Things are happening in threes again and while they’re not good, they could have been a lot worse. You can’t open a farm paper or pick up a farming leaflet without seeing something about farm safety lately and while of course, it’s good to get the reminders, the worst reminder of all is when we read about a farm death or even worse, it happens to someone we know.
The problem is that many farmers are under time pressure to get [...]
Friday seems to be a good day to share some “farmologies” with you, (the first five are in this previous post) those things that seem to happen on farms and probably don’t happen anywhere else. I’m reasonably confident though that these farmologies happen on farms all over the world, not just in my tiny corner of Ireland.
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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 [...]
Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, is the reason this Hereford-Friesian calf is called Mary. Yet, by the end of her third day of life I had to admit there was definitely something about Mary. She was a tad infuriating for the first couple of days of her life although, being so young, it’s not like there was any point getting cross with her.
We had Hereford calves last spring for the first time in decades and they all took to food like [...]
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 [...]
