Christmas season in Moscow

Hi Everyone!

We are spending a few days in Moscow seeing the sights and visiting friends before returning to the farm.

Here are some photos we took in Red Square today.

In the background you can see the Kremlin, St. Basil's Cathedral, Lenin's tomb, and the gloomy sky!

On the road again...

Hello everyone!

We are heading back to Russia today! It may be a few weeks until we get settled before we are able to post another blog entry. Have a great Christmas!

Kevin & Jennifer

While here in the US, we got a chance to visit Jennifer's brother Kent and sister-in-law Beccy at their home in North Port, Florida. The weather was beautiful the entire week we were there. We had such a great time so we decided to plan another visit! We are returning to Florida on Saturday, Oct. 25th for another week! We will be staying in a beach condo on Siesta Key. Jennifer's mom and Kevin's sister Julie and brother-in-law Jeff will be joining us on this trip. We are looking forward to a great time!

Our return to Russia has been delayed for a couple more weeks. We are waiting on paperwork to arrive from Russia so we can obtain our official "work visas" before returning. As far as we can tell at this point, we will be in the US until mid-November. We are looking forward to returning to Russia, but in the meantime, we are enjoying our time in the US!

September 20, 2008

We are doing well and are getting adjusted to life here. The weather was very warm in the 90’s a few weeks ago, but now it is in the 50-60’s and raining a lot. We are guessing that winter isn’t far away!

We are finally moved in to our apartment after a month of “tomorrows”. It is small, but we expected that. They have done a nice job remodeling it. We have a new bathroom, floors, doors, heaters, walls and paint. The colors they chose are pastel green, orange, and purple. So, it reminds us of Easter! It will suit us fine as we don’t expect to be able to spend much time here after the cows arrive.

On the weekends there is a large open market in town. We go there on Saturday mornings and buy all of our fruit and vegetables. We bought several bags of vegetables for $4. A lot of the vegetables come from local gardens and the old ladies wait to sell you their produce. The market is quite large and has everything you can imagine from cloths to bikes to TV’s. Most of the stuff is from China; so we have our own little Wal-Mart! We of course have a small grocery store and many convenience stores. The very large grocery stores are an hour away in Belgorod.

We believe we are the first Americans to step foot in this town. At least you would think so by the reactions we get! Everybody is very nice and patient with our poor Russian language skills! We are learning new words every day but are very far from carrying on a conversation! Luckily we have a very good interpreter at the farm. But we are on our own in the evenings and weekends.

We have finished chopping corn silage. It was a painfully slow process considering we have three choppers and 16 semi-trucks. The problem is the distance we have to haul and getting people to work more than eight hours per day. But I am pleased with the quality.

We are finishing storing 2500 tons of barley and wheat in Ag-Bags. This has gone very well. We will start harvesting high moisture corn soon. We have 2000 acres to combine. Hopefully the weather cooperates. Sugar beet harvest is in full swing. I have never seen so many beets! At home 40 acres of beets is a lot. Here there are 500 acre fields of sugar beets. There is an endless parade of trucks hauling to the plant. The sunflowers have all been sprayed by a plane to make them dry quicker. They are now all brown and I would guess that they are close to harvest.

The first ship load of 1100 cows is still delayed. With this being the first cows to come to Russia from the U.S. everybody is being extra cautious. They are now in the middle of a second 30 day quarantine in Oklahoma. The last date we heard was an arrival of October 28. The second ship load of 1500 cows will be selected in the next few weeks and then go through their quarantine process. At this point we are hoping that they get delayed too so that we don’t have them all arrive at once.

With no cows to manage, we have decided to make a quick trip back to Michigan while we have time. We will fly home from Moscow on Friday and will be in the U.S. until mid-October. We plan to go to Wisconsin for the World Dairy Expo, we have a meeting in Nebraska and then we may head for Oklahoma to check on the cows. We will know more definite plans in the next week or two.

Hope to see you all soon!

August 23, 2008

Hi everybody,
Just wanted to drop a short note to let you know that we are still alive and well!
We have been here for two weeks and are starting to get adjusted.
We have not had a chance to get everybody's email into our address book, so if you see anybody not listed here; please let them know we are ok.
We do not have internet at the farm yet, so we have found internet at the local library and they are nice enough to let us use it. If you email back I can receive it on my phone and send short messages back. We will probably have time to make it to the library on weekends only.
We are still living in a local hotel. Our apartment should be ready soon. They are remodeling the bathroom. Everytime we ask about when we will move we are told "tomorrow". This has become a running joke with us and the employees at the farm and we now have learned the Russian word for tomorrow. Everything will happen tomorrow.
The cows have been delayed. We are now told they will leave the U.S. on the 28th. It will take them three weeks to get here and then a truck ride to the farm. This delay is not a bad thing for us. It will give us time to get settled and learn more about the new systems at the farm. They are getting us all of the systems manuals in english. This should be very helpful because we are finding that we already know more about these systems than they do. Which is a little unsettling!
We have started chopping corn silage and the plan is to harvest 15,000 tons. That's a lot of corn! We also learned something interesting about the cows that are coming on the ship. For those of you without a farm background, let me explain real quick. Normally cows have a 50/50 chance of having a female or male calf. These heifers are all bred to "sexed semen". Which means that 80-85% of them will have female calves. And ALL of the females will be kept and raised on the farm! Jennifer has figured it out and in February we will have a total of 734 calves drinking milk! Well, at least its not 800!
Other than that we really are having a lot of fun so far. Our interpreters are good and the staff here is really friendly. (All 800 of them!) That is a joke, but it is crazy the jobs they create for the simplest things!
When we get in our apartment and get internet we will send photos and will get our blog started.
Miss you all!
Kevin and Jennifer

Countdown to departure

Welcome to our Russian adventure blog! The countdown to departure has begun. We just cancelled our flight for July 31st due to a mistake on Jennifer's visa paperwork and have set our sights on a new departure date, around August 6th.