Our Monday 9th March Blog Post

Posted on | by Colin Brown
Good morning everyone,
We hope you all had a great week – the weather is certainly more settled.
We had a fabulous time in the South Island, but we were also very happy to get home.  We missed our animals, and our little kitties!
Our two kitties (Ditsy and Sparky) had food left out for them every day, but hid under the house,  away from Peter, who looked after all our animals.  In their own way, they are still quite feral. They were overjoyed, though to see us again, and still haven’t stopped purring. Whilst we keep them out at night, they definitely want to be inside cats. They demand to sit on our knees, and are just so happy!
On the farm:
We had our Angus animals in two herds, but the day before we were going away one of the gates accidentally opened and we ended up as one big herd (apart from our two bulls, Tristan and Mt Vernon, who are by themselves).  One herd is easier to manage compared to two herds, but a nightmare when we have to yard them all.  Our yards are simply not big enough to handle one really large herd. We  have two current projects, which will require yarding:
  1. We have 9 animals to go to Taihape, and there is some urgency to draft them out
  2. We have the two animals we hand raised (Woody and Wanda) who need their second 7-in-one vaccination.

We will work out something! Hopefully we can draft them out when they are in the laneway in the next few days.

We weighed the young ones just before we went away.  I think we mentioned in our last post we were  hoping that they would be put on over 1kg per day, from birth. I am delighted to say the average was 1.33kgs/day. The two hand raised ones (Woody and Wanda) were even close to that 1kg/day. Woody was.93kg and Wanda .89kg.   Our two super young bulls (off to Taihape) got very close to 2kgs/day.

Hopefully, our fencing contractors will be back this week – and we are really keen to get the new paddocks working, with some special tree bays in each fence line.  We will plant the biggest Willows we can find, to give the animals lots of shade, plus something to nibble on.

Spotlight on:
Whilst we were away, our old herd matriarch, Keryn, had a wee boy calf.  She was not due to calve until the 9th of March, but she was 6 days early.  I was surprised, as I checked her before we went away, and her udder showed no signs of “bagging up”. As this might be Keryn’s last calf, we were hoping it was a girl but more importantly, we hoped she calved easily, with no issues.  She did that!

We have named this little guy KENNY, and he is our spotlight animal for this week.  He is a cool little dude.  Welcome to Lake Farm, Kenny! We hope you have a wonderful life here!

That’s all for this week.  We do hope that are enjoying the blog posts.  We welcome any comments:  colinbr@gmail.com.

Cheers