getting things done

Okay, after a couple of failed attempts to synchronise I now have Mindapro back (had to use the upgrade button but it only took a couple minutes, if that), the ancestry information, and some of the health/mating/calving/lactation data for my cows.

For some reason this information only goes back one year – all health information, matings &c prior to July 08 have vanished. The diary view is still blank because I haven’t added any new information yet and the old is still vanished. The groups I created are just as vanished as ever.
All notes I created regarding names, shed behaviour have likewise gone.

Looks like it’s time to start again and in the meantime cast around for another programme I can use that isn’t going to vanish everything next time I move farms – or at any random time. I’ve had a couple of goes at building an animal database over the years, but the databasing programmes that come with the computer are almost useless in that respect. I wish I could remember what programme it was we used in college, because it could do a lot of what I’m looking for.

I’m going to have to see if I can find that water leak today, I reckon. Bomb-washed the plant and haven’t been able to rinse it. I’m going to have to find my Fonterra username again and try to get back into that site, see when they’re next sending a tanker past my way. I’m catching 80 – 100 litres a milking aside from what I need for the calves.
Maybe I’ll need to go the old-fashioned way and phone them.
Definitely we can’t start the milking season without water coming into the dairy.

Timely check

The cows thought I had come to rescue them from boredom. ‘Fraid not.

The first Jersey cow, 137 circling as I entered the gate, no sign of milk fever, thought she was underway and then noticed that in fact she was chasing a brown calf into the herd.
A nice big heifer. She’s one of the best Jerseys in the herd; I’m pleased.

A few paces along the fenceline came across a cast heifer, feet in the air, lying on the bottom wire. My heart started beating again when her hind feet wriggled. She objected to my attempt to grab a leg and haul her out of the hollow. A clap of the hands and “Up!” did the trick – up she got.

There’s 126 the second Jersey cow, looking quite depressed of side and very much on her feet and sober. A few metres away, a very little brown and white calf – checked under the tail, yes, it’s a heifer. Having quite a run of them. No biggie, this one’s not for keeping.
Then I saw the other. Almost identical in size and markings. Twin’s a bull.

Continuing the circuit – you trying to take 154′s calf, 120? Nope, this one’s a bull and it’s her own calf – that was quick. 154 wandering aimlessly around. I had a neckband for her heifer calf but didn’t see it again. In pushes 97. Yeah right. Checked out her back end.

She’s on the job. She’s not due till August, but calfs come when calfs come. I got her and 21 others trucked back from the other farm on Friday – yesterday.

Next check 6 or 6:30 am.

23 is aiming for a record in monotonous bellowing – she’s still going, has been non-stop since the end of milking. I can’t hear the calves from here but could when I went out.
I spoke too soon. She’s either stopped or taking a breather.

Some pictures

The Jersey is the mother here – the heifer had her own crossbred bull a day later.

This is 140 and her calf. Stab wound healed up nicely now.

random happenings

Home and took a couple of apple turnovers out of the freezer and remembered that there were things I’d wanted to bake for calving and hadn’t got round to yet – but I’ve got the ingredients now, thinks I optimistically. I’ll do it next week.

Who is I kidding?
Not only has calving very much started, I’m up for a midnight/1 am check tonight. So I might be playing on the internets till then instead of sleeping.
Two older Jersey cows, not started yet. Not worried about malpresentations, want to be in time to prevent major complications to milk fever.

This morning of about 18 cows (including slips, another the other day at seven months gestation who gave a tiny bit of milk tonight) calved I’d seen 15 bulls.
Since then four heifers have been born.

More bad omens – it rained today, I decided for the second time to feed the dry cows maize on the clean concrete in the yard.
When they’d had enough they headed off down the farm, just as they’d done the previous time. I was in the dairy, heard a fair diminishment of noise and looked out to see about half a dozen heifers wondering where the escape route was.
The cows could open pretty much every gate at the last farm. But they tended not to. This is the third time so far one of the gates at the yard on this farm has been opened and they’ve had to use a different technique all three times.
Today they evidently burst the chain. I’m not sure you could call that a technique.
They ended up in the paddock I’d set up for the milkers, and I decided not to get them back. The milkers – including the three suckler cows – are in the corner of the paddock I was going to give them tomorrow, that would have represented about a quarter of the day’s area for the dry herd.
One of the reasons why paddocks need gates at both ends. I’m so used to consecutive grazing that I don’t even think in terms of how many days to get out of a paddock – just give them what they need and sort it out later when they come to a dead end in every paddock with sufficient grass remaining to feed a fraction of the cows in the herd that day. Do you move them then move them on again an hour later? Split the herd in two? Use the other herd to clean it up? I don’t suppose it matters how it’s done as long as the grass is utilised. I might have ended up giving the dries the extra area today to try and prevent pug damage, but the soil here doesn’t seem to pug readily.

