Spring-Run Farms: A Photo Journey

For today’s post, I wanted to give you a photo tour of the farm. These pictures were taken by a professional photographer by the name of Shaun Cloud, who photographed our farm after we received the 2011 Dairy Farmers of America Distinguished Member award. This award is given to 6 farms each year, and for our small family farm, it was a huge honor.

Our farm sign, located at the end of the drive. Grandma puts a lot of effort into keeping the fence painted and the flowers beautiful.

You can’t really see it from this angle, but the red lines are actually 12-foot-long cement letters that spell out “Spring-Run Farms”. Along with the letters sit a painted cement cow, and (out of the picture) an orange Allis Chalmers pedal tractor, on a bed of white limestone held in by railroad ties. We’ve been told by pilots that they know when to start their descent when they see our sign.

Some of our girls on the pasture. All of our cows are registered Ayrshires, and most are purebred.

Our girls coming back across the drive, headed from the pasture back to the TMR barn. When the cows are on pasture, they have a really amazing internal clock – every day at around 3:45pm they head for the gate, ready for dinner at 4.

Our cows in headlocks, enjoying some fresh hay. The large red piece of equipment on the right is a TMR mixer, which is used twice daily to fix breakfast and dinner.

Cows have a tendency to push out feed as they’re eating, both to get at fresh feed and to annoy us, I think. To make sure the cows get all they want to eat, the TMR is pushed in at least once every feeding, usually by hand – although Grandpa has rigged a riding mower with a small plow on the front to push it in. The only downside is that it’s not the most reliable little machine, and not everyone can start it.

My cousin, Paige, works part-time at the farm milking cows. Before the cows are milked in the evenings, though, the workers bed the cows with either fresh straw or corn stalks. As a side-note, the cow to Paige’s left is Jane, who is the mother of Paige’s graduation present.

Gasoline and diesel fuel tanks, as painted by Grandma. The one on the left is Monty, the son of one of the best cows we’ve ever had, Monet. The cow on the right – well, I don’t know. I think she was gone before I can remember, and besides, it’s a pretty common face pattern. I remember Monty only because he was the first bull I’d ever seen, and he was pretty cool.

The lower-hill calf barn. This is where weanlings are kept for a few months before moving into the alleyway pen. There’s a little pasture that encloses their pen, so the heifer calves can run around and get a little sunlight.

Ah, my domain – the bottle calf barn. I love this picture; it’s my desktop background. The most prominent calf is an Elm, and I like her very much. The calf whose ear is the only thing visible is Mackenzie, and she’s one of my heifers. 

There’s Mackenzie, and you can see more than her ear. She’s a nice little heifer, and friendly to boot. Mom’s petting that little Elm heifer because she’s just so gosh-darn cute.

This is my uncle Tim, our herdsman and milker. I wish I had a better picture of the parlor, but it’s just so small that the photographer couldn’t really get anything but close-ups. Anyhow, that’s what the back foot-and-a-half of a cow looks like, and it does give you an accurate representation of a milker.

And just some pretty shots to finish up:

This is Jane, more commonly known as Janie or Janie-cake. She’s the biggest pet, and everyone loves her. She’s had a lot of nice heifers, all of which look just like her regardless of their sire. One of them was my cousin Paige’s graduation gift, because Paige loves Jane.

Our farm butts up against a nature preserve, part of which is extremely close in proximity to Shreve Lake. I really like this picture. It’s next on my rotation of desktop photos. You can barely see the farm in the distance, but it’s just a neat angle – one that I had never really looked at before.

It was interesting to see the farm through the lens of someone who doesn’t live there. The photographer captured the passion that we have for our job, and I think that’s just incredible.