AgArts

the Orange Gentleman House

at 702 Clark Ave. (near Fairway)

Giant Orange house.

May have loud music.

May win $500 to fund whatever you want.

May meet someone to date.

Best food ever.

May meet Iowa’s Poet Laureate.

Dog hair permitted:)

AGARTS LOCAL WONDERS POTLUCK DINNER  SATURDAY, APRIL 20TH
FIRST CHURCH
6TH AND KELLOGG, AMES, IA
6:30 P.M.
DONATION REQUESTED FOR GRANT FUND

SUBMIT A GRANT:

AgArts–the student organization that explores the intersection of arts
and agriculture–will have a potluck and grant opportunity in about three
weeks on the evening of Saturday, April 20th. Our adviser is Mary Swander
the Poet Laurette of Iowa. Every year we have this open-to-the-public and
community potluck/fundraising event where we share food and then listen and
vote on grant proposals.

The way it works is that folks come to the potluck with food to share as
well as give a $10 (student) to $20 (regular) gift. The amount raised goes
into a basket. After dinner, everyone who attends the potluck listens to
grant proposals. Everyone attending votes on whose project we should
support. The person whose grant gets the most votes receives the monies in
the basket to invest in their project.

AgArts Local Wonders Grant
Proposal.pdf<http://cirrus.mail-list.com/pfigeneral/89031627.html>

The grant proposals should focus on local impact. For example, there’s been
funding for a collection of aprons from women around the state and an
exhibition with these women’s stories called Apron Strings. More recently,
a Slow Food and Music Festival was sponsored for Mustard Seed Farm.

I’m e-mailing the one-page form. Folks interested must have this completed
by the potluck. They’ll read their 500-word proposal for the project.

Please consider writing up a proposal, sharing this with folks who have a
local project they need help funding, and mark your calendars for Saturday,
April 20th at 6:30PM. We’re meet at the Social Hall of First Church on the
corner of 6th Street and Kellogg Street downtown. Parking is free after
6PM. There are plates and silverware. Bring a friend, food to share, and
your gift to help fund the grant.

VANG:  A DRAMA ABOUT RECENT IMMIGRANT FARMERS DEBUTS APRIL 9
8:00 P.M.  ISU MAINTENANCE SHOP, AMES, IA
$10 ADMISSION   $5.00 FOR STUDENTS
BENEFIT FOR THE IOWA INTERNATIONAL CENTER

‘Vang,’ new drama by Liberal Arts and Sciences faculty, captures the experiences of Iowa immigrant farmers
http://www.las.iastate.edu/vang_april_9/

Hey everybody,

My name is Nate Pillman and I’m a third-year MFA student in Creative Writing and Environment. This summer I job shadowed a fellow grad student, Molly Gillespie, while she conducted a point count survey of bird and bat activity near wind farms. Below is a link to my blog, which tells all about it. Enjoy.

http://natepillmaneng560.weebly.com/index.html

-Nate

These first images are from morning chores; feeding calves and heat detecting. Cade was gone for the day so things took a little longer than usual.

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I helped put new bedding in the calf stalls but I wasn’t very good the calf ran up as I was trying to spread it and I got it in her face. Don’t worry, I brushed it all off.

When I caught up with Dane, he was in the big barn checking on the cows. I think I was asking something about what makes a cows udder “nice” and why some cows are more bony in the back than others, but I didn’t get the chance.

Dane started sorting cows and sent me off to town to pick some things up.

I had to get some oil filters. There is something special about the stores in a small town. It’s not like there is one giant store to get lost in. You go places and it’s run by a family and eventually you get to know their faces and names.

While Dane milked the hospital and show cows, I went down to watch the hoof trimmer work. The contraption he used was really interesting. The cows walked in and two straps lifted them up as the whole thing spun onto its side. Then the hoof trimmer hooked a loose band in place to keep them from kicking. After the cow was secured, it was like watching someone manicure really big fingernails. The pieces of hoof were flying all over.

Hoof health in cows is important because they can grow abscesses and have difficulty walking. A cow with bad feet may fall down in the milk house and injure itself.

The first picture and the last of the hoof trimming sort of look the same but I think those are two different cows. He was finished one when I got there and then loaded up another before I left.

I love the view of the clouds from Cade’s. You can see for miles it seems and they are different every day.

