My first thoughts about the office was when a teacher at school sent you to the office, it was usually not good.
When my parents said, “He goes to the office every day to work,” it was assumed that person had a very important job.
On our dairy farm in the 1950s the office consisted of . . .
my grandpa’s scribbler that every important thing was recorded in. The front half was where he recorded all the births of calves and their ear tag number, all the sales of cows, the price he sold them for and the farmers name who bought them.
Back in the 1950s, grandpa and his brother (who also kept purebred Holsteins) would buy a very good bull every second year and that was recorded. The back half of the scribbler was where grandpa recorded all purchases and sales. Everything from a new pair of felt boots that he bought each fall to 50 acres of adjoining land he purchased from his brother-in-law when Harold and the wife quit farming and moved to Ottawa. That fifty acres cost $385.
Grandpa bottled and delivered milk in Shawville with Rock pulling the milk wagon; and each days milk sales were also recorded. No record was kept on individual milk sales because everybody always paid. During the depression some ladies left a note in the empty washed milk bottle that said, “Don’t leave any more milk because we can’t afford to pay.” Grandpa never stopped leaving milk because he knew that the children needed milk. He said that a few years later every one of those families paid for milk that he left during hard times.
An interesting sales item that grandpa recorded was the sale of a Very Good brood cow to one of Pakenham’s best up and coming farmers for $385. That was a good price in the early 1950s, but that cow was later graded Excellent which is the highest grade for the way the cow looked.
My dad’s office in the 1950s consisted of a little black pocket notepad where he recorded dates of cropping and harvest, phone numbers of machine parts dealers, the date when different species of birds returned each spring, date when the first leaves appeared on the trees and the birthdays of family members. He also used the back of a cigarette package to write down machine part numbers.
The farm office just gradually grew by necessity. My mom took a one-day course on bookkeeping and bought an account book from a farmers’ association for two dollars.
When I returned from college in the 1960s, I picked up dad’s habit of the pocket notebook which was replaced by a Palm Pilot in the 1970s. This was just an electronic notebook that held thousands of phone numbers, serial numbers, part numbers, and seed prices from year to year.
Our electronic world on the farm started in 1990 when Jeannie gave me a cell phone for Christmas. It weighed about ten pounds, looked like a black block of square timber with a receiver on it and cost about $1,300. The “eighties” heralded in an endless announcement of better, smaller, cheaper and more advanced cell phones and computers.
Today’s farm office contains a pen-state shaker box which is a combination of plastic boxes, each with different sized holes. These boxes are stacked on top of each other and a sample of TMR or silage is placed on top. When this pyramid of boxes is shaken large pieces of silage stay on top, medium sized pieces stay on the middle tray and pieces of grain and finely chopped forage fall to the bottom. All these groups are weighed on a very accurate scale and then dried in a microwave or electric oven and each sample weighed again. Then the dry matter is calculated and effective fiber for the entire sample. There is a tester to determine the quality of a cow’s first colostrums milk for newborn calves. If it is very high quality, extra is kept in the freezer in meal size Ziploc bags.
Computers record and store the milk given by each cow every day, every birth, vaccination, hoof trimmed, sickness, treatment, ear tag number and date of tagging, every movement of every animal to another location, the estrus cycle of every cow, the date of insemination, the date the animal left, sold, or died. The animals activity is monitored to help calculate exact time to inseminate. Rumination is recorded to warn the farmer of oncoming sickness. If the animal is distressed or stuck in her stall, an alarm is sent to the cell phone of the farmer.
Many farms use a closed circuit TV camera to monitor the calving pen. This can also be sent to a smart phone. A time and temperature recorder keeps track of temperature in the milk tank, all power outages, temperature of wash water to be sure that the milk tank is well washed. There are a variety of test kits in the farm office to check for different drug residues in the milk after an animal was treated.
The feed ration for each group of cows (fresh, heifers, dry cows, first calf cows, etc.) are in the barn computer and each time the TMR feed truck passes the farm office the recipe for each group can be transferred by Bluetooth from the farm office computer to the computer on the feed truck.
Most farm offices now have a semen storage tank to store hundreds of vials of semen from selected bulls that could be housed anywhere in the world. Very few dairy farms do not keep a bull anymore. An array of catalogues with pictures and statistics of available bull semen is on the counter of every barn office.
A drug fridge and storage cabinet to keep some emergency treatments for animals until the vet can come is also in the office. Epinephrine (what’s in an Epipen) is always in the office in case an animal has an allergic reaction.
Every animal in Quebec is required to be identified with an electronic ear tag and although each cow tag is read each time she enters the milking parlor, a portable reader in a hand wand can be taken anywhere in the barn to record hoof trimming, medication administration, etc.
We recently had a cat donated to the farm and because it was chipped, the number of the chip and all its information could also be read by the hand wand.
An array of manuals and research results about cows, crops, fertilizers, chemical and soil element interaction fill book cases on the walls. A pair of bolt cutters leans against the wall in every farm office to cut an animal free and save her life if she gets caught in her stall. A small compass is in a drawer to check if an animal has previously received a magnet to catch metal or a nail which she may have chewed down by mistake. A small vet’s satchel is always at the ready with a thermometer, injectable vitamins, an IV kit to administer CalMgK to save a cow from dying with milk fever, various sizes of new needles and syringes for emergency use. There is still a sharp jackknife in the farmer’s pocket. He is just not dressed without that.
Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations. gladcrest@gmail.com
