Eden Shale Update- January

Welcome to 2025! I hope you enjoyed Christmas and New Years with family and friends. It is always good to start the new year off with the rest and reset of the holidays.
During the past month at the farm we have been catching up on some projects that never seem to make it to the top of the list. A water leak caused our contractor to mobilize and address the urgent issue of water running down the side of the hill.  In typical Eden Shale fashion, the water leak was coming from an old galvanized water line that didn’t run to anything, and previously we didn’t know it existed.

With the water line now fixed, we had a list of other things for our contractor to do while he was onsite. We spread seven loads of rock onto existing winter feeding sites. We are developing a winter feeding structure for the heifers in which we procured some free road millings from a recent road widening project near the farm. This structure is the last location that we still feed hay with hay rings and it will soon utilize a Bo Renfrow structure to feed hay with additional bunk space for grain, and a creep area for the calves. It will also have incorporated a manure stack pad and wind break structures for the animals.

One other project included completing an intermittent creek crossing.  The above mentioned road widening project took out our main alleyway going to the west side of the farm. Recreating the alley proved to be too expensive so we created a crossing from one field into the adjacent paddocks.  The contractor utilized existing concrete that was removed from the heifers feeding site and placed it as armoring for the new crossing. It turned out nice, and it should protect the small stream channel from the occasional crossing of animals from one side of the farm to the other.

Other projects included adding a 3000 gallon tank to the water harvesting system at the heifer barn.  This will give us approximately 7000 gallon capacity to water livestock with, but it now has the duel purpose of being able fill up our sprayer with harvested water using a 2 inch pipe. We have not tried the system yet, but initial calculations of the flow rate of a 2” pipe suggest that our 300 gallon sprayer can be filled in under 10 minutes. To compare, the garden hose with good pressure was taking approximately 50 minutes to fill the sprayer. That is a massive reduction of downtime while refilling the sprayer. I will give you an update once we start spraying in the spring.
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I hope your new year is productive and I look forward to seeing everyone at the KCA Convention in Owensboro.

Water tank added to water harvesting system at the heifer barn.