It was still dark as I climbed into my pickup to head to the farm. The stars were visible and a low crescent moon hung on the western horizon. There was a chill in the early morning air, but that would all change quickly as the sun started to rise causing the temperatures to do the same. It would be a bright and beautiful fall day for our annual Open House Field Day at Eden Shale Farm.

We host this field day every year on the third Saturday in October.  It is our chance to showcase the new projects we have been working on for the past year. And every year, we get a good crowd of new folks that have never been to Eden Shale. This year we had over 100 people come and enjoy the day with us.
In all it has been another great season of hosting people at the farm. This year we hosted 20 tours and welcomed over 400 people through our gates. We continue to see new people attend the tours and we are excited that so many folks continue find our work valuable.

I continue to be impressed with the diversity of our visitors, both in their occupations and where they are from.  We had the opportunity to host high school ag teachers from across the state for a professional development day, then later we had science teachers from all over the United States join us for similar training.  Both days with these teachers was wonderful as they were eager to learn the information so that they could take it back to their classrooms and share it with students. There is no doubt that those two days will have a lasting impact on agriculture for years to come.
Other notable groups that visited Eden Shale were the KCA Leadership Development class, The Berry Center, Accelerating Appalachia, West Virginia Conservation Agency, KY Division of Water, NRCS, as well as a group of cattle producers from the Baltics (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia).

In total for 2024, Eden Shale Farm has hosted 20 farm tours totaling 405 people.  Those in attendance were from 62 Kentucky Counties, 22 US states, and 5 foreign countries (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Nigeria, and Jamacia).
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It is our goal to spread good ideas throughout agriculture, not only in Kentucky but throughout the United States and around the world. Thank you to all those who have taken the time to visit the farm this year. It certainly has been our pleasure to share our time together. From our farm to yours, Merry Christmas. 

For the past 10 years we have been weaning our calves based on the “sign”. Now you may or may not believe that there is a benefit to using this ancient calendar to plan certain procedures, but we have used it successfully and I do seem to think that there is something to it.

Referred to as “The Zodiac Man” or “Man of Signs”, this idea can be traced back to the eleventh century. Medical astrologers of that time believed that there was a correlation to both the heavens and living beings. During the late-medieval period this “rational” idea was built upon the precisely calculable order of the heavens. The theory was that celestial order, in turn, had influence on terrestrial things like weather and the human body. This correlation to the astrological phase to the human body was scripted as The Zodiac Man, corelating each phase to a specific part of the body. It is generally believed to be bad practice to perform any procedure on a part of the body while the sign is in that area. (Yale University Online Exhibits)

So right or wrong, we use the zodiac sign to schedule management events, such as castration and weaning. We only perform these two events when the sign is in the “feet”. A quick reference to the Farmers Almanac can tell you where the sign is on The Zodiac Man. We weaned our calves on Sept 13th when the sign was in the “feet”. Weaning went smoothly and we had hardly any bawling from the calves or cows even on the first night. The transition was smooth and Greg had all the calves eating grain by the third night.

Our weaning weights were down a bit from last year, but we also weaned two weeks earlier than previously. This years average was 491 lbs.  The calves averaged 2.2 lbs per day of age, and had we kept them on the cow for two more weeks they would have been within 6 lbs of last years average of 528 lbs.  That difference is understandable with this summer being much drier than last season.

The cows were in decent shape given the dry pasture conditions.  They had an average weight of 1246 lbs, a body condition score of 5.6, and a hair coat score of 2.1. On average the herd weaned 40% of their body weight.
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These calves will now get backgrounded at the farm throughout the fall and winter. The females will be managed as replacement heifers, and the steers will get grazed on stockpiled fescue and carried through the winter and then grazed on grass at Eden Shale next summer. Check back for more updates on these calves as we carry them through our management system.