Have you heard about the cap reforms and wondered what it is all about? As you might have seen on last night’s news, 5,000 farmers travelled to Cork to protest outside Coveney’s office yesterday. We didn’t go – Brian because he had to milk etc, even on a Sunday, his ‘essential work’ takes 5 hours in the morning and up to 4 hours in the evening and that’s with me feeding the calves which still takes me 45-70 min per [...]
It’s been a busy month, we’re up to 120 calves now with 25 cows left to calve. To say the compact calving worked well this year is an understatement! ?Having said that, most of the allnighters and long mornings and evenings teaching newborns how to drink milk are over, feeding them now is pretty quick. ?More on that in the next blog post!
95 calves in 23 days with 50 more to go. 2 losses (one was the c-section) but where there’s life, there’s a chance of death death! We’ve had 5 sets of twins, one set of bulls, two sets of heifer/bull, ?two sets of heifers (double bonus as a heifer born with a twin bull will almost certainly be infertile due to the male hormones in the womb – we did have one 4 years ago that was seen bulling and [...]
What a week! ?I had flu last week, not man flu, not woman flu but real flu that make me feel that dying might not be far off! ?6 years ago Brian and I had what we thought was flu and we got antibiotics for chest infections at the time. We felt lousy but Brian was able to carry on with the calving and training in the heifers and I was able to sit with a toddler on my knee [...]
Calving was supposed to kick off tomorrow but as can happen, some cows calved early with 4 being born last Wednesday. 2 are the tiniest little heifer and bull – not much bigger than lambs and have been named Paddy and Mary! We’re up to 8 calves now and I’m sure the next fortnight will be pretty busy. The photos I’ve taken so far aren’t great so will get some up this week.
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