It’s going to be a noisy night by the sound – the milking herd sounds practically behind my window (though I know they’re a paddock away). 23 is suffering separation anxiety. Noisily.
I have a home for three of the four calves and waiting to see if someone is keen to pick up a red whiteface heifer – Jersey/Hereford cross. If not she’ll either stay with me (and her dairy crossbred herdmate) or with the steer calves.

99039

Average SCC for the season just gone. Not forgetting that the average includes about three months on once-daily milking.

The good thing about the length of time it takes Fonterra to get round to congratulating you for being grade-free/low SCC is that by the time the certificates turn up it’s an unexpected surprise.
This is the first year I’ve failed to break the 100,000/ml barrier.

Unfortunately, not enough of a boost to negate everything else that can go wrong. Apparently when you move farms and LIC assigns a new herd code you’re not permitted to take the compiled history and management data of your herd with you.
Unless I’ve gone and done something wrong – I haven’t been able to synchronise records for six weeks. Finally asked someone what I had to do and the result was that the programme was wiped clean – erased from my computer – and I’m downgraded back to Mindalink.

*Simple* information about minerals. What is needed, how much. Moving to a new area and getting bombarded with conflicting information and dire threats and opinions…
Now I’ve been told if I’m going to drench I have to drench twice a day.
And I’m like – wait, hang on, I’ve already discussed this with the vet and he approved my 30g MgO drenched once daily.
So I’m to drench once daily and put MgC in the trough at night – but have you (who is recommending this) ever measured how much water dairy cows drink at night?

My drench system isn’t even set up yet. I’ve given several cows a calving drench (by bottle) over the last day or two, and discovered that there’s yet another weird bar in the cowshed. It extends for about the first six or eight cows, each side of the shed, and when you put your hand on the cow’s nose she raises her head and slams it (your arm, that is)straight into that bar – or she would if she raised her head with any force.

I’ve been told it’s better to mix the MgO into the maize than dust it. So the springers get 50 g dusted on thier pasture in the morning, 50 g and 10 g salt mixed in the maize silage a couple hours later (I’m not being told to treat them with mag at twelve hour intervals??).
The milkers get their whole assignment mixed into the maize – 100 g MgO, 100g limeflour, 10 g salt which I’ve now been told to up to thirty for milking cows. Anything that looks a bit dodgy gets a calving drench mixed up at milking time, or calol.

Yesterday evening I went to see the springers and 140 was cast, blown, thrashing, regurgitating icky green stuff and snorting through it.
We’d walked through the herd about three hours earlier.
She’s lucky to be alive. I stabbed her, got the tractor and pulled her to the new break, sat her up, calpromag into the milk vein and then checked for her calf. Went home for a cow cover and dep and phone the vet for advice. Apparently they don’t have to come out and stitch ‘em up if the hole isn’t over-sized.
The calf was a long hard pull – Friesian cross bull, very much alive, very determined to stay inside. If 140 hadn’t already nearly died calving I’d have left the pair of them to take their own time about it. She was lively enough once she got to her feet, no major signs of milk fever. But she got a good dose of calol too once she was calved.

This evening milking 57 started paddling, trying to kneel down. Didn’t milk her, gave her a bag of calpromag under the skin – cold, I was trying to fill the water heater.
Must have a major water leak down the farm.
Ute got a new gearbox today.
Milk pump didn’t pump the milk away. I turned the vacuum off, pulled the plug on the receiving can and caught it in a bucket. Then it worked fine during the wash.
With ten cows in the shed, stopped using the test buckets this morning and washed the milkline before and after milking. I don’t know where it all went.
I caught about twenty litres total.
I’d been catching over thirty from four cows the previous couple of days.
Where did it go?

Two cows in 24 hours. 57 is 8, 140 9. I don’t recall that either of them have had milk fever before.
57 gave me a beautiful heifer. The only heifer calf I’ve seen since 21′s.

I think 171 is going to be okay as a three-titter. She only gave a litre a milking for the first few days. Some milkings I can get a bit out of her mastitic teat, some I can’t. It’s time to leave it be, I reckon.

Silver Fern Farms still have a minimum carcase weight for bobby calves of 9 kg.
I think it’s time certain people stopped trying to pressure me into shooting my babies.

And did I mention that I’d been told my cows were flighty? You know – those cows of which 140 is a typical example, who last night I injected, put a coat on and then drenched while she tended her calf in the yard.
I put a blue mark on her calf’s head because she’s feeding him, dep and all. I won’t be shooting him either.

