54. Drizzly Goings On

I thought I would give you an update of what has been going on on the farm.

It has mostly been raining, not heavily but consistently. The ground is soft, and driving along the cow tracks on the bikes means you end up with a face splattered with mud looking like a Dalmatian. You know the tracks are muddy when there is so much muck on the underside of the quad that the exhaust smokes every time you stop.

Some of the cows have been dried off or culled now, leaving a milking herd of 426, although this puts less pressure on the grazing, the weather really isn't helping.

This picture shows where the cows walked alongside a reel to reach the fresh grass.

I can see this paddock across the creek from where I am sitting now in the kitchen. It still doesn't look very green, even after another few days of continuous washing from above.

The gateways to the paddocks take a beating too, the soil here is at times pretty clayey, which when wet gets very slippy. I have planted myself on my arse more than a few times in the last couple of days. The cows when going down these skiddy exits from the paddocks tend to plant there front feet and try and walk with their back legs. It is a bit like an bovine snowmobile with the skis at the front and the drive at the back.

I took a picture of this gateway before and after the cows came through, obviously I didn't want the cows to mess it up, but the 'after' picture is not as severe as some of the others which was a little disappointing

BEFORE

AFTER

.

In other news, we will be drying all the cows in the next three or four days. They will each receive intra-mammary antibiotic treatment to reduce the risk of mastitis, and then a nice winter holiday away from milking while the calves inside them grow. We will dry them off in two blocks of late and early calvers over two days. They will then be walked down the road to the run-off block. The return journey to the original 'Big Muster' (see blog post 5). You can probably expect a blog post about all that excitement!

In food news, I liberated Daniel's slow-cooker from his kitchen whilst I was visiting. At the moment, it is cooking some beef stew, it has been on for about four hours, and will probably keep going for another four or five more. I am very excited to eat it tonight, and tomorrow and probably the next day too if there are still leftovers.

In it is a combination of stewing stake and some topside, as well as spuds, carrot, onion and mushrooms and some stock. I am going for the simple but hearty method. Although the weather is fine now, if it turns out to be miserable again, then this is the perfect food.

That'll be it for today. I will leave you with a picture of 1444, one of the personalities I will miss when I go home in just over three weeks.

53. Canterbury Flat Farm

Last weekend I hopped in the car to go and visit my former colleague and bungalow-mate Daniel on the farm near Rakaia, where he now works.

I didn't drive there directly. I took a very out of the way route, for two reasons. Firstly because I wanted to see Lake Tekapo - I had heard it was a lake worth seeing, and secondly because I didn't think it would add three whole hours on to my journey. As photogenic lakes go, I have seen a few now. The ones on the Waitaki were as always, spectacular. As I drove past the crystal clear water, edged with trees of varying autumnal shades of rust, my trigger finger started twitching so I jumped out of the car and took a few snaps. 

As I drove North the mountains got higher and snowier and at Lake Tekapo, the scene in front of me looked decidedly more wintery.

When I eventually got to Daniel's, the 'Roast of the Day' and a few handles of Speight's at the pub did the trick to pick me up from what turned out to be a five hour drive. 

I was very jealous of the woodburner that was dominating his new accommodation. With a free supply of logs he can keep his house toasty, while here at mine, we have just one heater which savages the electricity bill. What was even more impressive was the cage around it, the previous occupants must have had kids, or maybe they kept large predators in it. To call the cage sturdy is a massive understatement, but at a guess I would say it was at least bear-proof. 

The next morning I was taken on the tour of the farm, as is obligatory for anyone who goes to see someone who lives on a farm. It is pretty different to where I work, which is probably one of the steepest dairy farms in New Zealand. The main difference being it is pretty much completely flat. That is due its location on the flood plains of the very wide Rakaia River. Looking on Google maps the area looks pretty cool, and gives you an idea of the scale of the river. You can also see the obvious shapes of dairy farm paddocks, dictated by the pivot irrigation. 

