Cold, spiraling details

January 11, 2011

Anyway, we got 7 or 8 inches of snow here Monday and it was pretty well advertised. So we fed 80 cows two bales, about 2800 lb. the day before, and that much again the day of the snow after full accumulation.  That was about 35 lb. per head per day, so we skipped today so they can clean up and start browsing tall grass. Weather permitting, they come home Saturday, and the forecast looks accommodating.

Well, it turns out the big bales are a lot easier to unroll if you have them lined up to just undo what happened in the baler. It’s not so important on dry ground but in the snow, it makes more of a difference.  I have always known this, as anybody who gave it much thought surely would.  But I shrug it off as one detail I can ignore, although I once tried to be more perfect. In my younger days, I even lined up an entire bale yard so that backing up to each one would always make them ready to feed. But for the past 20 years or so, it seems there have been too many competing tasks or impending rain or travel, so we have just moved the bales in off the fields as quickly as possible, without regard to clockwise or counter. I have to get out and check sometimes to get the clockwise spiral on the driver’s side as I back the bale bed up…

Except for snowy or muddy challenging conditions for the quick unroll, I will probably not worry much about a hay version of the coriolis effect. But there are plenty of other details we’ll need to consider by the following weekend when we make our mark on about 70 cows and heifers in need of a good, legible freeze brand. It’s been 3 years, so we have some catching up to do.

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