Our Monday 9th February Blog Post

I hope you have all had a great week, and are looking forward to a fabulous new week ahead.

With the better weather, last week, there was a lot more work done on the farm, which we are happy about. But on Saturday we had a day off. Keryn’s brother lives in Pukehina, and asked Keryn for some advice about a home renovation project there.  We had a nice day off the farm giving him our 2 cents worth. Lol we got paid in Crayfish and mussels.

ON THE FARM:

We have only AIed 3 of the 9 females not in calf.  As time is moving on we will forget AI and have now moved our bull, Tristan, back with the herd yesterday.  We will let him stay for two months (all girls should have cycled twice in that time).  If any girls are not pregnant, that will be time up for them!

He was a happy boy with the shift.

We have an “odd-job” man who comes to the farm on a regular basis to do repairs and maintenance that I do not have the skills to do. He replaced some rails in our yards, put in a new gate to allow our cows to get into the scruffy bits on the farm (to keep the growth under control).  We felt a lot happier yesterday after a week of cleaning up.

When calves are young, they are susceptible to tummy issues (clostridial diseases) and should be vaccinated  after 6 weeks of age.  We did not do it late last year (so busy with the closing down of the pie biz etc). Most had passed the critical clostridial period.  We were thinking that we may not need to vaccinate them at all. We decided to do an “AI search” to find out if we could miss giving them their “7-in-one” vaccine.  Lol – AI told us off!  We were told that they MUST have this injection “AT ANY AGE” and definitely have a second injection 6 weeks later.  SO we got all the calves in and gave them their first injection 2 weeks ago.  In 4 weeks we will give them their second one. I would like to weigh them now, but I might as well wait, and weigh them and inject them all at the same time.

SPOTLIGHT ON:

We have the most amazing older “foundation” cow – Jamie. She is a champ, and arrived here as a frozen embryo from Lawson’s Angus in Australia.  She is now 12 and a half years old. This is not seriously old for a cow but she is really struggling, physically, despite the really good grass. She puts so much into her superb calves. Last year we decided that her calf at foot will be her last, and she could retire on the farm – she deserves it!

We bred her to the super USA bull HART NETWORK. We were hoping her last calf would be a girl.  It wasn’t – it was a boy!

This guy is her son – his name is WESTIN.  Wow – he is actually a real champ and we have decided that he will be kept as a bull, and will be our “understudy”  to our bull MT VERNON.  So Jamie’s influence might be far greater than if we had bred a female!

Westin – keep growing like the champ you are.  We have really high hopes for you!

That’s all for this week.