As I worked on this entry I realized that I'm a few weeks behind on our blog posts, but that's pretty much par for the course around here at the moment. Summer on the farm means long days! These days the sun is usually peeking in my window before 6AM and giving us light to work by until after 9PM. It's great for productivity but not so much for getting enough sleep. Summer keeps us on our toes.
On the horse side of things, I'm doing a lot of ultrasounds to monitor pregnancies on our spring-bred mares. We were blessed to have cooperative mares and excellent conception rates on the big group of mares that we bred early in the season which removes the weight of tracking additional cycles and breeding those girls a second time. We have a handful of girls that, for one reason or another, foal in the middle of summer so we're not yet done with foaling season and I continue to monitor cycles, collect stallions, and try to breed these mares back as quickly as possible to get them foaling earlier in the year. This is our first year offering shipped semen on a stallion (Boone) so we also have days where we collect him to ship the semen off to other breeders for their mares. The foals that were born this spring are growing and developing so we make time to work on foal lessons and also keep track of their requirements for deworming, vaccinations, hoof trimming, etc.
There are quite a lot of farm chores that don't involve direct work with the horses. The biggest summer project is making hay to feed in the coming winter. With our big herd of large horses we find that we often go through around 350 big round bales (each of which weighs around 1,000 lbs!). Making hay is not my favorite project but is very important. We also try to keep up with mowing fields to cut down on weeds and maximize grass growth. In the heat of the summer day I can often be found inside working on my administrative tasks such as chatting with folks who are looking for horses, filling out registration applications for foals, tracking farm income and expenses and more. Dehan works full time (12 hr+ days) in the summer with a residential tree trimming business owned by a friend. He loves using a saw and playing with all the fancy toys that the business owns but it can also be challenging to work a full day in the sun and come home to an endless list of chores on the farm. He has such a great attitude about the dawn to dusk schedule of summer life!
Alongside the farm chores and busy days we have been blessed lately with visits from a lot of family and friends. These are good reminders to appreciate the fun parts of summer even when we never seem to be quite caught up. Soon enough, the days will be shorter and the babies will be off to their new homes and we will be waiting for the cycle to start again. Right now, we spend as much time as we can snuggling baby horses and trying to set everyone up for future success!
