About 20 minutes south of my home is a 5,000-head dairy ranch owned and operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Today several of us went down this morning to volunteer a morning’s work, as members from local congregations do on a regular basis throughout the year.

I had never been to this particular outfit; our task for the day involved covering up a mountain of silage, and cleaning up excess tires on other mountains. Here are a few photos of the event.

7:45 AM: Heading off to work. More joined us at the work site, and some folks brought their kids along, who had a great time and also contributed to the best of their ability.

Sunrise over Elberta AG

Pulling plastic over the silage. This was a fresh mountain of corn – it had just rained, the silage was wet, and had begun to ferment; the smell was very pleasant.

Looking East over other mountains of silage – some corn, some chopped cornstalks, others unknown.

Some of the hills had too many tires on them; they only need two rows of casings along the edges. Our second task for the day involved pulling off the extras, stacking them up in the aisles, and getting them into large front-loaders which took them away for storage.

Heavy work; most of the tires were full of water. Another detail headed over to a field that was scattered with tires over about an acre, and worked to get them all piled up into a central location.

At around 10:00 they brought us chocolate and cookies-n-cream milk from BYU’s creamery, which was a nice pick-me-up, and one family had brought doughnuts for the crew. Welcomed! I was about out of energy.

We did good work today – but I can’t remember having been quite so exhausted in a long time. I’m not as young as I was 40 years ago…

The Old Wolf has spoken.