At Rakaia (off the map), the road and rail bridges that span the water are the longest in the country at 1.75 km (over a mile) in length.

Anyway back to the farm tour. Mounted on two-wheeler bikes we set off for a look around. The weather was disappointingly grey, and the country probably didn't look its finest. 

Milking approx 580 cows (mostly small ginger ones), 'Dairy 2' is one of eight or nine dairies that make up a pretty large business of over 2000 ha (Canterbury Grasslands). These numbers and any more I include are partially guessed, I have slept numerous times and also drank alcohol since I was told them, so the accuracy may not be great.

The milking platform had a couple of big pivots on it, these roll over the fences, so the electric wire is kept pretty slack. This is very handy for crossing over a fence on the bikes, using the old 'boot holding the wire to the ground whilst the wheels go over' technique. This is a lot trickier to do on a quad bike, unless of course you are a lanky gymnast. Which I am not. 

So I followed Daniel about the paddocks, keeping a safe distance away to avoid being sprayed with mud from his rear wheel which had a very inadequate mudguard. 

Every now and then we would stop, and I would ask some interesting dairying questions, and then I would comment on how flat it was.

When I was visiting, about half the herd had been dried off, they were eating straw with their grass.

The other half still being milked (also 16 hourly), were getting palm kernel as a side dish. This is a supplement feedstuff that is quite popular in NZ. From what I gather, it is mostly fibre, and contains a fair bit of oil which helps keep milk fat up.

Here is a big shed of it, and then the cows digging in.

The milking shed did not look fun to milk in. Apparently because of the shorter stature of the Filipino workers that are pretty popular in the area, they had to raise the pit floor. Bashing your head on the pipes above became a real risk for those of us of normal height. There was also a ramp down too, I don't know, maybe for wheelchair access? It is a 50 a-side shed, which is getting quite long, at this size they usually bend them in a circle and call them a rotary.

A few thing stood out from this farm, not just the huge stones littered across the paddocks, but the way the pasture was grazed down to carpet length. With no silage, it is a pretty low input system, but the cows seemed happy enough.

The stand out feature of the place was the irrigation though, it can get very dry on the Canterbury Plains and this impressive set-up helps to combat that.

These huge pumps will be able to move a ridiculous amount of water.

There are two types of pivot irrigation used, this is one of the huge fixed pivots:

And this smaller pivot is dragged around by tractor and plugged into one of a number of hydrants in the paddock. It is also perfect to rub against to get those hard to reach itches!

Righto, that is all I have for you today. Keep reading!

52. Still Milking It

Ladies and Gentlemen, it is with great relief that I can now finally present my long awaited short film on milking.

It is not an easy job filming whilst milking, it is kind of a situation where three hands would be ideal. Or a complete camera crew. Anyway the product of much frustration and the mixing of water and electrical devices is here.

As always, best watched on a larger screen.




Hope you enjoy it!

51. Top 10 Simple Pleasures.

Hello Planet Earth (to be read in the voice of Ron Burgundy), here are my top 10 simple pleasures on the farm this week.

10. When a silage bale doesn’t collapse as soon as you take the wrap off. I am so fed up of soggy silage bales that when one maintains its cylindrical structure and does not end up all over the road, it is a bonus. 

9. Remembering that you put a muesli bar in your pocket that morning and having a mid-milking snack. A quick wipe of the hands on a clean cow is sometimes necessary.  

8. A new blade on the silage knife – the knife we use to cut the wrap off the silage bales is basically a big craft knife, when it is sharp it is great.

7. Seeing a cow with shit on their head – it reminds you that it can happen to anyone.  Although seeing a few means you are pushing them too hard in the collecting yard.

6. Forgetting about an irrigation hydrant in the paddock when on the tractor, then looking behind and finding it went between the wheels.

5. Accidently touching an electrified fence, but catching it between pulses.

4. Having a whole row go through during milking without shitting in the pit – this is rare, but oh so satisfying.

3. When a cow puts her head through the head bale of the crush all by herself and waits patiently to be shut in. As opposed to the granite statue impressions many of them do when asked politely to proceed forward.

