Good morning everyone,
We hope you are all enjoying an extended King’s birthday holiday weekend.
Today signals the first day of winter, and we have certainly noticed the much colder nights. We now start our home fire in the middle of the afternoon, to keep us snug through the evening and overnight.
Our Feral Kitties:
I forgot to mention last week. They were so happy to see us back from Australia. Our animal minder fed them every day, but they missed being inside, and having their cuddles. I don’t think they have stopped purring!
They love being in front of the fire!
Fencing:
We are so close to finishing, but it might be another week. We will post some images as soon as it is complete.
The fences are built for horses (higher than for cattle). They are 9 wires high using “number 8” wire. Here is a photo of me standing next to one of the internal fences. As you can see they are very high.
Whilst we expect to be here for a few more years yet, when we do sell the farm it should be suitable for a horse stud as well as a cattle stud. We want to ensure we cover all bases.
Once all fence lines are completed, we will build quite a few tree bays along side the fences (on either side). We plan to plant lots of weeping willows as shade for the herds, and to beautify the farm.
Splitting some of the herd:
Some of our young bull calves are now 8 months old, and now need to be taken away from the young heifers. We don’t want to wean them from their mums, so we will create a separate herd for these guys and their pregnant mums. We will include our bull, Mt Vernon. We plan to separate them into this herd tomorrow.
Scanning the last 10 cows.
We still need to pregnancy scan some of our in-calf cows, and our scanning lady in coming on Wednesday. When we do the splitting of the bull calves and mums tomorrow, we will also draft out the mums for scanning.
Spotlight on:
Today we need to spotlight another bull calf, born over night.
This little guy is named SNOOPY. He was named by our grandson. His mother is an Angus first calver – and had no issues delivering Snoopy, which is great. The little dude is as healthy as!
We are surprised. The first 5 calves born for 2026 are all bull calves. That is well against the law of averages. We don’t mind, as, in time, steers are worth more than heifers. We will grow him through to finishing, at 18 months of age.
Mum is “Sunshine” , a daughter of one of our special commercial cows – Sunny. Whilst Sunshine is a very good heifer we will still need to sell her early next year. Unfortunately we need to bring our total cattle numbers down, as we no longer have the 6.5 hectares (sold to our neighbour). We will run Sunshine with our bull, Mt Vernon, from 1st December, so she can be sold in-calf.
That’s all for this week.
As always – we love feedback. If you feel like making a comment, that would be great!
Colin and Keryn