Hi all. As usual at this time of year, the emphasis is on setting up for next year. For me that means using grass silage to lengthen the round from 36 to 72 days. The girls are still putting in the effort, but you can tell they are looking forward to a rest. They are […]
2018 started with us flying from Israel to Hong Kong, so we were in the air for the New Year’s celebrations. On 16th December we flew to Israel with our extended family to enjoy a wonderful trip touring Israel, Palestine and Jordan, and then stopping in Hong Kong on the way back to NZ. This […]
Waitangi Day, 2018. Yet another day off! Yay! The long, lazy, hot days of January have been and gone, along with the bliss of social holiday gatherings with food and drink, day trips and holidays with food and drink, unstructured and unplanned days around the pool with food and drink, family gatherings with…… And so […]
At the moment I’m sitting in a motel in Queenstown on holiday. We have been to the Catlins for a memorial dedication to my sister and then visited friends who farm in Southland. The days were hot and sunny, although their grass doesn’t seem to have gone as stalky as ours. Everybody was saying how […]
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 […]
It’s 6.30 am, a quiet, relaxed morning, 24 degrees on a cloudless day, with the promise of the temperature rising to the low 30s. No sound of cows, dogs, milking machines, or magpies, although I do hear the quiet humming of air-con units and the sound of waves lapping onto the shore. Yes, this blog […]
Don’t you just love January?? All the joys and pressures of the Christmas period have passed, New Year celebrations have been and gone, and the month that usually has the least amount of “things to do” plastered all over the calendar has arrived! I guess, at our place anyway, one of the major reasons that […]
I have just finished watching the end of the first stage of this year’s Tour de France. It looks like another three weeks of getting up each morning and watching the computer while the Tour unfolds. I thought that since I was up and it’s too frosty to go out I might as well write […]
The sound of rain falling on the dairy shed roof as I milked this morning was a welcome tonic and one which gave me a much needed boost as mid-summer slowly but steadily approaches along with the prospect of El Nino conditions. To be fair, the weather during the last month or so has been […]
Time flies when you are having fun. And even more so when you are not. Things on farm are still quite hectic. Seems like it takes all day just to get the essentials done. Add in meetings and off farm activities there seems to be very little time left to do the jobs I wanted […]