Chase's Organic Dairy - Farm Blog

It’s that time of year again – time to put the fences back up.   We take some fence posts along the road down in the fall. to avoid damage to them when snow plows push back the snow banks.  We also have to repair fencing that has been taken down by deer and moose passing [...]

The cold days of January are upon us, and the busiest place on the farms these days is inside the barn.
Click here to view more photos of what’s happening in the barn during the winter months.

Well, the days are getting colder.  Soon we will have to “tie up” but we are trying to keep the cows out as long as the weather permits.  After the record snowfall on October 22nd, we’ve had many decent days with temps in the forties and occasionally even in the fifties.  There’s not much grass [...]

The cows aren’t overly impressed with yesterday’s storm, which left 6 inches of the white stuff at the official weather station in Caribou, breaking a record. There won’t be much grazing happening today, but there is plenty to eat in the hay rings and they will get exercise and fresh air.
For more photos of the [...]

Ready or not, a little snow arrived today.  The cows are still outside for the most part, and we hope to be able to keep them going out for a while longer.  They are feeding mostly from alfalfa haylage in rings in the pasture, but there are still some die-hard grazers who are still feeding [...]

I was headed to the barn with coffee this afternoon and took a moment to snap a pic of our haylage bales.   What a lot of work that group of bales represents!   They are stacked two high.   We are feeding them in hay rings outside for now.  When its gets colder, we’ll unroll them in [...]

The cool days of fall are upon us and the grass is still growing, but very slowly.  We recently set out some hay rings and are starting to feed some haylage to make sure the cows have enough to eat.   We love opening the bales and smelling the sweet scent of good haylage.  The [...]

As much as we hate to admit it… it’s time to start thinking about winter.  While we are enjoying the fall weather and the cows are enjoying fall pastures, we are working to gather firewood to heat our houses with this winter.  We usually cut up trees that have blown down and also cut some [...]

August has been an extremely busy month haying.  The wet weather of June and July has changed and we have had many days of cloudless blue skies.  It hasn’t been easy, but we’ve finished haying!  We baled about 11,000  square bales this year and about 1,100 round silage bales.  We also did about 150 dry [...]

We had a good weather forecast this morning so started cutting around 8:00 AM and kept cutting for nearly 12 hours today!  We started with some second crop alfalfa and also cut some timothy/mixed grass fields.  We will be busy the next few days – round bales tomorrow and (we hope!) square bales for 2-3 [...]