Chicken Cartoons


Oh, it's been a hard January. Don't even get me started. Not only has the weather been totally sucky, but menopause just isn't the fun you'd expect it to be. Hot flashes are mildly amusing when they happen to someone else, but when it's you going 2 1/2 months without sleep, it ain't so funny anymore. It's true what they say about sleep deprivation as a torture---I'd admit to anything to be able to sleep again. I'm on meds, and it's getting better. Enough said.

Visitors to our farm like to spend time standing in front of the chicken house door. The chicken house isn't a separate building, but an 8 by 16 foot enclosed room inside our barn. The chickens spend the morning there so they'll lay eggs in the right places, then can roam freely in the afternoon. But of course, since it's been -20 and snowy, they only roam inside the barn.

Chickens and eggs are, to many people, pretty funny, and proof of this is on the chicken house door. Here's the door: (There are three cartoons on the door...but why are there only 2 in this photo? I'm clueless.)



Here are three cartoons Melissa has posted:






A fourth one went up the other day, but I don't have the gumption to crawl out to the barn and photograph it.

Our fridge is covered with sheep, chicken, and dog cartoons. Gary Larsen's The Far Side is our favorite. He has some great shearing cartoons (who knew shearing could be so amusing?) which I'll share next time. Right now I gotta get some sleep...

Oh, and if I haven't covered enough topics in this post, here's another: I like to write about writing and books and being an author and meeting readers, etc, and none of this fits into Farm Tales. So in a burst of creative insanity (I mean, energy) I've started another blog called The Inkslinger. Scroll up to my profile, and you'll find The Inkslinger under my list of blogs.

Okay, now I'm going to get some sleep....

How Do You Weigh a Cow?

While this isn't likely a question that burns at you day after day, it does occupy a bit of our time. How the heck do you weigh a cow?

When we harvest our grapes, I weigh them by dragging the bathroom scale out to the shed, weighing myself with two empty 5-gallon buckets, then weighing myself with two buckets full of grapes. We've weighed thousands of pounds of grapes this way. (We're totally into high tech around here.)

Weighing sheep is a bit more advanced because we have a walk-on scale, sized just for sheep. Some sheep stand there quietly so we can read the gauge; others dance around like crazy animals while the scale reads 50 pounds then 150 pounds then back to 50. Eventually we get a fairly accurate reading.

But our beef steers are too large to fit onto this sheep scale. I've resorted to asking advice. Our friend Joe stopped by and I dragged him out to the barn. "How big do you think these guys are?"

Joe shrugged. "450 pounds or so."

When our neighbor Lyle stopped by, Melissa pulled him over to the steers. "How much do you think they weigh?'

Lyle eyed the cows. "500-600 pounds."

We envied these men's ability to eyeball an animal and know its weight, but we needed something a little more accurate. We could not, however, afford a $1000 cow scale.

Luckily there is a gadget in farming for every single thing a farmer needs to do, and Melissa discovered the Cow Weight Measuring Tape for $2.00.


Here's how it works: You put the tape around the steer's chest just behind its front legs. Here's Melissa doing so with one of the Jerseys, and he's not really sure he likes it.




You'll come up with inches. Then turn the tape over, choose the line that corresponds to your breed (Holstein, Guernsey, or Jersey,) and you have the approximate weight of the steer.



Brilliant.

Turns out our steers weigh between 450 and 600 pounds, just as our experts had predicted. But now we have the tape, so we'll be able to estimate ourselves. Although I'm not sure how accurate the tape is, since I caught one of the steers sucking in his breath and trying to make himself skinny.









I can certainly relate. When a tape measure gets near my body, I suck it up and imagine myself as thin as possible. I totally surprised the nurse at the clinic the other day when she asked me politely if I'd like to step up on the scale.

I said 'No.'

So even though we now have a great tool for weighing our steers, we won't likely put them through it very often.