2. Managing to keep a clean bit of forearm to wipe the face during milking. 

1. Clean overall day – it means you can put them on inside. The simplest, yet undoubtedly most pleasurable of simple pleasures. 

In other news, it rained a lot a few days ago. It rained non-stop for about 5 days which coincided with my weekend off and caused my planned fishing trip to be canceled. So instead I started designing the ark that I would inevitably need. The rain did stop though so thankfully that was a defunct plan. 

The cow tracks all got nice and muddy though, permanent 4-wheel drive on the bikes kind of muddy. The battered old Honda 350 that I usually drive became next to useless, it is only 2 and a half-wheel drive. 

There is no mud on the tracks any more though, that is because all the mud was on the underside of the quad I washed today. It took me nearly an hour and a half. You could have planted potatoes underneath the mud guards. The yard where I cleaned the bike looked like a ploughed field afterwards and I had to wash that too. 

Speaking of the yard, the collecting gate that helps keep the cows moving through the milking shed stopped working today. Upon closer investigation the drive chain that moves the gate appeared to have come off its cog. David stuck his hand in to try and fix it and very quickly retracted it as if he had been shocked. Turns out there was a possum sitting in there. Must have had a horrible fright when his bed started moving and an alarm started blaring. 

I didn't have my camera with me at the time, but this is where it was hiding. 

It turned out his foot had been stuck in the cog. We didn't know that though so we thought he was just being stubborn. They are pretty aggressive animals when cornered and have sharp teeth. They also are carriers of TB, a bit like badgers in the UK. I didn't want to get too close to his snout so I poked him with a bit of wood, which he promptly attacked. At the opportune moment I grabbed his tail and pulled him out and he hopped away towards the dairy. He wasn't doing so great so humane euthanasia was the only way forward. Also we really didn't want TB about. 

I took a picture of the ex-possum, but I have decided not to include it because that would be the second picture of a dead one on this blog (See Day 1 of The Road To Hobbiton), and possibly one too many. Also there was some possum juice seeping out which wasn't very photogenic. 

Finally if you are reading this and your name is Sam Hall, congratulations on your engagement mate!!! If you are not the Sam Hall this is aimed at, never mind, just ignore it. 

That is all I have for you today, keep reading!

50. 16 Hour Milking

This is my 50^th blog post on ‘The Udder Side Of The World’, and this milestone comes at a time in which a major change has happened on the farm. Due to a need to save grass for the winter, the powers that be have decided that 16 hour milking is the way forward for the rest of the season. 

Although called 16 hour, it is actually 17½ hr / 17½ hr / 13 hr milking. We milk at 5 am, 6 pm then 11:30 am the following day. The main thing is that we milk three times every two days, rather than the usual four milkings. These timings are the most practical, although now two of the three milkings are during major meal times, which as you can imagine does not sit well with me.

Having done over a week of this new system, I have doubled the number of meals I eat during the day, although the meal size is halved. It is like I am on a pasture based system of eating when I am hungry rather than coming into the feed-lot three times a day.

When you need to reduce grass intake from your cows, there are a number of things you could do;

1. Dry off cows – the cows still need to eat, much less, but they are not producing anything.

2. Cull cows – Definitely not producing any milk from dead cows, although dead cows also don’t eat any valuable grass.

3. Fill the cows full of silage – Before we switched to 16hr, the herd was already getting six bales of silage per day on top of grass. That is about 1800 KgDM/ha of silage. If we fed them even more silage the feed cost would get pretty high, and we still have the rest of autumn and winter to go.

4. Sixteen hour milking – The aim is that milk yield drops a little bit, but grass intake drops more. So effectively it is going towards an even lower low-input, low-output system.

I was pretty excited about this major change. I am here in NZ to learn more about dairy farming so this opportunity to work a system that is very different from what I have learnt in the UK is very interesting. I will explain what I have observed so far.

