Could be the same title as my last post, but instead let's say call this 'Spring'

So it's snowing again (thus I have time to write). Maybe this snow will damper the smell of chicken manure permeating our farm. We received our 3rd tractor trailer load of chicken manure yesterday, the 4th, and hopefully final, load is on its way tomorrow and phheeewwweeeyyy it smells rotten around here. Probably most visitors thought our farm stunk already, but we never really noticed until this crap arrived.
Being organic means that we can't use synthetic sources of nitrogen to fertilize our fields, but chicken manure is an excellent source of nitrogen. Another local organic farmer found a chicken farm in Lancaster, Pa that is sending a truck to Wagner Lumber in Owego to pick up mulch and therefore doesn't need to charge much to send loads of manure up here.
Thanks to Organic Valley's regional herd health meetings we have also learned more about folliar feeding our pasture and hay fields. You might wonder why we would learn about fertilizers at a herd health meeting, but if you knew Dr. Paul Detloff, the veterinarian presenting at these meetings, you wouldn't be surprised by the topic. Dr. Paul came all of the way from Wisconsin to spend a week traveling New York State to help Organic Valley farmers learn about managing herd health on their own farms. Dr. Paul takes a holistic approach to looking at animal health and considers the health of our soils and quality of our forage as the groundwork for healthy cows. We learned a lot about how to make our own fertilizers using a source of sugar, milk, fish emulsion, apple cider vinegar and various other lesser ingredients to spray on our fields or even our home gardens. Dr. Paul also realizes that most farmers have a hard time finding hours in the day to mix these foliar feeds, so most farmers will purchase them from a local supplier, but he uses a homemade blend for his own business growing herbs for the various tinctures he produces and I intend to use his recipe for our garden this Spring.
We were lucky enough to host one of the herd health meetings and have Dr. Paul evaluate some of our cows. He is such a pleasure to listen to and has so much knowledge to share that if you ever get the chance to attend a conference that he speaks at I would definitely recommend it. One of the topics he explained to us was a old German theory on reading bovine hair coats. This theory, which Dr. Paul tested with success on our farm, uses the visual interpretation of a cow's hair patterns to distinguish the quality of milk production (quantity, protein and butterfat), the breeding status or even the endocrine function of a cow.
We have spent the last week trying to implement some of Dr. Paul's suggestions and Ben has had to wake me from a daze as I study a cow's haircoat instead of doing the task at hand while we are trying to milk.
Between our search for foliar fertilizer, the truckloads of our chicken manure sitting a couple hundred yards from my house and the arrival of our clover seed you can bet that the winter is almost over and this snow won't stick around very long.