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Ridgway, IL | Good morning
I’m sure you all know the feeling when the days are getting shorter, the weather is getting worse, and you’re trying to prioritize all the things you need to get done before winter. We finished all harvest activities last Friday, wheat seeding Monday, Then the rain set in. Fall tillage isn’t really done but I guess we will be alright if we don’t get to do anything else till spring. Haven’t got to spread much stockpiled manure.
At the feedlot, we’ve been getting along pretty good. Sorting up cattle, and we’ve started a multiple part project that we plan to work on over the next couple months.
1. Where our first barn sits (e/w), was once a n/s dirt pen that was tied directly to the corral. When we replaced that pen with the barn, it left us without a very good alley to move cattle from the barn to the corral. We had temporarily solved that issue by using some free standing panels. This allowed us to get cattle over to the corral, but now that we’ve divided that barn into halves... we have to move all the cattle out of pen 2 to get the cattle from pen 1 to the corral to work on. Not a big deal when I have some help, but it never fails if you have to doctor a calf on a Sunday it’s a real pain.
2. So we are tying pen 1 into the central drive alley buying pouring a 4’ concrete wall the length of the building and also along the end of pen. We may have to put a stick of guardrail on top too. We get to borrow the forms from my neighbor joe.
3. Additionally, you can see the approx 50x150 area between the barn and corral. The new walls will serve as the southern and eastern perimeter of a new concrete pen that will act as 24hr receiving in good weather as well as a multi purpose holding pen for cattle coming and going from the corral. I hope to mount a hay feeder along the southern wall.
4. We will replace the freestanding panels with about 50’ of new bunk line
We picked up a used set of 4” pocket forms to pour 800sq ft at a time for 350$. Concrete has went up about 15$/yd locally from 2 yrs ago. We have trouble areas around the feedlot that are high traffic areas that just never get dried out, i want to start picking the worst of them to concrete.. We’re trying to retrofit our auxiliary bull float to act as a grooving float. We tried a tining float the last time we were pouring much concrete and just don’t feel like we were getting enough traction. Though we have an empty pen now, we’ve elected to hold off buying new cattle so we can get some progress made on this project.
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Sunday