Cows are animals that live for routine, any change in their daily schedule messes them up a bit and ultimately shows in their production. Even if I milk in a different coloured hat, I reckon they get a bit stroppy. So as you can imagine this huge change gets them all worked up a bit.

In the evening milking at 6 pm they would come flying in to be milked and peg it out of the shed and race back to the paddock. It just gets dark in the first half hour of this session so feels very strange finishing in the dead of night. Sometimes when I go to fetch the cows to be milked they are confused and think that they are getting more grass so go the wrong way away from the gate. Here patience is the most important of virtues! They have settled down now and I think are getting used to the new system.

The milk yield immediately dropped when we lost that one milking every second day. I think we dropped in two days from over 14,000 litres to about 11,500. Very alarming as this was, it was kind of expected and the docket from the subsequent milk collection revealed milk had gone up by 800 litres. It stayed reasonably constant for the pick-up after that. It will be very interesting to see how much they get back up to producing, although they are naturally giving less milk as they near the end of the lactation.

A side effect of this system is high risk of a rise in mastitis incidence in the first week or two of reduced milkings. (It may make my readers who have ever written a scientific dissertation smile to know that I nearly went to look for a reference from a peer-reviewed study for that statement!) So, according to Common Sense and M Y Boss, 2013, it is important to watch out for a sudden increase of mammary infection. We have only treated one cow for mastitis since the switch, which is good. Although there are a few cows that now have a big blue ‘C’ on their udder reminding us to check every milking. They are ones where clinical mastitis might be on its way or just look a bit swollen. The somatic cell count rose to the 250’s, from about 180 (000 cells per ml), but is not anywhere near worrying levels, and already on the way down.

I am really enjoying this new system, if for no other reason that it gives me a lie-in until 7 o’ clock every second day. The worst part is when motivation to milk dips to a low at 6 pm with 496 cows to milk. I will continue to report in an entirely un-scientific way, on my findings of 16 hour milking and the pros and cons of such a system.

In other news, a massive effluent pond is being constructed on the farm. It will contain what I believe is called a ‘weeping wall’, to separate the solid from the liquid and will ultimately reduce urea use as fertiliser by replacing it with the dirty water from the shed and yards. At the moment our effluent is pumped to the neighbouring farm and spread on their paddocks, not ours.

Autumn continues to roll along, at the moment it is a bit cold and rainy. Last week though, we had a proper cold snap which caused the first whitening of the tops of the higher mountains as this picture shows;

The sudden drop in temperature also prompted me to replace these poorly wind-proofed gloves,

With these beasts,

They make 4 am quad bike rides much more pleasant, although it becomes very tricky picking anything small up. On the packaging it said that the material along the top of the thumb was perfectly designed for ‘flicking away sweat’. I know for a fact that that is false, it is there purely for wiping a runny nose.

Finally I should offer my congratulations to my employers David and Jocelyn who have just had a baby. As half Irish, half Kiwi I am positive that he will grow up to have language so profane that the air around him will be permanently blue! This will be no reflection on his parents as individuals, just my observations of the two nationalities’ take on the English language, where every other word needs to be bleeped if said before 9pm! Try being in an Otago pub when the Highlanders are losing (again). The referee, unfortunately dressed head to toe in bright pink, gets some amount of abuse. My vocabulary has been expanded considerably!

See you next time.

49. Otago Drive

I had meant to upload this video much sooner than now, but I have had to start using expensive internet with a limited download capacity. Apparently uploading does not reverse the process, it also uses a lot of mega/giga/terra-bytes.

Anyway here is my latest short film. It is not about milking. That one is taking a long time to produce, but will hopefully be worth the wait. As before, it will be best viewed on a larger screen, rather than a phone.

Enjoy and leave some feedback!

48. Fast Things

I was going to post my latest video, but I am having some technical issues, which means I am reaching the limits of my technical ability. So instead I have done this one which I was going to do anyway.

This blog post is mainly about things that I have seen at high speed in the past week.

