Well tomorrow is my last day of work and our last full day in New Zealand. Tuesday we walked the first group of 200 cows to the wintering farm, 15kms away. That went well. I got to stop traffic this time, on the main highway that we have to cross with the herd.
Today I milked for the last milking of the season. After that we dried off all 300 cows that were left to be dried. We cleaned up the milking shed for the last time this season and got into getting things ready for next season again. Tomorrow, for my last day I get to walk another 200 cows 15kms to the wintering farm. At least I will have a nice drive on my motorbike to admire the mountains and sunshine one last time. I can't believe the season is over and this learning experience is coming to a close. Well I guess that just means a new and exciting chapter of life is about to begin, again! See you all at home!
I realize I haven't updated the blog since Paxton was born, Sorry! Well this season is winding down, extremely fast! On April 13th the 230 heifers that I took care of went on a truck and were brought to a different farm to be looked after by a contract grazer. He will take care of them on his farm until next winter when they come back to Pencarrow where they will be in time for calving.
We have been doing a lot of maintenance jobs on the farm for the past two months, trying to get things ready for the next season. We have slowly gone from milking 700 cows in April to 500 this past Friday. This was done by culling some cows (sending them to the slaughter house), and drying off cows that were not pregnant that other farmers bought from us, and by drying off the cows that we wanted to keep but that were skinner than the rest of the herd. So far when we dried off cows we have done them in batches of 20 to 50 cows at a time.
When we hit the 500 cow mark on Friday we put all the cows into one herd and started milking only once a day! The day seems so much easier when we only milk once a day and we get a lot more done around the farm!
We don't have hardly any grass left on the farm so it looks like we have under one week left before all the cows are dried off and we are done milking. In fact, tomorrow might be the last time I milk cows in New Zealand! Only about half the cow's diet is grass right now, the rest of it is made up of corn silage and fodderbeet (which Brittany posted pictures of in the last update).
On the 1st of May all the heifers that will calve this spring came back to the farm. We put them in the fodderbeet paddock and they are eating that and hay. At the end of this week they will have finished the fodderbeet so we will be taking them on a 15km walk down the road to the wintering farm which is where I first wrote about when we got here.
I can't believe I only have 7 days of work left in New Zealand. This season has gone by very quickly, but I have learned so much about grazing-farming, farm business, cows, decision making, and so much more. I hope that in God's plan for our future I will have the opportunity to use the things I have learned here.  View of Mt. Hutt from the milk shed  The last cows that are being milked.
Paul hasn't updated in FOREVER--so here are a couple pictures of some cows eating fodder beat behind our house--just to let you know that the cows are still alive--and to keep you entertained while we think of something to update on! :)
curious jersey
yum
I know it has been exactly a month since I have written last, but it has really flown by. We have been catching up on all the maintenance work that wasn't being done during the month that we had only two people running the farm everyday. A lot of fencing of random broken wires, fixing irrigation, cleaning up around the farm, and really keeping a close eye on the pastures. I have also been busy doing heifer rearing work and keeping up on what the heifers destroy on the farm across the road. They are really growing and looking good right now, especially since we have drenched them for worms again. We also vaccinated for BVD and Lepto which are diseases common in cattle in NZ.
The big news from the last month occurred on Friday. We had a group of 40 Young Farm Leaders Course participants from Northwest Michigan for a farm tour. It went really well and they just loved it. Andy, Steph, and I talked about the dairy industry, the farm, how pasture farming works, we showed them the irrigation systems, and took the tour bus all around the farm through the paddocks and everything. It was quite fun to be able to show other Americans what pasture dairy farming is like, and to also show off the farm a little. The group asked a lot of good questions and were interactive which made it really easy to speak too. After the tour they took Brittany and I out to lunch at the Speight's Alehouse. I never turn down free food, especially here where it is so expensive!
Now we are just waiting on the baby to come. Everyone on the farm is guessing when it will be born, so far Russ is wrong. He thought it would be born this weekend so he wouldn't be able to have his weekend off work. Only two more weeks until our next visitor comes! And this time hopefully we will be able to travel for a week! Here is a picture of me talking to the group about milking efficiency and how the milking shed works. Below is definitely something we don't see everyday. It was neat to see the farm from the bus, it looks different from there for some reason.
