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 [...]
It’s been an interesting farming week at Garrendenny in terms of the calves born. At exactly the half way mark of 65 calves, 40 dairy heifer have been born (plus three Hereford cross heifers) so it’s an excellent ratio for us. As dairy farmers, we prefer heifers – they are higher value and it gives us more choice in two years time regarding which ones we want to keep in our own herd (we sell the others to other dairy [...]
Hi, it is Maggie Moo here again and I got big yellow earrings since the last time you saw me.
Coincidentally, it is the year 2014 and my tags have the same number. The reason we have tag numbers is so that we can be identified and traced. If there is ever a problem with a disease (such as Foot and Mouth in England a few years ago), all bovines [...]
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 [...]
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