Each week we will go through the alphabet and learn about our top 2-3 most important things on the farm!
LETTER A

1) Bet you can guess this one! ANIMALS!

More specifically Farm Animals! We have over 200 animals of all sizes, colors and personalities at Double Vision Acres! They all serve a very important role at the farm too. Megan’s most important motto is “Every animal has a job & a purpose”. Whether their job is supplying a product like meat, eggs, milk ect, being part of our educational petting zoo, or acting as a guardian and protector they are all very important to us and we love them all the same!! Each animal differs so let’s go over a few of our top animals that you see often!
COWS- Around here you’ll see mainly beef/dairy cross cattle at our petting zoo, and the beef we sell in the store, which is full Angus or Angus/Cross is born and raised on this farm by Farmer Dean. The petting zoo calves are all raised on a bottle and born at a local friends dairy farm. They all have moms (dams) who are some sort of breed of dairy cows like a Holstein or Jersey and they all have dads (sires) who are beef breeds like Angus or Hereford! We like the petting zoo calves to be raised on a bottle because they are much more tame and easy to handle. The beef cattle that are born here are raised by their moms (dams) and tend to be a bit harder to handle because they are only used to being around a large herd of cattle, so humans are a bit strange to them at first!
CHICKENS- You see lots of  laying hen chickens around our farm if you’ve ever visited! Although they are supposed to be free ranging in the fenced in field (for their safety) we also have a lot of escapees! They like to wonder out in front of the store, under your cars and all about the farm foraging on bugs and seeds. We try to keep them in the fence so we can feed them a specific diet, as well as keep them safe from the road. We also raise broiler chickens that supply fresh meat to our farm store. We only raise them in the spring/summer and fall because they don’t do well in winter and we like them to free range on fresh green grass pasture and we can’t get them that in the winter!

2) Next up for letter A is ANTIBIOTICS.

This is a touchy subject but also a VERY important one. We gets lots of questions asking if our meat is antibiotic free? We get lots of questions as to if we use antibiotics on our animals and at our farm. The short answer is YES if we have a sick animal we are going to utilize antibiotics to make them feel better. Let’s dig a bit deeper…. Every antibiotic we use in the livestock industry has a very important LABEL on it. We get most of our veterinary prescription drugs from our vet, but there is a few common broad spectrum antibiotics that we can get from our local farm store. Each label has directions for use, dosages, and to us one of the most important things listed on the label is the meat & milk withhold. That meat and milk withhold is the time frame in which we just wait for an antibiotic to be fully out of the animals system before utilizing them for meat or selling the milk produced by the animal who received the drug. Most withhold periods are no longer than 30 days but a lot are much shorter commonly being 72hours for milk or 8 days for meat. Let’s be honest here the animals who are normally in need of an antibiotic and get sick around the farm are the babies who do not have their immune system built up yet! They sometimes need a little boost from a nasty stomach bug that causes diarrhea, or an antibiotic to clear some pneumonia out of their lungs when the weather switches from cold to warm and their little bodies can’t keep up!
We keep a fully stocked drug cabinet at the farm, as a just in case! It’s stocked with anything from antibiotics, pepto bismol, iodine for the new babies navels, calving chains, stethoscopes, calcium, molasses, thermometers, needles and syringes and so much more! Megan does most of our own vet work around here but we always have a vet on call just in case for more in depth needs like surgeries ect!

3) Parents can take their own lead on this if they’d like their kids to learn BUT I feel this is one of our most important tools at the farm…..Artificial Insemination 

Megan is a certified reproductive technician, or artificial insemination tech for cattle. Some even call me “the bull”…. Which I take as a compliment.
Why do we Artificially Inseminate the cattle around here? The main reason Dean chose to sell his 3 bulls and opt to AI all of his cattle is for safety purposes. Bulls can sense a female and for some reason it seemed very dangerous to have Megan walking through the pen to check birthing cattle and help out because at any point in time a bull can change its attitude and charge or attack. The typical weight range for an Angus bull is no less than 1,800lbs….. I never felt safe and couldn’t do my job the to fullest potential. AI is most commonly used in the dairy industry around our area but slowly beef farms around PA are starting to utilize it for convenience and to better their cattle genetics. AI is a bit more work than just having a bull breed your cows but the outcome of AI has many pros! You get to know breeding dates exactly so you can calculate 283 days and get an exact due date (although rarely do they calve on their exact date), you can choose genetics so we can pick calving ease (smaller calves for an easier calving experience), we can choose a bull that produces fast growing offspring with high grade marbeling and better meat to bone ratio. There is also cons to AI such as more work because you must catch the cows in heat (when they are releasing eggs that need fertilized), and in beef cattle who aren’t as tame you have to have the correct housing to safely lock them and keep them as little stressed as possible. Deans cows used to be much more wild, but now I have been AI ing them for 3 years and they kinda know the drill and routine! They have calmed down a lot!! I also love to mix in some colored genetics, and produce some amazing crosses with AI that have resulted in better growing and tasting beef for the store!
Megan has also utilized AI in her pigs, which was a lot more labor intensive than we thought but we did get some pretty great AI bred litters of piglets the past 2 years!
I cannot AI any other animals at this time but would love to someday learn!!

What did you learn about letter A on the farm??
What is your favorite ANIMAL at Double Vision Acres?
ACTIVITY: Stop into

the store this week to see if the kids can find the WITH HOLD period on some Antibiotic bottles!

Leave me comments, and feedback! Let the kids answer the questions and write Farmer Megan back!
I will pick a winner for a free kids gift from the comments section!

See you back next Monday for Letter B!!!