A big sandbox

It’s our county fair this week. The kids get to see how they did in picking and training their animals for the show. This year, we have 16 animals at the fair. We have four families who lease from us, plus our kids, or there would be no way I’d personally want to bring that many cattle to the fair. We also have a lot of nieces, nephews and young kids in our lease families who want to lead a calf around in the novice show, so we have to bring a decent-sized show string just to have enough younger calves for them all to lead.

Yesterday, my sister and her family came to the fair to watch the 4-H dairy show. My nephew got bored watching cows parade around, as young kids do with anything that involves sitting and being relatively still. The novice show isn’t held during the 4-H show day, so there was no calf leading for him that day. Luckily, the fair has a large sandbox this year. Like most boys under the age of 10, a sandbox, especially one with those handle-powered excavators, can be fun for a very long time. I still like playing in the dirt, too.

There was a grant program a year or two ago through the Minnesota Department of Agriculture to help livestock operations do things that would make their operations more resilient against extreme weather events. I submitted a grant application to repair and improve the main water course on our farm. We have a number of ponds that had their overflows damaged during a 10-inch-plus rainfall years ago, and we never got them repaired. Because they don’t hold water back like they used to, when it rains more than a few inches, a part of our pastures flood. My plan is to improve the existing ponds and create another one to increase the amount of water they can hold. Hopefully, that will prevent wet years from making a lake in the western part of our farm and a constant creek that blocks us from getting cows to the farthest paddocks. To do all this dirt work, I have rented an 18,000-pound excavator from the local Bobcat and Kubota dealer. Like I said, I still like playing in the dirt.

I haven’t started on the pond-digging yet, but we have installed a couple of water lines for a new barn to hold our laying hen flock and automatic waterers for calves. I need to get good at running the excavator and carving out a couple of hundred feet of a 6-foot deep trench is as good a way as any. We also installed a waterer for our pony and possibly either goats, sheep or a llama. Who knows what might be put in that pasture? My wife, Emily, doesn’t want sheep, but our daughter, Hannah, wants to try showing sheep at next year’s fair. We’ll see who is more convincing in that argument next spring.

We have only just begun the third crop of hay because we didn’t want to start making a bag and have to stop midway through for the fair. All the regular weekly rains have made another excellent yielding crop, but my plan to make dry hay on the 25 acres I cut a few days ago keeps getting delayed by cloudy, still days.

Until next time, keep living the dream and treat yourself to renting a big piece of dirt-moving equipment you always wanted to run as a kid. It’s really fun.

Tim Zweber farms with his wife, Emily, their three children and his parents, Jon and Lisa, near Elko, Minnesota.