The dogs all came up to visit during evening chores. That’s Dozer and Ava, and the white one is Moose. He is allowed at Cade’s but not the home farm since he has a tendency to chase after chickens.

Dane had a really early morning when he got a call saying the milk was running warm. There is a window of time to get milk cool before it grows bacteria so he went down to the milk house to turn on the compressor fan (I think) and it caught fire! So he grabbed the extinguisher and put it out but at that point, with the fan not working, the call had to be made that the milk would be dumped.

Dane and I ran up to the hardware store after that and picked up a couple new fire extinguishers. I always liked small hardware stores better. Everything is easier to find and maybe it’s the fact that when there is more stuff and I don’t know what anything is, it’s overwhelming.

Reba kept standing under Daphne in the truck which I found pretty entertaining for some silly reason. We also picked up some coffee and a sticky bun for Dane because with the fire, he missed breakfast. There is a really good new restaurant. I think it’s called the Classic.

After breakfast, we went and waited for the vet and Dane pushed up some feed.

Preg checks again.

We also sorted some cows the needed to be dried off. And I saw this big guy running around. He was pretty sweet but apparently, bulls get meaner and meaner as they get older. I thought his coloring was really nice.

Dane treated some of the cows that weren’t going to be milking for a while for ring worm.

We also had some visitors. They were nutritionists. The guy in the center was interesting. He was french but has lived in the states for about 25 years. His accent was different and he talked our ears off.

When those guys left, we moved some of the big farm equipment around.

Afterward, Cade and I moved calves from several different pens to other pens to make room for the young ones that are done being weaned. It was funny because whenever they moved to a pen they would all run back and forth and kick their legs because they thought they were out.

After we moved the calves, I helped Dane fix this gate near the parlor.

When the fence was all fixed Dane sent me in search of a few cows that got out of the hospital pen. One has a bad leg and keeps falling down so she is going to market next week. We had no idea were she was though so it took a little while to find her.

I met up with the guys after feeding calves and they were chatting with the nutritionist they use at Cade’s place.

I think that same heifer was out again so we rounded her up and put her in a pen. She’s clever to find a way out but as soon as she does, she wants to be back with the other heifers.

I don’t have a ton of pictures from this day because I spent a lot of it mowing a small field. It was fun learning to ride the big mower and once I got the hang of it, I got around quickly. Before that though, there were the usual morning chores: feeding the calves and heat detecting.

A man with a giant machine was there when I got to Cade’s to heat detect. He was grinding up the bales of hay in it. I didn’t get a close of picture but when the crane/claw part drops it in, it gets pulled into a big spinning grinder.

When I got up to the home farm to tell Dane what heifers were in heat, I helped push up some feed. I think I am finally getting the hang of it. I sort of put my foot on the shovel and push with my whole body. Let me tell you, pushing up feed will make your shoulders burn.

Like I mentioned, I mowed a small field. The picture below is the before shot and the one next to it is when I was about half way done. It took a long time to learn to drive the mower in straight lines, and there were two or three kinds of thistles growing. They really put up a fight, and I had to go over the areas that had a lot of them two and sometimes three times.

Dane let the cows out into the big field. The commercial says happy cows come from California but if you look at these girls when they go out in the fields they run and kind of skip.

After a collective of around 4 or 5 hours I was all finished with the mowing and thank goodness because I had dust and grass and dirt all over me. I am talking in my eyes, ears, hair, and somehow all the way inside my boots. All those nasty thistles are gone!

Dane unloaded some square bales. Cade said they are a lot harder to maneuver than the rounded ones.

Instead of helping feed the calves, I had to run back to the house and take a quick shower. My eyes were bright red from all the dust and grass kicked up mowing. I did make it to Cade’s to help heat detect while Dane mixed feed. He has a machine that he dumps different parts of the mix into and then it tosses them together.

This girl had an infection in her foot that affects the joint but Cade gave her a shot and they told me it should be all better in about 48 hours so she should be fine when I get back there Monday.

As my second week started, my back didn’t feel so sore anymore and I was really happy to be back at the farm. It is just a really beautiful place and God knows I love the animals. There are about 12 barn cats/kittens. This one is my favorite but she and the other kittens are really skittish around people. They also have eye infections that I have been cleaning when I can catch them.

They hate it but it’s better than getting gunky eyes and running around blind.

It’s become part of my routine to feed the calves with Cade and his grandfather Maynard every morning and evening.

