Good morning everyone,
We hope you have all had a great weekend. The weather is pretty mixed around the country, and its been wet here, but not too bad. Today looks like a nice spring day, but with a cloud base.
Our new vehicle:
We picked up our new car on Friday. It is a BYD Atto 3 – the new EVO version, with rear wheel drive and much larger battery. It’s going to take us a bit of time to get used to all the “tech” in the vehicle. We are so impressed with its very solid and luxurious feel. I read that BYD employs almost 1 million people around the world. Wow!!
Our Solar array:
With the above in mind, its nice to generate the power to run the vehicle. We are still waiting for the fast charger to be installed in our garage. Meantime we plugged the vehicle into one of our standard plugs, and although very slow, the vehicle was topped up again. Its cool to think we will rarely have to fill up with petrol (farm vehicles excepted)- especially in this very volatile world!
We have an “app” which shows the amount of solar coming in; what we have used; and what we have exported back to the grid. We don’t know how accurate it is, but its so interesting so see how much the weather affects incoming solar. But with the longer days the average daily inwards solar keeps increasing
On the farm:
We are still overstocked, but I am hopeful that we have sold our rising one heifers and steers. This will help immensely. We only want to breed 30-32 cows this coming season. This year we will calve out 39 calves – too many). This revised goal is important as “Super El Nino” is coming!
We do have quite a few cows to go, once their calves can be weaned. Most of our Black/White face cows will run with our Bull, Mt Vernon, from 1st October. We think we can sell them in calf – rather than send them to the works. Fingers crossed!
We put an elastic neck tag (with a number) around the neck of our new born calves, so we know which is which, and can tag them later with the correct NAIT and number tags. Yesterday we noticed one of the calves had “slipped” the neck tag, and being elastic it actually stuck in her mouth. The poor girl! Its not possible to catch them in the paddock, so we have to shift the entire herd into one of the laneways, so we could then draft her up to the yards, to remove the tag. She was very happy afterwards!
Our Willows are starting to grow:
Our newly planted wispy Willows are now showing signs of Spring growth – yahoo!
Questions on our breeding program:
We had a query from one of our readers wanting to understand a bit more about our breeding goals. Specifically, they were interested to know if we looked at the “meat yield” from the carcass.
New Zealand meat processors don’t actually pay for yield (they should), but they do report the fat covers over the carcass – and penalise animals with too much fat (or too little cover). As we always sold the meat from our finished animals, it was important to us to to provide the “tastiest” meat – and British breeds (Angus, Hereford, Shorthorn) have higher fat covers than European animals (which do grow faster because they have less fat). A better fat mix does add to the flavour (especially marbling – “intermuscular fat”). Of the three British breeds, we chose Angus because of the larger genetic pool – and also their marbling is finer that the other two.
What we specifically looked for was carving ease, growth and marbling. But now we also add “carcass weight”. We want to breed a heavier animal, if we can. Of course we also look at the “feet EBV” for clawed toes and bad angle. And finally we do look at EBVs for fat cover – we prefer an EBV which is not too negative.
What we have concluded is that we can’t treat the animals “estimated breeding values” as gospel. We have found that the EBVs on some of our animals do not match their actual performance. One classic example is the lady we are spotlighting. We also have her sister, and the EBVs say that her sister has the better genetics and will grow bigger and faster. This is 100% wrong (even after DNA genetic evaluation). This can be frustrating!
Spotlight on:
Today we would like to spotlight a Mum and baby pair.
This is Sherry, with her little boy, Simeon.
Simeon was born late on Friday night and that night there was quite torrential rainfall. When I shifted the girls on Saturday morning I found him lying stuck in some mud. I got filthy picking him up and carrying him to my ATV and then taking him back Mum. He could not stand up, and when I got him on his feet and held him, his back end was very unstable. We now have Sherry and Simeon both in the small paddock beside the house, so we can keep an eye on them. We have seen him drink from Sherry, which is essential. But he is not out of the woods yet. Sherry is one of our very special girls, and she lost her calf last year. I am desperate for her not to go two years without a live calf. I “think” we are going to get there, but only just!
That’s all for this Monday! We hope you all have a great week ahead.
As usual – we would LOVE to get feedback from you! Maintaining a blog is very lonely!