Good morning, everyone,
Firstly, welcome to all new readers to our blog! We emailed our existing pie customer database to let them know about our blog, and also a new feature to sign up to receive an email which lets readers know when a new blog post as been published. We have had lots of signups – thank you!
Well, it is certainly better weather here after last week’s shocker. Being farmers we still like to see some rain, but not too much!
On the Farm
In the next week or so, we will ship a consignment of cattle to a farm in Taihape. On Saturday we weighed all the in-calf yearling Angus heifers – some bound for Taihape. They have all grown very well, apart from a couple. Today we will get the herd back, and drench the smaller ones, to make sure they have no worm burden.
We still have a few late calving cows not in calf, and I check the herd three times per day to see if any girls are cycling. We picked up two a week or so ago – and AIed them. So far there has been no further activity. We have not put “scratchies” on their tails (which show if they have come on heat). I might need to do this.
We have a plan to re-fence a lot of the farm. The paddocks on one side of the farm are poorly laid out, and we have had to put up with the poor layout. Not any more. We have a very good fencing contractor who has already started. We now have a new race up to the cattle yards, and some post, rail and batten fences already in place. He starts this week to remove and replace a lot more of the existing fencing. It will be 9 wire, with round posts, and include battens. We won’t use high tensile wire – instead No 8 wire. When we eventually fully retire and sell the farm, we want the farm to be suitable as a horse stud (we are in the heart of Waikato’s horse breeding industry). Horse breeders do not like high tensile wire. It can do terrible damage to a horse. No 8 wire is much safer. The farm will be ready for horses, when we ultimately need to stop. Lol – we hope that is not for a long, long time, though.
Spotlight on:
This week we would like to spotlight one of the heifers we scanned on Saturday. She is not scheduled to go to Taihape – she will remain as a breeding female, here. She is already well in calf.
This girl is called TARA, and she has gone for a year without ear tags. We ran out of tags for her year, but we do need to get these for her.
The other feature of Tara is a really high number of warts on her face an neck. The vet tell us that they eventually go. We do hope so! It does not make her very attractive.
BUT – she is growing spectacularly. When we weighed her on Saturday, she weighed in at 568kgs – which is amazing for a young girl. Since birth we has averaged growth on 1.18kgs per day.
Tara is in calf (to our Mt Vernon) and is due to calve on 4th September. Her mother is a registered Angus, and mum’s “estimated breeding values” (EBVs) show really high growth. It seems her growth EBVs are quite accurate!
Well done, Tara! You are pretty special!
That’s all for this week.
Please note we are going to close the “comments” section. We get about 50 spam messages every day (sigh). We would love to hear from you! If you wish to make any comments, please send an email to colinbr@gmail.com
See you next week!
Colin