On Easter Monday I went to the Mackenzie Highland Show at Fairlie. It is the regional show for the uplands of South Canterbury and a bit of North Otago and had all the usual country show attractions. These include the obligatory dirty looking trailers that sell terrible food, someone who was trying to sell clothes that looked like they were made from leaves and pens of alpacas or llamas (I am never sure which is which).

The best stuff was the fast stuff though, and the two fastest were shearing and log chopping. I have seen both on a larger scale at the Royal Welsh show back at home but I am pretty sure these competitors were quicker.

The log chopping is a strange sport. There is the upright tree-trunk log that they cut notches in with their axe and stick a board in the notch, they then stand on this wobbly board to chop even higher. I missed this one but I did see the short log chopping. They have a log about two feet long and stick it horizontally on a metal holder that stops it rolling away. Then they chop away some flat bits to stand on and mark where they are going to aim with some chalk.

The chalk goes about an inch away from their feet, and therefore so does the axe. They just wear trainers though, no safety boots. I wouldn't trust my aim that much, I would be too worried about turning my feet into hooves.

They also wear cricket whites (well just the trousers), I have no idea why. It is probably for the same reason as you wear a white coat when you show livestock. Or they wear white to show up the blood if they do miss the chalk, the pale trousers allow the paramedics to easily locate the wound.

Here is a veteran axe-man competitively chopping some wood.

And the switch around to get the other side...

They chop through this wood quickly, two photos was the maximum I could take in the time he went through the log. Impressive stuff.


Even more impressive than the log chopping was the shearing competition, if only because of the presence of livestock. Although some cow-men may say that logs have more personality and are more interesting than sheep...

However, I thoroughly enjoyed watching the Mackenzie Shears, as this competition is called. I have never sheared a sheep, my dad used to have Wiltshire Horns. They are an excellent sheep, as well as being very tasty they do not need shearing, their wool is more of a short thick fur.

From watching the shearing I gather it is hard work, I think I would get a sore back leaning over all day like that. The shearers were looking pretty knackered, there was a lot of sweat going on and faces gradually turned quite red. Although that could have been the blood going to their head from bending over so much. These shearers were going at a bit more of a pace than the usual I reckon. The fastest one in the 'Open Machine Final' sheared twenty sheep in less than 20 minutes. His last couple were sub 55 second.

But it is important to remember that they also get the points from the quality of the buzz cut as well as the speed. I left as the judges were deliberating on these scores so I never found out who won. This bloke below was the one I was cheering for. He is a top shearer from Scotland and has representing the country in the shearing world championships, which I am sure you all remember watching on the TV when it was on.

They also had old-fashioned shearing with big scissors. I am only kidding, I know they are called blade shears. This obviously takes a bit longer and requires good wrist strength. As I try and write a family friendly blog, I can't repeat some of the jokes the commentator came up with during the blade shearing.

As well as those competitions, there was a Scottish pipe band that marched around at double-time through the crowds. I saw young and old, families and animals all have to dive out of the way to avoid being trampled or worse, bag-piped.

I took a few photos of the marching band, but quite bizarrely and irritatingly, every time I did, someones hat ruined the picture.

It was a good show though.


More recently, yesterday in fact, I saw some even faster things. These things were rally cars, and these rally cars were racing on a gravel road that runs through our dairy run off. That is the land a few minutes down the road where the young stock and cows live over winter. The road was one of the stages of the Otago Rally, which is quite a big deal in NZ rallying. The race is one of six that make up the New Zealand Rally Championship.

They were absolutely flooring it down the road, you can tell that they are fast cars when they have lots of writing on them. Also you could hear coming about three miles away and the drivers were wearing helmets. Also it was difficult to photograph them.

My first few shots were mostly like this, just dust.

Then I got in my groove and took these shots:

Unfortunately my camera ran out of juice before the 2- wheel drive cars came by. There were lots of historic Ford Escorts from the 70's and a few Porche 911s. It was, however, the middle of a working day so I couldn't follow them on to the next stage up the road.

Righto, that'll do for now. See you next time.