Sam, our almost 14 year old collie, died last Tuesday, 1st June.
We got Sam from a neighbour and he has been the last surviving dog from the litter for a couple of years, two of his siblings went blind but he has always been in the best of health. He’s only ever had three trips to the vet: for the snip, for a suspected concussion when kicked by a bullock, and for an injury to his neck (the bucket of [...]
Back in 2019, I wrote about our experiences with calves experiencing severe bloat and nearly dying as a result of contaminated milk powder. It ended up being a very long post, but because I’ve spoken to so many other farmers about it, as well as vets, the Dept of Ag and the DVO, I decided to write an update. I intended writing it last year but with doing a new milking parlour, I never got the time. As [...]
Taylor’s Field is quite unassuming: an almost perfect rectangle, fairly flat, no large humps and bumps to make it interesting. It has the advantage of good road frontage. No signs remain of the stone cottage that was there just over a century ago, the stones used by my great-grandfather for some project or other. At one end is a small copse of trees where I used to play. The trees created a perfect leafy glade where I could pretend I [...]
It has been a busy spring between calving, the building of a new milking parlour complete with rebuilt collecting yard and other ancillary expensive essentials, and now of course, we have coronavirus to think about. But this post is going to be about another C – a cow called Claudia.
Without wanting to sound too morose and, dare I say it, a ‘stereotypically grumpy farmer’, it has been a tough year for farmers this year. Between the late, very wet, very cold spring which meant winter extended into May, and then a drought during the summer, it’s been a year that involved a lot of extra work as we were still doing winter work for weeks during the heatwave. Without even thinking about the bank balance, a lot of farmers [...]
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