This is what is looks like bringing 400 cows home. This day they only went 5 miles, they had already traveled the previous 10 miles on another day. Enjoy! 

Today was such a great day! After lightly snowing on Monday today seemed so much nicer. It ended up being warm even from the very early morning and got up to 65 degrees this afternoon, with sunshine, and a nice light warm breeze. We also are getting settled into our responsibilities and routines for calving now. Today I brought the milking cows in at 7:30 to a beautiful sunrise over the snow-capped mountains. I helped with milking and then moved some calves around. I got to watch Brittany at work with the calves today. It is pretty cool to see her getting right into it on the farm and taking care of those calves. 

We had our big pre-calving meeting with the staff after lunch and went over treating sick cattle, taking care of the effluent, and walking through the typical schedule, and we also were assigned our responsibilities for calving. I am responsible for feeding out the supplements (palm kernel and baleage), minerals, and other mircros that the cows will be getting. I will also have my own small mob of cows to look after on the farm.

After that we brought ten more cows that calved today up to get milked, and separated another 40 cows from the herd that I will be looking after that need special treatment. Then there was shifting break-fences and milking again, and helping Brittany finish feeding the calves. It felt like a full day where we got a lot done. I really enjoyed it!

Yesterday consisted mostly of tagging and doing more vaccinating of the springing heifers that are on the farm. Brittany came out to give a hand and did all the recording for us. Bringing the heifers through the milkshed yard really set things off for that herd to start calving. We went from 2 calves to 8 calves literally overnight. So today we had to draft out 6 fresh heifers (that means they calved) from the rest of the herd along with trying to match up all their calves to each heifer. We went from having  5 cows coming in for milking to 13 cows today. It has definitely made things more exciting around the farm!

It's pretty neat to say I did a cattle drive in New Zealand. Today we took the first herd (the heifers) home from the run-off block. We had a modern day cattle drive for more than 10 miles that we walk the cows down the road. In New Zealand all the roads have fences lining the sides and all the driveways have gates so you can shut them up when moving livestock. We moved 200 cows across the busiest road on the entire South Island, Highway 1. 
    
I felt like a cowboy, only I rode my Yamaha dirt bike instead of a horse. It took about four hours to walk the herd home so it was slow going, which gave me time to look around at the scenery. Over the last four days we have gotten a lot of rain which means that the mountains got dumped on with snow. It was clear today so it was really nice to be able to enjoy the beauty of the mountains with all the fresh snow glistening in the sunshine. 

We have three more herds to bring home over the next month so maybe I can get Brittany to take some pictures of one of our cattle drives. They really are something to see. Just a day in the life of a modern day cowboy.

So our whole one cow that we are milking at the current time got her first milking companion yesterday. She aborted her calf at the run-off block. Our first milker is giving good milk now and has improved in health quite a bit, so I decided to take my first liter of fresh milk to drink home with me yesterday. It is so good! It definitely makes the best hot chocolates ever and makes cereal taste so much better. I can't wait to get more! 

Today we are talking the whole herd of 200 heifers home from the run-off block 15km from the farm so this should provide some good stories and pictures in a later post. 

Back to work this week. It was a nice break having a week off for the conference and some vacationing in Queenstown. This week started out with a workshop put on by Dairy NZ which is a checkoff association like we have in the US. The workshop was called StockSense and was put on to help farm staff get ready for the calving season. The things that were discussed were a lot of the basics like what to look for when a cow is ready to calve and when to help her out, how to move cows and calves around on the farm, and other practical things to do with calving season. Overall it was a great refresher course for me since I haven't helped with calving for four years. I feel a lot more confident and prepared for the very busy time that is fast approaching on the farm. 

On Tuesday this week we did some more "yard" work. This time we were drenching the heifers to protect them from lice and other external parasites. We also gave them an injection for internal parasites. I started out doing the injections and about 100 heifers into it I had gotten myself with the needle twice in the same finger so I switched over to doing the external drench after that, which I was much better at administering, I hate needles! But I learned something new and we had great weather to do it in.