A Few Suprising Things About Our Farm

Hello guys! Today I’m going to show you some things that not every farm has. 🙂 Ready? Okay then, here you go… 🙂

Number One: The Cotton Pile

Maybe when you read that you imagined a big pile of cotton balls. In that case, I’ll need to re-phrase it.  Ahem.

The Cotton Seed Pile

Have I succeeded in making you more confused? Hooray! 😛 I’ll try to clear things up a bit… The cotton seed pile is used to mix in with the cow’s feed. It is stored in a big barn and whenever they need more a skid loader comes and scoops some into the feeder thingy. It’s also easy to dig in, and once we made a hole that fit about five or so kids inside. Fun, huh? Another time our cousins from Canada came and we (with the help of our uncle, their dad) made a castle out of the cotton pile! Strangely though, we don’t play in it much unless other kids come over. 🙂

Now to explain it with a picture. This was taken when there wasn’t much cotton. Sometimes there is over twice as much as this! 😮

Isn’t that cool? 😀

Number Two: The Island

And everyone gasps in amazement. We have an island on our farm! It’s super fun to play at. 😀 Want a picture?

Oohh… did I forget to tell you that this island was in the middle of a field? I did? Oh. XD I’m not really sure who named it the island, but I’m pretty sure we named it that because it’s basically… and island in the middle of a field! 😛 It’s where we haul brush and stuff so it’s not the best of woods, but it has little deer trails and nooks where we sometimes ‘sell’ things to each other. Pine cones are our money. XD The only problem is we don’t really use any of the things we ‘buy,’ so it can get boring fast. 😛

Number Three: Solar Panels

I’m guessing a lot of you don’t connect solar panels with farms, am I correct? Well our farm has three big solar panels. Their power is used for our three 450 foot-long chicken houses.

In that last photo the red barn-looking things are the front of our chicken houses.

Number Four: We Make Nests

You are probably beginning to think our farm a little weird… XD But we don’t make nests out of sticks and mud, we make nests out of sheet metal and rivets. I can’t say that it’s my favorite job in the world. Dad ordered 100 nests, only someone needs to build them. I guess it wouldn’t be horrible if the nests only took five minutes to make, but they don’t. They take around 30 minutes to an hour. Multiply that by 100 and you get… (calculator please) somewhere around 75 hours of nest-making. Sound fun? It’s not.

This is a box that contains the materials we need to build three nests.

Number Five: The Automatic Calf Feeder

Now this isn’t actually ours, but it is on our farm. My dad’s cousin owns the dairy and all the cows, but they live on our farm. (The cows do.) This machine mixes powder with water to make a milk replacer. It scans the calf’s ear tags when they come up to drink and if they’ve already had enough for that day, the machine won’t let them drink. Here are a few photos, maybe they’ll help you understand better.

 

 

Those are all the ‘weird’ things I could think of! 😀 Which surprised you the most?

In case you are wondering how I put photos on if I’m out of space, its because I put them on a private page on another blog, copied them, and pasted them into here. Thank you Clara! 😀