Field Trip::Superstition Farm Tour

This year my goal is to incorporate a lot more field trips into our school year. Since we do school Sunday through Thursday and Rand has Fridays off, Fridays seem like the perfect day for educational trips around the valley. We ended our first week with a trip to a farm in east Mesa. It's a relatively decent sized dairy farm. We got a hay ride tour, food to feed the animals in their "petting zoo" and a sample of their homemade ice cream. We had a blast. The weather wasn't too hot (we went early) and we learned a lot about dairy cows. Mostly they have Holsteins (for milk) and a few Jersey cows for butter. We saw several baby cows that had been born that morning (they had already been moved into the pins with the petting zoo animals) and on the tour we saw a couple that had literally just been born. I didn't know that dairy cows had to have a calf every year or they would stop producing milk, even if you kept milking them. Learn somethin' knew every day! :)

the chickens and rooster were just roaming the place

all the petting zoo animals were rescued (except the baby cows)

Babies! just born a few hours earlier

a jersey baby

this chicken was hilarious. she looked totally disheveled and ran and hopped all around

the farm dog

on the tractor tour

I think they said the cows eat 6 tons of hay a day and each cow drinks a bathtub full of water a day!

Just born!!

Getting up for the first time

the whole place was really clean and the cows seemed pretty happy, even though there was no fresh grass. AZ doesn't have much pasteur land! Each cow gets milked twice a day and gets 4 showers a day! They have 2000 cows. It takes about 24 hours to complete the cycle 2 times.

The number that each cow wears is connected to a computer system. Each farmer has a pocket computer and can punch in that cows number and pull up her entire records. Everything on the cow is in there: when it was born, how many calves it's had, how much milk it has produced, if it's been sick, etc, etc.

High tech!

This is Phyllis