Working for a living

We have been working for 4 weeks now.  Everything is going well.  The calves have been doing well and we are finding the work not too tough.  At the moment we are feeding around 220 calves morning and afternoon.  The target number for replacements is 200, but we also have to train all the bobbies to drink off the feeders as well.  There is around 1200 cows to calve and we are just over 1/2 way.  At the moment we manage to do all the feeding,tagging ,cleaning and other miscellaneous jobs in about 7 hours.

                     Happy in her work.

 The weather has been a bit challenging at times with  one weekend the whole farm was covered in a good layer of snow and good solid snow showers coming through as we were working.  There has also been a good number of really hard frosts.  Where we do all the cleaning over at the shed as you wash down the ice is forming all over the concrete and it becomes difficult to stay on your feet.
In the weekends James and Grace come up and give us a hand.
  Generally things are going well on the farm.  Rod bought 2 staff members with him from Oamaru.  Pila who has worked with Rod for a number of years and Katy from the farm at Duntroon.  There are 2 other full time staff as well.
  Rod has very good systems in place and everything works like clockwork with the minimum of stress.  It is all very different to when I was dairy farming,not only with the larger scale of these farms but all the new technology that is considered normal nowadays.  For example we no longer have to tag calves in the paddock to identify who the mother is and what the breeding history of that animal is.  All you have to do now is take a very small sample of each calfs ear using a specific gun and send it away and the DNA is recorded and proof is confirmed of the family tree of each animal.  The vets come in now and jab the calves.  They all immediately go to sleep and while they sleep they are dehorned, blood samples taken, vaccinated  and Jocelyn and I do the DNA sampling.


        Calves everywhere.   Some inside and some outside.

 But there are also a lot of rules and regulations that were not around in our day.  OSH can be a trial and  all the new environmental rules that apply.  It all takes a lot to get your head around.
  All in all things are going well.  It is good to have an income again.  Should pay for a bit of fuel when we hit the road again in October.