Week of stock work

This has been 10 days basically doing stock work, with both dairy heifers and sheep being moved around their rotations. 

We were able to have some 'city' friends come and visit us a week ago and took them for a ride around the farm.  Unfortunately the day wasn't the best weather wise so the views weren't as good as they could have been. 


Showing the boundaries



Looking north

2-ths milling around (pines are the neighbours)

Looking east from the back country, Huntly slightly to the left of photo

 This was a 'long weekend' for us with Auckland Anniversary on the Monday, with Mal spending it with his girls in town, celebrating Rachael's 12th birthday.  This involved an excursion to the Hamilton Museum (http://www.waikatomuseum.org.nz/), which has lots of interactive things for the kids.

The 600 odd MA Ewes (Mixed Age) got their booster shot of Androvax (talked about in December post).

Our dairy heifers grazing have all been drenched and administered with a Time Capsule (http://agrifeeds.co.nz/index.php?act=facial_capsule).  This is a slow release zinc capsule that protects animals against Facial Ezcema.  Despite our pasture samples to date being zero, the monitoring around the district does show an increase in levels.  Discussions with the owners of the heifers, we agreed to administer now.  They aren't the easiest things to put in, and we find it easier to get in with the heifers to drench and 'bullet'.

Alice showing how the capsule is inserted into the 'gun'

Mal inserting the gun into the animals throat and then pulls a wee trigger to shoot the bullet down the throat

Alice helping to insert the capsule for each animal

Drenching the weaners

With our big bulls now gone, next intake of 100 lease bulls have arrived.  These are 18-month Jersey bulls with an average of 357 kg.  With ample feed about at present they will be sent out to do a bit of a clean up job, preparing pastures for weaners and hoggets.

We also weighed and drenched the remaining of our ram lambs.  With the next marketable 370 going out in the next 2 weeks, that will leave us with 250 lambs, which will be gone by the end of March.