Finally decided that it’s blog time again.
I’m writing this on the last day of our “between calving and mating” holiday. It’s a welcome reprieve from the pressures of this winter-spring. I don’t need to tell everybody how stressful it was as we all had to deal with it.
Having calved the cows five days earlier and not had any increase in production I decided to go back to our usual date. Also it meant that we could have a decent holiday.
We have managed to plant our first paddock of fodder beet close to the date we wanted. We sprayed the next paddock before we left so will get into cultivation when we get back home.
We have had a few fine days and it’s amazing the difference in the cows, both in their behaviour and production. Hopefully the weather will play ball from now on. Having said that, we have had another weather system come through and give us heaps more rain.
Calving is almost done with only one cow left to calve as we left. All has gone smoothly and pretty much problem free. The new heifers have settled in amazingly well and seem to be producing well. I thought that they might be a bit of a handful, but was pleasantly surprised.
When we get home it will be time to focus on heat detection and getting cows back in calf.
We are still working on our exit from milking cows. We have talked to lots of people who have helped us in our career and it seems that we have quite a few choices, so we need to work through them to reach our final decision. I was tempted to get out at the end of this season but it seems like we need to set a few things up to maximise the return we will get when we decide to sell up.
As I said earlier, we have been on holiday so I’ve had a couple of good fishing trips and we are rested a bit ready to carry on.