Well calving is in full swing now and I can look back and contemplate if winter milking was/is worth it. The conclusion I have come to is yes, it is, as on a cash flow basis it’s great to have a milk cheque coming in still. But if I was to look at it from a work/life balance point of view I might say differently; although we did manage to squeeze in a week away on the Gold Coast.
Anyway, this time of year is one of the busiest, but also one of the best. One reason is the school holidays and spending quality family time on farm.
It’s also the time of year we get to see how the matings we selected last spring turned out, and I must say that we have some very nice heifers hitting the ground, as well as some beautiful R2s coming into the shed. Which reminds me, I’ve been pondering our next mating and which bulls we will use, I’ve made the decision to use A2A2 polled Jersey bulls, but I will talk more about this in the next blog. To date, we have 60 cows calved and approximately 28 heifer calves in the shed. This is almost a 50% heifer/bull ratio, which is miles better than the 15% heifers we got last year.
We have some challenging times ahead over the next few months as grass growth has really slowed down, I blame the South Island for sending Jack Frost to visit three days in a row.
So currently we are holding the cows a little tighter than we like. Hopefully the 70 kg/ha of Ammo going on this week will speed up the growth a bit, and Philip Duncan from Weather Watch has got my good weather booked in (his forecasts are the only ones I trust).
Well on that note I better help with getting the kids ready for bed. Happy calving everybody!!
July 21, 2015
Great to see you making the most of the time with kids on farm during the holidays – creating some great memories for them.
August 30, 2015
[…] other thing, I touched on this in my earlier blog, is a change in our mating plans. We are going to use all polled A2A2 Jersey bulls. Yip, I can see […]