I love feeding the calves.  The Jersey calves look like deer and they really like getting the milk formula we give them. So much in fact, they will lick it out of the own little noses.

It’s pretty cute.

There is one calf that hasn’t mastered drinking from the bucket and I end up holding it so she doesn’t buck her head and spill it every where. That’s ok though. And she is getting better at it every day.

Breakfast comes after chores each day

I finally got a picture of a standing mount. I go up every day after breakfast to watch for signs of heat and here are a couple of cows showing signs of that. I try to take notes on which cows are in heat because otherwise, by the time I get to Dane, I’ve forgotten which ones I saw. He doesn’t forget though. It’s impressive the way he has gotten to the point where he remembers each cow and it’s status among the herd.

Cade put tags on some of the newer calves. Fayoola’s calf, Tequila Fiesta, didn’t like it at first.

I think he was trying to shake them off.

This is the the machine Cade was using to bale the fields with. It kind of dwarfs me.

I helped Dane uncover the more of what goes in to the feed mix. I can’t think of what he calls it right now but I will ask him. We had to get up on top and pull these tire rings off. They aren’t light. Imagine playing a game of frisbee with a 20 lb. disk. After we pulled them all of, Dane cut off the plastic beneath.

The afternoon was another adventure in fence building. This one was a lot longer than the last one and there was more left to do. We started by grounding some wooden posts. The ground has been really hard without rain and the guys had to bring around one of the big machines to push a post deeper in the ground.

We also pushed the metal posts into the ground this way.

Cade has a method for laying out the barbed wire alone. He takes a giant pole and pushes it through the the barbed wire and through an attachment on the tailgate of his truck. Then he walks the end of the wire to the last post. It’s a lot better than carrying that 50 lb. roll of razors in my opinion.

It looks really good in my opinion and it definitely keeps the cows in.

After the fence was done, it was time to feed the calves again. They get excited when they see us coming.

There are chores up at Cades in the evening. He keeps a young bull and a cow in a separate pen and I gave them their half bucket of grain and heat detected while the guys mixed feed and fed the heifers. Cade found a baby Killdeer. They are funny little birds with really long legs. He was sweet and I let him go again where Cade said he found him.

I went out early and watched the cows at Cade’s to see and signs of heat. I don’t know that they were quite used to me being there because they spent a lot of time staring at me and not at each other. There was one cow that had a standing mount though.

This is the inside of the grinder Cade uses on the corn for the feed mix. I think it also mixes different things together.

You put the raw material in a shoot that has kind of a cork screw shape. It rotates and pushes the material up and inside.

We picked up the oats from a silo down the road and Cade scooped enough to fill two drums with 250 lb. each.

I helped shovel smaller bucket fulls into the mixer but it is tough with stuff so heavy. I could sort of scoot the drums around in the truck bed but that was as far as I got there.

The thing about the dust that you can see in the silo is how it can make you skin itch. If you get a lot on you or in your eyes, it is almost like you have a skin rash itch without the rash.

This is a wider picture of the whole machine. When the mix is all done it includes: ground corn, oats, molasses, protein pellet (Dane thought they were probably made of soy beans, and salt.  I don’t think this is an exhaustive list of ingredients but it is most of them.

The vet came back to vaccinations the calves and we built a make shift shoot to send them down one by one. The guys took gates and attached them to each other and a couple of us held them so the calves wouldn’t nock it over. There were quite a few that needed their shots and they got around it and out of the barn once but it went really smoothly for the most part.

Dane said we vaccinated for a lot of things but the big ones were brucellosis, which doesn’t really exist in Iowa anymore because of the vaccine. Vet’s are required to give calves this vaccine for several reasons. One being the symtoms it causes in cows. They include: aborted calves, retained afterbirth and arthritic joins.

Another reason for vaccinating for brucellosis is that the disease can be spread to humans through unpasteurized milk and through contact with infected animals. It has been known by many names over the years but mainly as Malta Fever or Mediterranean Fever in humans. The main symptoms for humans are fevers, headaches, joint pain, chills, weakness and more. It got the nick name “undulant” fever because of the inconstant fever spikes that untreated people got from it. Finally, the disease can be chronic and may reoccur even years later.

There are very few cases in the United States today but like other vaccinated illnesses, it was, at one point, a serious problem.

