Sunday morning we had our first live calf on the farm. It came from one of the heifers that we brought home last week. It is a really nice little fresian heifer calf, I think she is going to get spoiled over the next week. I will have Brittany put some pictures up of it. We are currently milking 5 cows now!
Today Steph and I milked all the cows together so she could show me a few things. She showed me how we mark the cows to tell which ones we are taking colostrum from to feed the calves. We also gave a Selenium injection to one of the cows that had a retained placenta that hadn't come out yet after the last few days. The selenium helps her uterus contract so that the placenta will hopefully come out easier.
Another cow we are milking looked like she might be getting milk fever so we gave her an injection of B12 to help her appetite so she eats better to come out of it. We also gave her and oral drench which involved me trying to get a bottle in her mouth and slowly pouring out the contents in her mouth. The drench has a lot of things in it to give her system a boost.
The busy time is just about upon us and everyone at the farm is excited to get underway for the season!
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.
This week I had the privilege of spending Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday at the largest dairy conference in New Zealand. It took place on the campus of Lincoln University and it was great to be back there again after three years. The conference had a great line up of speakers; the Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand, The coach of the New Zealand All Blacks Rugby Team (He is more popular than the Prime Minister!), an entrepreneur and franchisor who was a high powered speaker, and some of the top leaders in the dairy industry, just to name a few. I enjoyed talking to vendors at the trade show to learn about a vast line up of products for the dairy grazing systems. I also got to meet a lot of new people. One young farmer who was from Ireland I got to know quite well along with some very good farm consultants. Overall I can't even begin to count the number I people I met and talked with. Most of the educational sessions were very good as well and the format for the whole conference made it flow very smoothly. I am so glad I attended this event and feel very blessed at having the chance to go.
Yesterday was quite an exciting day! I got the privilege of working a cattle yard for the first time. We had 5 vets out to the runoff block yesterday to teat seal the heifers (160 of them). This involved us getting the whole herd of heifers out of their paddock and a half a kilometer to the cattle yard. Then we drafted out the heifers five at a time to push up a shoot onto a portable stand where the vets did the teat sealing. It involved swinging many gates around and just moving cattle where they didn't want to go. It took us about four hours to finish the herd but it went pretty smoothly after we got our rhythm down.
I also got to watch dogs herd the hefiers out of the paddock which is really neat to see, I wish I would have videoed it.
It was a beautiful day to do the work yesterday, it was sunny and about 60 degrees, with clear skies that revealed snow covered mountains, you can't beat that!
Not anything to earth shattering to report (except for the two earthquakes we had last night). Yesterday I gave my first injection to a cow. The heifer that we have been milking has a Retained Placenta, so she has been a bit sick. I haven't given to many injections during my time on dairies before so Steph walked me through it to give the heifer a shot of Penicillin in the muscle. It went pretty good (the heifer might think differently) and she is starting to perk up a bit now. When we give injections on the farm we use the MRS T rule of thumb; Mark the animal, Record the treatment, Separate out of the mob of cows, and then Treat her. This process helps to protect against a treated cow getting milked into the tank.
The majority of the last two days has been filled with many odd jobs around the farm. Yesterday all four of us filled 4 out of the 5 calf sheds with sawdust and fix up the gates in preparation for calving. Today I picked up a lot of rubbish around the buildings and in the yards, cleaned up the shop area, and scrubbed down equipment in the milking shed. Thats about the extent to what has been happening on the farm this week.
So Saturday I convinced Brittany to come to the run-off farm to take pictures of how we feed the cows in the winter. So here is a bunch of the pictures from that day.
Here is a video that Brittany took of me moving the break-fence up. Enjoy!
I did some more new jobs today and yesterday on the farm. It started out with milking my first cow on the farm since we got here. That's right, out of 800 cows we are milking a grand total of 1 cow. I used a bucket milker to get the job done. It is quick and only requires cleaning in the milker that I used instead of the whole entire milking system.
After that I started putting up a new fence in the center of the farm in an area that we will graze the few bulls we will have on the farm later in the year. I used 3 different types of posts; a Waritar which is a triangular metal post, a standard wood post, and fiberglass rods with an funny looking clip on them. I strung up "spider" wire in all the posts, which is a very thin wire. I think I could still use a little improvement on attaching insulators to the Waritars but other than that I think I did alright.
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