Why I don’t like treating the water troughs:
a) it’s ineffective under several different circumstances – rain, presence of ground water, several troughs (fence the other troughs off, I’m told), bullying (heifers may not get enough), differences in intake, dilution over time – first to drink get strongest dose under most methods of trough treating, water leaks, water supply failure (I know that shouldn’t happen anyway) and
b) it tastes yucky.
so cows will prefer not to drink.
and c) some additives are dangerous to other stock types – bloat oil for calves? Apparently farm dogs everywhere survive rumensin added to troughs. Last year the bloat oil jumped several paddocks to reach my calves, from an in-trough dispenser in the cow herd.

Well aparently everyone else treats their water troughs with no problems.
I have seen a cow die because it rained. (I would like to add, my boss was in charge at the time. I knew better than to rely on trough treatment while it rained, but didn’t give him the ‘Plan B’ should it rain. So I guess it was still my fault.)

One of the big issues with trough treatment is running different herds on different regimes – it’s the same wtih introducing feeds that are a risk for acidosis. You start an unpalatable mineral in the water at low dose and increase gradually till they get used to it, and do the same with a dangerous feed to allow the rumen to adapt to digest it efficiently.
So what do you do when you want to transfer a cow from one herd (not getting supplemented) to the other?
I suppose most farmers work round it somehow or other. I only see two obvious solutions – take the risk of putting her straight there, or have a ‘quarantine’ area/herd for her to adjust.
Which is what I’ll be doing with the cows coming home onto maize.

At one time farmers in general avoided certain forms of mineral – chlorides, mainly – because they were *corrosive*.
I guess now that everyone’s using them cows must have evolved asbestos throats in the meantime.
Oh yeah, and I see RD1 still sells plenty of oral-cal.
The one year I used that stuff it worked all right, but stripped the skin off my arm where the cows dribbled. That’s why I never used it again.

Getting into it

Two calves today, one yesterday, one on Wednesday.

I guess the season’s started.

Naturally, it can’t be straightforward. I have a heifer to move out of the springing mob into the milkers tomorrow – she steals every calf born. Meantime, today’s two bull calves are in the milking herd, with their mums, overnight.
A 17 kg Jersey bull born to a heifer on the other farm – apparently failed to suckle, and his mother turned out to have a nasty case of mastitis in her rear right. The calf drank about 1.5 litre colostrum mixed from the two new cows tonight – I was glad not to have to tube him.

And I’m saying nothing about that headbail.
According to the list I’ve just put into Mindapro, I tagged twelve heifers and two cows this ‘afternoon’. It took from about an hour before dark to an hour after dark and I’ll be embarassed to meet my neighbour now… in fact probably every neighbour for three farms around.
To think there was once a myth going around that I didn’t know any swearwords…

I got me a set of bathroom scales for the calves. That’s how I know that calf is 17 kg. Today I had to subtract 61 from its weight. It’ll be interesting to see how quickly that number drops – it’s 3 kg heavier than Wanganui vetgraz recorded at the end of April and that itself was 3 kg heavier than my normal ‘calving to Christmas’ weight.

The grass seems to be picking up. The springers (close to calving) cows are on 40m2 at 2300 cover and 3 kgDM of maize silage. That’s keeping them happy – they clean up and don’t complain when I go see them, though they could probably eat more.

Grateful to persons past

Person, that is. Would be the girl who instructed me in the correct handling of a cow’s teat when I was 20.
Same person who informed me there was no place for human females in farming after the age of 30, but never mind that… I heard that she had indeed left the industry and it’s a great loss if so.

Anyway, she taught me that to milk a cow (we fore-milked every teat, every milking, to check for mastitis in those days) you wrap your thumb and first finger round the base of the teat where it joins the udder and follow through with the other fingers, creating a downwards pressure on the milk – relax, repeat for another squirt of milk.

I’ve seen a number of farmers handling teats since. I thought there were two ways they usually did it – the right way and the wrong way. In fact, there’s three. The way I was taught. Then there’s the grasp the end of the teat between thumb and fore-finger and pull method. Then the one that really makes me wince to watch – thumb and first finger opposing each other at the base of the teat then slid all the way down to the end. That’s gotta hurt surely?

I simply can’t imagine hand-milking a cow (as opposed to taking a squirt or two to see if there’s mastitis) with either of the latter techniques.
As it happens, I’ve milked out cows by hand for various reasons over the years, sometimes twice a day. It does take a milking or two for the muscles to settle into it if I haven’t been handmilking for a while, but it’s no big deal making the decision to handmilk a cow as opposed to getting her into the shed and starting the milking machines.
So yes, which is the point of this post, I’m glad someone in my past took the time to insist on a particular technique.
Because not a single other person I’ve worked with has made any suggestions or comments regarding hand stripping/milking technique. Did I mention I’ve seen other people using other methods? Some of these people are good farmers with twenty, thirty, forty years experience dairy farming. And in all that time they’ve never figured their method isn’t best. Who knows, maybe you can milk a cow from start to finish solely by tugging on the end of her teats.

