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 [...]
We have sixty calves now and they are divided into a very neat thirty heifers (females) and thirty bulls. Last year we had 40 females and 20 males when we hit 60 but it ended up fairly 50:50 when calving was finished. As a dairy herd, we prefer heifers – partly because we are continually working on improving the breeding of our dairy herd and dairy calves will either go into our herd or will be sold to other dairy [...]
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 [...]
You might remember me telling you about a calf we named Arthur dying some time ago. As he was born from our best cow, we were hopeful that he would be accepted by an AI station. And yes, they would have taken him to try him out. The good news though is they took another one. It will be the autumn before we find out if he will definitely be fathering lots of calves but here’s hoping.
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It was quite an uneventful week in many ways yet how can such an uneventful week still be so busy? The sun has started shining again and apparently it will be nice for the next week. As I collected Brian from the outfarm and brought my dad an icecream as he was rolling, memories from years ago in that field came back to me. The Chapel Field was re-seeded last year and the plan was to check there weren’t [...]