Well the end of 2011 is already past and a new year is already 4 days old. The last two weeks of the year We only had two people working each day on account of everyone taking holidays. It still amazes me that two people and one tractor can operate an 800 cow dairy farm this time of year! I have one more day of my 8 day vacation left before I return back to work.
I had a hard time with the calves right before Christmas. We had a B1 deficiency problem that we couldn't get rid of. We tried lots of different things and we weren't quite sure which one finally worked, but we ended up loosing a total of five calves from it. Besides that they have been growing very well and we have be regularly drenching and vaccinating them.
The last day before I went on vacation I had a performance review. Steph said I beat everyone else on the farm in always being positive, and that I am always eager and hungry to learn. We talked a little about improving my weakness in animal health, and also that we are going to mainly focus on my continuing to gain a better understanding of the pasture management and system over the next five months. I am happy about her and Andy's commitment to help me learn and understand these key aspects I have come to New Zealand to learn. I know I still have a long way to go to fully understand it but I know when the season is through the knowledge that I gained will be immense.
I am really excited for this coming year and what it has to offer. I know the first half will be filled with much more learning and experiences that will stretch myself. And after the season is over we will see what plans the Lord has in-store for us next! Also becoming a parent will be pretty great to! I hope everyone reading this does something this year they have always dreamed of during, I hope you take a risk, make some mistakes, and grow.
So the month of December started out with a week of very hot and dry weather. It turned the day Brittany came back and has been unusually cool and wet for what is normally the driest month of the year in Canterbury. The rain has been helping us out on the farm since we fell behind on irrigation during the week of hot weather. We were really tight on grass as were all farms in the area. We ended up feeding palm kernel to supplement the pasture, only a few pounds per cow and only for about 10 days. The amount of grass has risen a lot in the last week and we are hopefully out of what could have been a very bad spot feed wise.
Artificial mating finished up the day that Brittany came home so everyone has been getting more much needed sleep. We have been spending most of the day keeping the irrigation going. I was trained on how to run the K-Line irrigation, the roto-rainer irrigator, and how to setup and properly irrigate using the border-dyke flood irrigation. The flood irrigation is what I have on my area that I keep up where the heifer calves are. So far it went well.
I have also been busy, vaccinating, drenching, and weighing the heifer calves as well as keeping them properly fed. Everyone is saying that they are looking great so I guess that means things are going well. I am enjoying having more responsibility and decision making for the pasture management of that area of the farm. Andy (the farm owner) spent some time with me last weekend giving me pointers on pasture management for the calves and agreed to spend some time with me once every other week to go over the decisions and ideas I have, and help me in areas I am still struggling.
This past week I had two heifer calves go down, so we called the vet out and we found out they had B1 deficiency. She said it was to the variation in weather we have been having along with the fast growth that the calves are experiencing. They are both still alive right now, I have been trying to nurse them back to health, I am really hoping not to loose any calves that Brittany worked so hard to raise earlier.
I am looking forward to the 8 days I have off for New Years, it will be a good break before the baby comes and we plan on spending some time traveling too. It should be fun. I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas!
I am sure everyone is just dying to know what I have been up to while Brittany has been back in the US. Well I have been quit busy, taking on some new responsibilities and ending some others. The herd that I was running got put back into the main herd as mating is soon to come to an end. Because I no longer have a herd I was put in charge of all the heifers that we calved this spring. So now I have 250 heifers to take care of and a 75 acre farm across the road where we are raising them. I am going to be responsible to keep the heifers fed so they hit their growth targets, and vaccinated along with a few other animal health requirements. I will be doing the feed planning and making sure that silage is cut at the right time to keep the quality of the grass as high as possible. I am really excited for this opportunity since it will give me the experience of doing the decision making and grass management while still having our farm manager to help me out when I need it along the way.
