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 [...]
The calving season is progressing well and is keeping me busy. I started this post three weeks ago and am only getting back to it now.
The calving season started, as usual, with one cow calving a few days earlier than predicted but he wasn’t on his own for long. As the calving house filled up with more cows, it never ceases to surprise me how much cows will fight when re-introduced to each other. We had them housed in [...]
It has come to the end of the calving season. While we stocked up at the beginning of the year with essentials such as stomach tubes, calf bottles, long gloves, iodine, milk replacer, tags and every other essential for the calves not to mention the essentials for the humans such as bars and bars of chocolate, I still have quite a long list of [...]
I suppose all calves are special but when you have 135 of them being born in a relatively short time, it’s not really possible to have a soft spot for all of them. There are some factors though that make a calf stand out. We tend to name a few partly because it’s handy to be able to say ‘check number 2305, he’s a bit off colour, he’s in Bruce’s pen’ rather than having to say ‘check 2305, he’s in [...]
Cows aren’t natural ballerinas or gymnasts. You probably knew that already. They can run fairly quickly if they want to but aren’t that dexterous. That creates problems if a cow decides to go for a dance or inadvertently slips and falls. If they fall, they are usually fine, just like a child gets up and walks on, they do the same. However, the odd one will ‘do the splits’ and go down. If they go down and can’t get up [...]
