Rolling Dog Farm Blog

On my weekly trips into Missoula, I stop at Cenex and load up the truck with equine senior grain and bales of wood shavings for the stalls.  This means I’m in the back of the truck, lifting and pushing and stacking the 50 lb grain bags and the big, bulky bales of shavings as the Cenex guys keeping loading more on the tailgate.  With a canopy on the back of the truck, I’m bent over inside, trying to lift all this stuff and make as much fit as possible.  One of the Cenex guys said to me a couple of weeks ago, "You know, you buy so much you should just have us deliver pallet loads to you at the ranch."

Hmm.

I said, "You deliver out that far?"  (We’re 60 miles from Missoula.)  "Sure do," the Cenex guy said.

So today Cenex came out with a 1 ton pallet of grain — that’s 2,000 lbs, or 40 bags — and 21 bales of wood shavings.  Kathryn, Beth and I unloaded it all from the Cenex trailer and stacked the bags and bales in Lena’s Barn and Beauty’s Barn.  This photo shows one of the stacks of grain in Lena’s Barn, with the wood shavings in the white bags in the background.  (The apparition coming in from the burst of light is Kathryn.)

The supplies delivered today cost $572.73, including a bulk purchase discount.  This should last us just about three weeks.

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If the floor of the barn in the foreground looks damp … well, it is.  We’ve had two days of warm temperatures (hitting 40 degrees) and the snow is starting to melt.  Lena’s Barn was not built with a large enough eave on the north side, and when the snow outside the doors begins melting, it runs into the barn.  Even building the floor up didn’t eliminate the problem entirely … especially with as much snow as we have.  We learned all this the hard way our first winter, which is why all the supplies in the barn aisle are now stacked on pallets. 

The real fun is when it melts during the day and freezes hard at night, leaving the barn doors locked in ice in the morning … as they were today.  We keep crowbars outside the barn to break the ice and free the doors.  Having endured this for several winters with Lena’s Barn, when we built Beauty’s Barn last year, our main requirement was for a 10-foot porch on both ends to keep snow away from the doors!

Yes, some day we’d like to have an extra $1,000+ to spend to build a roof extension on Lena’s Barn, but for now … crowbars will have to do!

(Click on photo for larger image.)