I have also slowly begun learning how to operate our different types of irrigation on the farm. This has been pretty slow since we have been blessed with timely rains and cooler than normal weather, both of which is making the grass growth higher than normal for this time of year.
I am very excited for my wonderful wife to come back again. Tarzan has been keeping me company, but he doesn't come close to Brittany. I know she has really enjoyed going back home for the month though. I will try to keep everyone updated on how my new responsibilities are going in the future. God Bless, Paul.
Last week Wednesday was the first day we irrigated on the farm. We started up one of the irrigators called a roto-rainer. It is basically a big lawn sprinkler that waters an area 300 feet wide and travels up to 1900 feet in a run. This weekend while I was off they also started up the K-Line irrigation which is made up of a sprinkler head in a pod, attached to a long water line. It is moved around with the quad bike and attached to water outlets at the ends of the paddocks. We have a total of 7 different types of irrigation on our farm. We will be working on getting them all up and running this week as things are drying out quickly with warm sunny weather.
Here is a picture of the roto-rainer in action next to our house.
Also we ended up getting almost 500 bales (3' x 4' x 6') of silage off the farm and where we winter the cows. Below is a picture of one of the ways we store the bales so they don't go bad. It is called a bale stack and these stacks are two bales high, five bales wide, and 15 bales long. It saves a lot of many on plastic doing it this way versus individually wrapping the bales in plastic.
It has been a a while since I have posted what is going on, sorry! Since getting back from our holiday away things have gotten busy on the farm once again. Mating season started this past Tuesday. This means that we will be pulling out cows from the herd every morning that will be getting Artificially Inseminated for the next five weeks (six total). One person sits in the milk shed in the morning during milking and checks to see which cows are in heat that day. It is very important to catch when they are in heat because if we miss it that means next season they will calve later and won't be milked as long as they could have been, hence lost income.
I am in charge of my own herd on the farm right now. This means that I make sure they are fed right, and that I decide which paddocks they are going to eat. I calculate how much area they get for the day and night so they get fed twice a day. I do this by knowing how much grass they need to produce the milk they should be producing per cow and then measuring how much grass is available for them to eat in the paddock.
We have had really good weather for growing grass lately and this has given us excess grass on the farm. In order to use the grass up we cut some of it for hay this week, along with some other land that we use across the road from the farm. In all we cut about 55 acres of hay on the farm and 240 acres off the farm. This hay is what will be used for feeding in the fall, winter, and early spring. We also have killed off about 60 acres of paddocks (in grass) on the farm too. These paddocks were killed off because they were old and needed to be replanted. They should be back in production sometime in December.
We have also been in the process of weaning all the heifer calves off milk and onto grass. Brittany did a great job rearing them so they are transitioning very well at very good weights. This has been going on over the last two weeks and the last ones should be weaned by the end of this week.
As you can see a lot has been going on, but it is a great time of year to learn about. The weather is getting nicer and the daylight last much longer!
 Paul is back at work now after our vacation and "Mating Season" has officially begun. Paul will have to go over more of the details of what they do daily during this season. As you may have seen in our other posts, Calving is now done and most of the calves on the farm are already weaned!!!! Crazy how fast they can go from straight milk to only grass. Well, they get pellets and straw too, but still It's pretty neat.
Because we have been having some nice weather it's fun to take walks around the farm with my little sheepies in tow. Last walk, I took my camera with me so I could post some pictures of what Spring is starting to look like around here and what the Dairy Shed looks like. Finally leaves are on the trees, ducks are running around with all the millions (seriously) of ducklings in an unbreakable line behind them and the weather is getting warmer, it's really fun. Stay tuned for an update from Paul soon about the new season and his new responsibilities on the farm!
 The actually follow me pretty well, however they get distracted when they see tall grass.  This is the "main" road through the farm  The Dairy Shed, where all the milking happens!  Inside the shed  Russ just milking away!!  Just because I'm sure you were all wondering what the milkers look like :)  some of my beautiful Charolais-Jersey Calves :) The one on the left is Goldilocks  Another Charolais...ain't he a beauty?
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