodically and took the milk, even if it had soured a little for his hogs. Still a lot of the milk produced the last fifteen days had been thrown away.
The first thing Harvey did to decrease his production thereby reducing the waste, and also decreasing the work load, was to divide his producing animals into three groups.
The first group were those animals that would be amiable to being milked by hand as Harvey knew he couldn’t make electricity forever. He only had so much fuel. He picked out a dozen cows that had good temperaments and milked easily by hand. Twelve cows gave a lot of milk; more than Harvey, his family, my grandparents, the calves and pigs could use. But he knew more people would be coming.
The second group of cows, those in late lactation, were not giving an abundant amount of milk, and could, therefore, be immediately dried off, or taken out of production. It was a difficult thing to do. They were used to being milked twice a day. What Harvey and Larry had to do was pen them where there was no water for two days. It was uncomfortable for both man and beast. The cows did a lot of bawling, but it was necessary or they would have felt much worse filling up with milk. By the time our family moved over, they had been successfully dried off, and were content.
The third group of cows were those that were still in decent production but were not the type of cows that you’d want to milk by hand. Either they were ornery or milked hard by hand because their teats were too small or the teat opening didn’t allow a good milk flow. This group Harvey put in a separate area and gave all the calves under two months old to them. The calves suckled those cows so that they didn’t have to be milked nor did they become too uncomfortable because of their udders being filled with milk. Plus the calves no longer needed to be fed by us. These calves grew terrifically on a milk diet and the cows seemed to adapt to it.
On Harvey’s dairy, water was not a problem. He had a creek running right through the middle of the farm, so the producing cows, the dry cows, the cows that were suckling calves, and the heifers all could be partitioned with access to water. Additionally, Harvey had a spring that gushed water abundantly.
“The finest water in the county,” Dad had said once. It was about 400 yards from the houses, however, so for our own use, it gave some carrying.
Feeding the cows was a bit more of a challenge. Harvey had one silo that required electricity to get the feed out. However, it was a sealed oxygen-limiting silo, so they just left it sealed.
“You never know,” Harvey had said, “Maybe one day we’ll get electricity again and we’ll be able to use that feed.”
Fortunately, much of the feed the cows were fed was stored in long plastic bag-like tubes. Larry usually used a skid loader to load the feed into a feeder wagon and with a tractor, would distribute it to all the animals on the farm. In order to save fuel, it took some adjustment on Larry’s part. Harvey, Dad, and Larry knew that the diesel fuel they had would have to be saved for the most important jobs. The one that came to mind was for the combine that was used to harvest the soybeans in fall. The second one was to save some fuel for plowing the vegetable patches next spring, possibly preparing some soil for planting this fall and finally, saving some for a backhoe that Harvey had. You just never knew when the backhoe might be needed.
Larry had to adjust to feeding his cows without using equipment. This was accomplished by moving the fences as close to the tubes of silage as they could so that the feed could simply, though it wasn’t easy, be forked or shoveled over the fence where the cows could eat it. Also, fences were rearranged so that the animals could graze in certain parts of the farm. Larry had two solar powered electric fencers. Fences with a little shocking power, which the cows had been trained to respect, kept them from wandering into the other crops. So, in addition to all the extra work milking and shoveling and forking feed, there were fences to be moved all the time. Fortunately, by the time we arrived, Dad’s brother Jeremiah, his wife, Lois, and two girls, Amy and Lynette, who was my age, had moved back to the dairy. And also Harvey’s cousin, Joe, his wife, Sandy, and their two grown boys, Aaron, and Dennis. When Dad, Jake, and Josh arrived, it really helped Larry out with all the work he needed to do to keep his animals milked and fed.
In the meantime, the crops in the field would have to wait until other things were taken care of. The soybeans and the corn were a couple of months away from harvesting. There was time to plan that, but Harvey did have many acres of hay that were difficult to harvest without using machinery. The solution was to move the fence every few days so that the cows or heifers could graze those hay fields. Again, more labor, but there were many more of us to help now. It was good, however, that the cows were outside more. Normally, during the heat of the day they would be under roof with many fans blowing on them to keep them comfortable. With no electricity it got way too hot inside of the buildings. With all the shifting around of animals on the farm, it also spread the manure around the farm saving more work. The worst situation would have been to have all the livestock at the same spot where their manure would accumulate, thus requiring tremendous amounts of labor to keep the manure hauled away.
Larry also had to feed his cows a little differently. He used to feed for peak production, formulating a ration consisting of his homegrown corn, corn silage and haylage, then adding supplements, minerals and vitamins purchased from the local feed mill. It was no longer necessary to feed such a souped-up ration; the cows produced all the milk we could use. Larry had some of the supplements on hand but the feed mill no longer had supplies available. He also stopped feeding salt to the animals, saving a couple of bags that he had on hand for our own use as it was necessary to preserve any food we would raise or butcher in the coming months.
The local feed mill was also in a predicament. Just a month earlier, Harvey had sold all his wheat harvest to the mill but since the collapse, the mill had no way of paying for the wheat nor did they have a way to sell it. Everything had come to a halt. They said they could have written checks to pay for the wheat, but those checks would have been worthless, so anyone who had brought wheat into the mill was welcome to come and retrieve it. Harvey and Larry brought a portion of their wheat, about 1,000 bushel, back to the farm. They said we could feed it to the cows if necessary. We could feed it to the few chickens that Mom had. We could sow it this fall for pasture or to harvest with the hope that until next July we’d have fuel again. Or, we could possibly use it ourselves for food.
Of course, Harvey wasn’t the only farmer to bring wheat into the mill. They had thousands of bushels of wheat plus corn and oats on hand. Not all farmers had retrieved their grain as Harvey did. Many were from neighboring counties, a much greater distance away and perhaps couldn’t spare the fuel. Or maybe they had no place to store their grain. The owners of the mill allowed those farmers as well as Harvey to take merchandise in return for their grain. Harvey brought an assortment of veterinary medicines, a selection of rubber boots, gloves, a scythe, several bags of hydrated lime and even four bags of seed corn left over from the spring planting. The owners of the feed mill said any remaining grain would be available to the local people for food as they needed it. It was dry and stored properly. They said with no electricity, they couldn’t keep the fans in the storage bins running so they would also have to be diligent about keeping insects out, a harder task with limited pesticides, but they’d do their best.
To be continued… Mort
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