As you might have figured by the very fact this post is being written – I’ve been handmilking.
314, from the time she calved until the calves were big enough and aggressive enough to keep her milked out without my assistance – I just finished off every morning once 198 had finished feeding. She doesn’t need me no more, I just go and look at her udder once in a while to make sure the calves are keeping up with her.
I started up the shed for 21. But only got a dribble from her the first milking. Then 2 litres in 5 minutes the next morning and a swift kick when I took the cups off. Fetched a bucket and took off another half litre by hand because she didn’t feel milked out.
Started the shed again that evening. Got two litres and the kick landed a leg the wrong side of the rope. I figured the vacuum wasn’t dropping at the teat end when I cut it off to remove the cluster – but why?? Took another half litre off by hand.
This morning I didn’t start the shed up. Bucket under her udder. Got five litres.
This evening, I’d meant to put the milking machines on again and find out if they were at fault or if she’d just suddenly come into better production this morning. Got back too late to be bothered, put a bucket under her udder. Another five litres.
Milking machine guys are coming out to test them in the morning.

I’ve known this cow five years. She’s always been a fast, heavy milker. Be interesting to see what the machine test turns up.
Meantime – it’s one cow; I’d rather hand-milk her than ruin her desire to come to the shed.

Milking at 7

Just an observation…

This week’s Farmer’s Weekly noted that cows that choose their milking times tend to prefer 12 – 3 am and avoid 3 – 5 am – the latter not an unusual start time on larger farms.

As some readers might have noticed, I haven’t been in the habit of rousing the cows at 4:30 am or 2:30 pm. I have my reasons for that, too many to expound. Start with a) laziness and b) heat avoidant and you’ve got the morning and evening time deviances covered
In fact, for most of the year I fetched the cows at sunrise and sunset. That got round the problem of the fact that every clock I put in the cowshed got tinkered with by the ghost and there were too many fun jobs around to down tools before dark… but anyway:

The cows’ morning routine was to lie around until daylight – about half an hour before the sun appeared to the horizon, usually between 5 – 6 depending on the time of the year. Then they’d get up and spend half an hour to an hour grazing. If I hadn’t turned up at the gate by an hour after daylight they started walking home for milking.
The days that I had to go and get them early they were content enough if they were at the ‘getting up to graze’ stage (though I’m sure they would have preferred the time to give the paddock a final trim, and the grass quality next round would probably have preferred it too), but if I had to get them up…
boy, could those cows sulk!

Cows apparently have excellent night vision. I apparently have very good night vision so far as people go, but it’s not as good as a cow’s.
So, it is a full mooon tonight. But 21 surprised me on the wander back to her paddock by stopping and turning towards the gateway a paddock too soon. But she realised her mistake, and continued on.
Now it’s a new farm to both of us, and I still have to count the paddocks to figure which is her gate (until I realised that I just had to look and see which fence I’d hung the reel on) but the gates are two-wire affairs continuing a 2-wire fence – yet she knew it was a gate and could see well enough to realise it was closed. I couldn’t see those wires in the dark.
Mind you, she was closer to it than I was.
And she didn’t see the wires of her real gate strung right across the race till the last second.

I’d be embarassed to admit how many times over the years I’ve lost the way out of a paddock in thick fog. (Okay, maybe three or four). Never seen the cattle trying to find their way along the fencelines to a gate because of dark or fog.

Misty morning

First calf 2009

Guess who couldn’t wait for the official start of calving…

21. Again. And again, she’s dropped a Jersey-cross heifer (do new calves normally come this tiny?)
Last year was an ‘up-half-the-night’ affair for me, waiting for colostrum to defrost because I couldn’t convince her calf to suckle.

This year the calf was maybe half an hour old and following her around and when I gave her a push towards the udder she started suckling without delay.
Wait till daylight to take photos? Course not.
She’s ten days early. I’m kinda hoping one of the heifers quickly follows suit so that 21 has company in the milking shed, and because said heifer looks like she’ll burst if her udder keeps expanding.

The farm still has no grass – but as of yesterday, it does have cows. 25 springers, now 24 and one milker.
About 1700 kg DM cover across the farm, longest paddocks 2300. The series of frosts week before last didn’t do the growth rates any good.
Strictly speaking, 314 had the first live calf of 2009 – as her bull was born alive in early June, seven weeks premature. The first full-term calves are due around the twelfth of this month.

edit: the following morning

and of course I went to see last year’s heifer number 1 and told her she had a baby sister