June Dairy Month Being Celebrated With A Special Emphasis Called Honor The Harvest

Jun 03, 2016

With the arrival of June, it's time to celebrate the US Dairy Industry with June Dairy Month. Susan Allen with DairyMAX stopped by to visit with Radio Oklahoma Ag Network Farm Director Ron Hays to talk about the Oklahoma Dairy Industry and a special emphasis called Honor the Harvest.

Allen says that experts predict farmers will have to grow 70% more food by 2050 to feed the growing population. She adds that the dairy community is committed to being a leader in sustainability and has significantly and voluntarily decreased the resources needed to produce each gallon of milk.

Allen says there are three important pillars to Honor the Harvest.

Feed people.

1/3 of the food grown in this country is wasted and winds up in the land fill. The most significant thing that we as the general food eating population can do is to buy what we can eat and eat what we buy, which will reduce food waste.

Feed animals.

Cows can eat things we don't like cotton seed hull and citrus pulp (left over) and instead is that being wasted, they turn that into high quality food like milk, cheese and yogurt to in turn feed the world. (Magical recycling machines)

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Video: Cleaning Sheep Barns & Setting Up Chutes

Indoor sheep farming in winter at pre-lambing time requires that, at Ewetopia Farms, we need to clean out the barns and manure in order to keep the sheep pens clean, dry and fresh for the pregnant ewes to stay healthy while indoors in confinement. In today’s vlog, we put fresh bedding into all of the barns and we remove manure from the first groups of ewes due to lamb so that they are all ready for lambs being born in the next few days. Also, in preparation for lambing, we moved one of the sorting chutes to the Coveralls with the replacement ewe lambs. This allows us to do sorting and vaccines more easily with them while the barnyard is snow covered and hard to move sheep safely around in. Additionally, it frees up space for the second groups of pregnant ewes where the chute was initially.