We have been sticking to the plan to survive the dry weather and this has involved: Extending the grazing round in January (when the turnips started) to get onto a 40ish day round (l.5ha/day). Introducing grass silage to fill the gap of grass DM and going from 30 to 40 day round. Feeding turnips at 4m2/cow/day. The current situation […]
It seems that every year we are having big dry spells through summer, so my thoughts more and more often go to what can we do to mitigate it. Do we grow more summer crops, more maize, or do we look at alternative pasture species? Generally, with summer crops if you have a good summer […]
Well, it’s back to reality this morning, first milking after a two week holiday. Lazing at the beach and fishing in my new kayak. Have returned home to find the pasture growth predictor saying zero growth for the next week. Things are starting to look quite brown and next round will find the cows going […]
A very, very hot January is behind us and now we are already a week into February. A month ago I spoke of having grass galore, and wondering about the best management strategy to overcome this. I soon found the answer….. lots of heat and no rain! What a change a few short weeks can […]
Many things have changed for us over this past year, which has bought about many changes in the way we are running our farm. One of the first major changes was our worker, Rex, got an infection in his leg and sadly on 12th March, after many complications, he passed away. He is very sadly […]
Unfortunately after my little Christmas getaway I came back to a rapidly rising SCC and after stripping the herd and pulling 8 clinical mastitis cows out we still saw little change in the bulk SCC. So we needed a plan. We talked to our local vets (Kamo Vets) and we decided do a machine check, […]
Howdy all, We are now well into January and the cows have settled into once a day milking. We always switch on January 1st. This is supposed to give us more free time but it seems to be taken up doing jobs that I was meant to do before calving. The farm seems to be […]
Christmas time has been and gone and we are now 10 days into January. Happy New Year to you all. It’s certainly been a good month for a number of reasons. A round length of 30 days along with some hot days and a couple of overnight rain events have meant cover has lifted, almost […]
I hope everyone has had a merry Christmas and is about to have an enjoyable New Year! Mating Well, I will take you back a month or two to mating… I think my mating has gone very well this year with a 90+% SR at 21days – with a little intervention. We did a CIDR […]
It’s time to update you all on what’s happening at my place. We’ve just put in the last of our silage from the runoff so hopefully now we will be able to get those jobs done that were meant to be done before calving! Like finishing the fencing that has been pulled out because hedges […]