I don’t have any down to the penny cost savings on this but I can give you some rough estimates.  Typically before insulation, our electric bill would jump up $80-100 or more a month with one tank.  Now having 2 insulated tanks, the bill is about a $30-40 jump.  That’s twice the tanks for half the $$. I’d say saving even $50 a month is well worth it.
 
It is the second week of January as I write this and we are just now plugging in heaters. Even at that, an hour is long enough to heat the water up and keep it from freezing the rest of the day.  My next goal is to find a timer to alternate heaters on a four hour schedule.  The temps have been down into the single digits and the most ice I have seen is less than a quarter of an inch.  Without the insulation I would have been plugged in weeks ago. 

 If you stuck with me long enough to read this far, I’ll throw in my final tid-bit of advice….for FREE!  Fill your tanks in the morning if possible.  Most of the time our critters don’t drink much at night and fresh water in the morning helps warm up what water had been sitting all night getting even colder and not being drank.  Every little bit helps make life easier and lets us spend time and money where it’s needed most.  Thanks again for reading this and feel free to ask questions.  I like to keep things short and sweet, so if you want further explanation, I will do my best to assist you. 

Enjoy! 

​Happy New Year! With each new year tends to come a lot of change. We spend time reflecting on the previous year and set resolutions or goals as to how we can better ourselves in the coming year. That’s no different here on the farm. This year we are looking at some rather large changes but today I am going to talk about a change that we dictate but that affects the calves the most. Every 2 months or so, we wean our bottle calves. This is time of great change for them! Not only do we take milk out of their diet, they also move to a different home, and learn to socialize with other calves. 

​There are a lot of different methods out there for weaning calves.  We like to use a step down process because we think it helps the calves adjust better.  This means that instead of cutting the calves off of milk cold turkey, we start by taking away just 1 bottle per day. Meaning the calves still get their evening bottle of milk so that they go to bed with a warm full belly. This lasts for 1 week.  We typically see the calves creep feed intake during this week and they also seem to learn what water is! Now, we provide the calves with water from the time that they are 3 or 4 days old and they will splash around in it a bit but very rarely do they drink a significant amount of it until they are 6 or 7 weeks old. And I don’t ever see them empty a bucket in a days time until Week 7, when we start decreasing the amount of milk they get. I speculate that this is because milk has such a high water content that they are able to meet a large portion of their water needs just from their 2 bottles of milk a day. Did I mention that each bottle holds a half gallon of milk?? And that that means, each calf drinks a whole GALLON of milk every day!

​At the end of week 7, we take away their evening bottle and at this point they are weaned! That is to say, they no longer have any milk in their diet. They are eating only ever increasing amounts of creep feed and water. After another 3 or 4 weeks we will slowly start introducing hay into their diets as well.  However, the changes don’t end there. In order to decrease stress at the time of weaning, we like to leave the calves in their hutches for an extra week if possible. A lot of stressful things occur at this time in the calves lives so it helps them if we can give them time to adjust to each new change.