Good morning everyone,
We hope you have all had a great week. The weather is definitely more settled, but getting colder at nights.
Our two kitties:
Our two feral kitties give us so much pleasure. I can’t believe how loving they are – both little “purring machines”.
One of our readers emailed me about two cats she has, and how special they are for her. Reading that we put ours out at night, she said she couldn’t do that with her two. In fact we don’t have any option. From experience, on a farm, it’s not a pleasant experience to wake up and find half dissected rabbits (or other) bleeding on the carpet. We do love them to bits, though!
Our Facebook Page:
We had an Indian company do all our Facebook advertising when we were selling pies. They were really good. But in December they got “hacked” and this included our Lake Farm Facebook page. Since then, despite their best efforts we have still not recovered the site, and still cannot make any posts to the site. It is very frustrating! I am now dealing directly with META, but so far without success. Dealing with a huge multinational company certainly has it’s issues!
Once it is back we will let you know, and, perhaps post this blog post on Facebook as well.
On the farm:
Despite the cooler nights, the grass is still growing, and we are happy with the feed bank ahead of us. Because we were so preoccupied with closing our pie business before Christmas (and also had sold some land to our neighbour), we did not make any silage last year. We are quite relaxed with the decision, and we are quite happy to buy in silage, if we need to. Most of the cost of silage is in the actual collection cost. There is not a huge price difference between making silage and buying it in. The main reason to make your own is to get rid of the excess grass, and clean up the farm. Our cows did that for us.
We are actually slightly overstocked (even after selling some animals to Taihape). We will need to cull some animals and one of the decisions we have to make is which animals to cull. It’s not a nice decision to make. But as mentioned in previous posts, the main criteria to cull now, is docility. We are really happy keeping animals that are docile and happy to be here. They are almost all like this, though.
With the workload involved in shipping pies, the maintenance on the farm took second place. The cows came first, naturally, but all along the lake front, it slowly grew lots of barberry, and blackberry. Whew… Its a big job cleaning it all up. We are getting there, though!
Spotlight on:
This little dude was born a couple of days ago. He was born to a registered heifer “Up Town Girl”. Each year Angus have an alphabetic letter to signify the year. Our protocol is that all the registered females born should be named with a name starting with the letter for that year. In the “U” year it was hard to find reasonable names, and we thought “Up Town Girl” was cool.
As this calf is a boy (and won’t be registered) we don’t need to follow the letter protocol (although we normally name the calf after the first letter of the mother). But we thought that being a son of Uptown Girl it would be cool to call him Billy Joel! (who wrote and sung that very famous song).
Welcome to Lake Farm, Billy Joel!
That’s all for this week. We will post again next Monday. Have a great week!