The Pink Eye vaccine was another important shot the calves got that day. It’s official name is infectious bovine kerato-conjuntivitis or IBK. The bacterium that causes it produces a toxin that attacks the corea and surrounding area of the eye and erodes the surface causing inflammation. The disease can spread quickly through the herd and happens more often in dusty places with flies and bright sunlight. Sounds a lot like a farm in the summer right? It also happens more often when there is physical irritation to the eye by weeds like thistles so I guess killing the pretty purple thistles that are “nuisance weeds” makes a lot more sense.

Pink eye is not only painful for the animal but can cause decreased body weight and milk production. If not treated, the cow can lose sight in one or both eyes temporarily or permanently.

Staphylococcus aureus Mastitis is an infection in the utter that produces toxins and causes damage to the milk producing cells. It begins in the teat and moves up inside the udder. It seems like the vaccine for this is very new but I am not sure.

The last big one was for a reproductive vaccine for Bovine Viral Diarrhea or BVD. As I understand it, it develops in calves in the uterus and can cause abortions, infertility and a secondary respiratory disease. This one was pretty complicated and rather than write something I am not sure about, I’ll just say we treated the calves for this as well.

The delivery man came and dropped of a truck-full of corn gluten. This is the leftovers after corn is processes and it is mixed in to the cow’s feed. It is delivered wet and helps keep the cows from sorting their food for the things that they think taste the best and makes sure that they eat the things that provide different kinds of nutrients as well.

In the evening, we fed calves. Cade fed a newborn her mother’s colostrum. Colostrum is the milk produced by a cow when it gives birth to a calf. It has lots of benefits for newborn calves such as antibodies that prevent disease. It also provides more protein than regular milk.

Well, that pretty much sums up the day. Before the sun went down we checked crops again and the sunset was really pretty over the corn field.

Dane pushes the feed forward every day at 9. It’s done 3 other times a day. I attempted this but I haven’t quite gotten the technique down. You have to sort of scoop and throw right before you get too close or the shovel gets stuck in the heavy feed. Imagine shoveling snow, sort of.

After we finished shoveling the feed forward and checking the chalk on the fresh cows, we went to the feed store in town and picked up some salt licks and a few other things. These blocks of salt weight a very solid 50 pounds a piece.

When we got back from the feed store, we spent some time sorting cows to be preg checked. Dane walked through and found the ones he wanted the vet check and I would help get them into a separate inclosure. The trouble was keeping them in there. There was one cow in particular that snuck past me back to where we took her from twice.

Most of the girls Dane pulled out were supposed to be between 40 and 90 days pregnant. The vet confirmed this via ultra sound. He would put the scope up their rear and view through the membranes into the uterus. A few cows were open, meaning they were not pregnant. There was some discussion about where the term came from because if a cow is not pregnant, her uterus is very small, or not really open. We wondered if it meant something like open for business but it’s hard to say.

The majority of the afternoon was spent with Cade checking on the crops. They plant corn, soy beans, oats and I am going to half to ask again what else because I can’t remember on different parts of the farm. They use these crops as part of the feed for the animals.

The problem is, there hasn’t been a lot of rain and the ground is very dry. The seeds laid in dry ground and some germinated late or not at all.

It’s not typical to see cracks in the dirt this early in the year.

Dozer and Eva (another farm dog) enjoyed riding all over as well. In total, I think there are different crops in 4 or 5 different locations.

Here is a great example of the corn that is growing strangely due to the dry weather. Some plants were doing well and others hadn’t even sprouted.

Under the hard top layer is beautiful, dark earth. Albeit, it was still pretty dry.

These are field peas are grown with oats I believe. They have purple flowers on them sometimes. The plants protect each other as they grow.

This corn looks a lot better. But is growing suckers. I don’t think that’s a technical term. Instead of having on central stalk, there are smaller extra ones that suck nutrients and moisture from the ground, depriving the plant as it grows. I think they die off though.

This field was planted late so it’s barely started to grow but there are little spikes of corn and small corn plants.

The barn was build last year and holds some of the younger heifers as well as some cows that are a little older.

There were some issues last year where corn fell and they lost part of the crop. These kernels are from an ear I found on the ground. They didn’t grow but other ears started to grow more volunteer corn. You might think that is good but rather than grow in single stalk lines, the corn was growing right out of the ear and Cade had to pull them up.