Essex Farm: Brittle

Essex Farm dairy cattle in the barn. (Credit: Kristin Kimball)

Check out the latest news from Essex Farm in this bitterly cold winter with this note from Kristin Kimball:

“Travis plugged the tractor into the block heater this morning, to get it warm enough to start, and the extension cord snapped. It’s that cold. I recorded -14 after sunup, but really, once you get into the negative double digits, who cares? Super cold is descriptive enough. Mark has been in New York City since Wednesday. He comes back tomorrow, when the weather is due to warm up. Note this is exactly what happened last time he left the farm. It has occurred to me his energy might be enough to change the atmosphere.

I don’t want to curse us by saying this but I do like the cold, especially when the sun is brilliant, and I’m most impressed by how many things have gone right in this stretch of weather. The greenhouse waters are frozen but that was to be expected. They should thaw when it warms up. The automatic waterer in the covered barnyard has a thermostat and heater built into it. The valve got plugged with bedding and it overflowed and froze, but Travis got that fixed yesterday. The dairy team’s new crush is this big hot guy named Mr. Heater, a 125,000 btu kerosene-fueled hot air blaster that sits in the aisle of the barn during milking. The milking parlor is curtained off from the rest of the barn with one of our famous billboard tarps and it gets, temporarily, quite toasty in there. No more frozen lines or sluggish pulsators. Thanks to good bedding in the covered barnyard, no frostbite on the cows’ teats this week either, except for Winnie, who has a tiny, blind fifth teat that was doomed to get nipped eventually.

The biggest challenge in the dairy herd right now is not weather related, but might instead be due in part to the excellent feed we have this year…” (Continue reading this Essex Farm Note.)

Essex Farm: The Last Week (www.essexonlakechamplain.com)
Essex Farm: Winter Wonder (www.essexonlakechamplain.com)
Reber Rock Farm Fotofeed #4: Year in Review (www.essexonlakechamplain.com)
Thank You, Essex Blog Readers, Writers and Boosters (www.essexonlakechamplain.com)

About Essex Farm

In 2004 Mark and Kristin Kimball founded Essex Farm in Essex, NY. It was the first full-diet CSA farm formed (as far as they know)! Kristin wrote her memoir, The Dirty Life, chronicling her transition from city girl to farm wife and the first year of life at Essex Farm. Since then Kristin continues to chronicle life on the farm on her blog, which we give you snippets of here on the Essex on Lake Champlain Blog.