The cows are looking pretty good, nice and fat and too lazy to run away when I went for a tea-time photographing session.
As is normal during a cows lactation, the milk yield is dropping and the somatic cell count has risen slightly. Nothing we can't handle though, although it would be good to get a few more kilos of fat and protein out of them. One of the reasons why the yield has dropped perhaps a bit more than usual, is the feed they are getting at the moment.
We are in the process of lengthening the grazing round (to benefit the start of next season), to do this we are keeping the cows a bit tighter on smaller breaks, and making up the difference with silage. Some of the silage has been a bit unpalatable which means the cows have not cleaned it up, and therefore are probably not getting their approx 18 kg of dry matter per day. This is showing in the bulk tank, but the silage is getting better so we should pick up in the next few days.
Some details on the grazing:
170 effective hectares (minus approx 10/15 ha that have been written off).
Stocking rate of about 3.3 head/ha.
28 paddocks in the rotation.
Current grazing round length: 30 days.
Shortest grazing round of the season: 22 days (back in Oct/Nov).
Here is a GPS map of the paddocks:
Paddocks 31 and 21 are not in the rotation and 27 is terrible, it has no irrigation and the cows do not like the grass in there.
On the whole, grass growth is good, the irrigation is on 24/7 and combined with the sun which has been ever present recently, is the perfect recipe for grass growth.
My time during the day (apart from the usual putting up reels and feeding out silage), has been taken up with urea spreading and thistle spraying. I consider myself a stockman, I don't really find pleasure in driving tractors up and down fields trying to maintain a straight line. That being said, here are a few pics from spreading urea:
This picture below is me (unsuccessfully) trying to capture the tiny urea pellets flying out of the spreader. You can however see a bunch of thistles that need spraying.
The application rate is 50 kg/ha for those of you interested in such things.
Thistle spraying is a permently ongoing task, it is a lot of work keeping on top of them. I keep on forgetting my camera everytime I go killing thistles, so you will have to look out for some pics in a future post. It mostly involves drive-by shooting of suspect weeds with a 500 litre tank of ammo towed behind the quad.
In other news, I took a few hours of work the other day to go to the North Otago A & P Show in Oamaru. I know the A stands for Agricultural and I think the P stands for Pastoral but I am not too sure. It was a good little country show, with a fair few beef animals being showed and some vintage tractors. (I am mainly including the old tractors for my brother to look at).
This is a decent looking Angus Bull that I wouldn't want stepping on my toes:
Including this pretty angry looking guy!
Apart from the cattle, there were a fair few sheep, my favourite of which was rocking an afro and looked like he played bass in a 70's funk band.
Here is the machinery side of things that I photographed, some of them are older than New Zealand I think!
Well after that online tractor run, it is time for me to go.
I will leave you with a pic of the worlds most un-photogenic cow:
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