Good morning everyone,
Well, we “think” Spring is finally getting closer. The days are not as cold and the grass is starting to grow. Phew…
There has been a lot of rain over the last few days, and we are not unhappy with this. We do need a high water table if the next spring and summer is dry. Also rain means no frosts!
The feral kitties mum now wants to be an inside cat too!
We call her “MumbleBee”. She likes coming in, and lying by the fire. We got her spayed with her kitties, so she can live her life on the farm without adding to the feral population, which is nice. We like the fact she feels comfortable coming in. What’s interesting is that she wants nothing to do with her “children”. She spits and hisses at them.
A “tweak” to our Breeding season
This year we have already had 18 calves born. This coming year’s breeding will not start until 1st December, so there will be no calves born next year until at least 1st September (cows have a 9 month gestation – the same as humans). We do have 5 cows who won’t be ready to breed by 1st December, but will work hard to get them in calf as early possible and each year continue to tighten the breeding season for them. With a 9 month gestation, they have 90 days to recover before rebreeding. In fact, they normally re-cycle in 60 days, so we can catch up the late ones over time. One of my girls was actually pregnant 35 days after giving birth! That is pretty unique though!
This year we want to breed 32 cows (and carry over 2 very special retirees) Last year we bred 43 cows. As soon as all this years calves are weaned, we will reduce the cow numbers back to that 32. Hopefully we can sell the cows we cull, in calf (my preference). If not they will get processed. We also have some black/white face calves, that we might try and sell as weaners, rather than carry them all the way through.
We still have bull semen in our tank from a very special carcass bull and also from a high marbling bull. Where we can we will still AI most of our girls with this semen. We might try to program a lot of the girls to cycle in that first week of December, so we can do a high number of AI breeding, before they go to our bull, Mt Vernon
We have previously been quite focused on high marbling in our breeding. We have finally concluded that the four most important traits (for us) to breed from are:
- docility – a prerequisite to living here at Lake Farm
- carcass size and frame (without being too big)
- growth
- marbling
Although we don’t want them too big (and especially too tall), a really solid frame also means more meat. At the end of the day, that is what we are paid for! We also want “neutral” fat covers. We are not paid for excess fat (in fact sometimes penalised), but too little fat cover and the animal does not finish as well.
The above slightly revised goals are our decision, but I have found it quite interesting that a lot of breeders overseas are also changing their goals -they are looking quite similar to ours.
We still have all the holes where the removed hawthorn hedges were burnt (along with huge piles of fill). They are very deep and we have used them as “junk holes” putting in all the old fencing wire, and posts to burn etc. We plan to get most of these filled back in soon. We will have some excess fill, but there is plenty of hollows to use that up.
We did think that we would wait until all the holes were filled and re-grassed before we did our drone farm map, as the map is photograph quality and we wanted the photo/map to look great. I am a bit slow. It will be easy to photoshop the holes out. So as soon as the farm mapping guy is free we will get him here, now that all the fences are complete.
Just 3 bales of silage left
We are feeding out 3/4 of a bale every day. Lol – the cows love the silage and bellow out when it is gone, despite there being good grass in their break. They are spoilt! But in four days it will be all over, so we really hope that grass keeps growing! We do have some other baleage bought from our neighbour that can be used if necessary. Here’s hoping we won’t need to. Fingers crossed!
Our Facebook page
Our Facebook page was hacked 9 months ago! We have not been able to post for all this time, and Meta is simply useless at recovering the site for us. Our last post was from one of our last pie shipments last December! My personal task is now to see if I can actually get it recovered, so that I can post images and small posts on a daily basis. Once we get it back, we will let everyone know!
Spotlight on
Today we want to “re-spotlight” a special lady, who I admire so much!! This is Bryar:
We bought her a few years ago to use as a recipient cow in our embryo transfer program. But not only does she have the most special personality, ALL her progeny are simply outstanding, and are keepers here. Their growth rates are so much better than their contemporaries, so although we are reducing our Black/White face cows she won’t be one of them.
Interestingly enough, since she has been here ALL her progeny have been females. There has been only one girl who we have culled – all the rest are in the herd. They all have her outstanding docility, and great growth.
That’s all for this week’s post. We would love to get feedback from you, so please feel free to let us know what is of interest, and what you would like to read more of?
Thanks so much!!
Colin and Keryn