Good morning everyone,
Well it’s great to have some settled weather here on the farm. We do hope it’s nice at your place, also.
Spring is here!
Whilst it is not yet reflected in an abundance of grass, there is a spring flush happening on the farm, which is so nice to see. Interestingly, I was talking to a farmer up in the hills also near Cambridge. He has not noticed any change.
We will be feeding out daily for a few weeks yet. Whilst it is hard work, we don’t mind, and the cows love it! We will stop as soon as we can, though, as we want to keep as much feed in reserve as possible, in case the “Super El Nino” is really bad. We will also be preserving as much grass as we can, over the spring, also for El Nino protection.
Our Boulders mentioned in last week’s blog:
We had some interesting feedback from some readers about the boulders on our farm. Some suggested that the Maungatautari eruption was too long ago, and the boulders on our farm probably came from the Lake Taupo eruption.
In fact the boulders most definitely came from the Maungatautari eruption. Whilst Taupo debris certainly affected this area significantly, these andesite boulders are from Maungatautari’s old core, where one side of Maungatautari collapsed causing a huge rock slide down to Tirau.
Here is a photo of a split stone I picked up on the farm. This must have been molten at some point. It is certainly so different from the very soft Hinuera stone – which is less than 5ks away. Interesting…
On the farm:
We have a 100 meter farm entrance, lined with 50 year old Copper Beech trees. They really are beautiful, but the leaves are deciduous, and once all the leaves are off the trees, it is a really big job to clean up around the house and stables. They look lovely when first down, but the novelty wears off. Over this last week we have worked hard to rake them all up and do a clean up. The house and stables area looks a LOT better. And we won’t have to do it again for a year!
Our fencers have not come back yet to put the new gates into our cattle yards. I really hope that can be done in the next week. I want to weigh and drench some of the cattle – and put ear/NAIT tags in the young calves ears.
I am really over feeding out silage. It takes close to 2 hours to feed out just one bale. When I see how happy the cattle are when eating it, I really don’t mind, but I do feel knackered once the feedout is completed – so hurry up Spring!!
We are now getting weeds up the ROW to our section, so I will spend the next couple of days spraying it, so the section title looks perfect. We will put the section on the market, once the market improves, so we want everything to look good.
I also want to keep an eye on weeds in the pasture. In Keryn’s horse paddock there is normally a lot of buttercup, and some parts of our farm grow “wild turnip”. I want to spot spray all these weeds really early, before they grow too big, and make the farm look awful. That will be quite a few days of spraying, but if I get it all early, it is a lot easier to manage. We heavily spot sprayed all the Californian thistles last spring/summer. I am really hopeful that it will be all gone this spring. I am sure there will be the odd one, but, hopefully, only the odd one.
Spotlight on:
Today we would like to spotlight one of three young bulls we are retaining (for at least a year).
This guy is WALLACE (not a great photo) – and he is the pick of the bulls. His mother, Phoebe, is such a cool lady, and is very well bred. Wallace’s dad is the American bull “Hart Network” so his breeding is very impressive. He is right up there, genetically, but he also looks pretty perfect to the eye. We might end up selling him, as he really is quite special (and we already have our super bull, Mt Vernon.
That’s all for this week.
As always we love feedback. If you would like to comment in any way we do welcome it!
Colin and Keryn