It’s been a long time between blogs for a number of reasons – the beginning of the year is a marvellous time of getting back into routines and starting up all the clubs and meetings again, which can be hard after all those lazy days at the beach – always lots of fun! To add […]
Animal cruelty Well, the Sunday TVNZ show was disgusting: the way the media/SAFE have portrayed all of us in our industry as animal abusers. I have a few points to make about this: WE ARE NOT ALL LIKE THIS!! What was shown is 1% of the industry, and as far as I’m concerned they need […]
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 […]
December has arrived, along with all its craziness with end of year things to attend. We are off to a flying start and up for the worst parent awards, where we are in the lead at the moment, by completely missing the violin recital :(. On another note, the boat has been in the water […]
Spring has finally arrived … along with some more rain, wind and sun! Thankfully the growth has kicked in over the last couple of weeks and we can get the spring burst of pasture we have been hanging out for. Another good lift in the GDT last week was also a nice spring boost!! On […]
Seems like just yesterday that I wrote my last blog, I guess that comes with age as I remember my parents saying the same thing. What’s been happening here? We had our first herd test last Thursday and got the results on Friday. I was very pleased that there were no cows in the millionaires’ club. In […]
The new run off Well, Frostie finally got his dream run off for the farm. We have been looking for a support block since we moved back to the North Island in 1999 as Brian loves to be able to have control of all the stock. We have had some success with grazing stock out, but also […]
It’s gypsy weekend, another time of chaos and mayhem for farmers moving onto new ventures, either to other farms or moving on to another stage of life outside farming. We are experiencing a taste of this ourselves this weekend as Bernard moves into a new sharemilking venture, oh so exciting and maybe a bit scary […]
Five months ago we had a friendly call from our local Agritrade rep Shannon Patterson wanting to know if we were interested in taking part in a mineral trial in our young stock, knowing that we should be doing more monitoring and trying to grow our young stock better we decided to give it a […]
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 […]