Addie’s Blog #1 – The start of Winter

The Start of Winter

We are well and truly into the winter season. Been dried off for 3 weeks now after a great first season on our new dairy farm! We have been busy drenching, DNA, copper bullets and selenium for our R1s, dairy herd are well and truly accustomed to the Swede crop and R2s enjoying their crop of Rape. 

I’ve been learning to feed out silage into waste nots for the dairy herd! What an experience that was 😂 I hope the neighbours weren’t watching me 🤦‍♀️ had a bit more practice now and I’d like to say it’s getting easier every time! 

We have a few winter jobs on the go – new boundary fence to avoid our cows joining the neighbour’s morning milking 😅 and a new race. Lucky kips an experienced digger driver which is a huge saving to the winter budget. 

First season owning a dairy farm and cafe with no workers on farm and a 1- and 4-year-old beside us - I think Kip and I were just happy to make it through still mostly sane and I was only marginally late to 2 morning milking’s 🤪 

We had an amazing meeting with CMK accountants last week to discuss our financial budget for season 2 and talk about our current and future goals and what our budget looks like for these. It was extremely helpful to break everything down and to also look at our first winter and how we were going to make it through financially. This meeting taught us to speak with your team around you – accountant and bank manager and to talk about the uncomfortable things like budgeting and next steps forward. We feel very “set up” going into season 2 and feel comfortable with our budget. 

We had a very dry and settled start to winter weather wise on the west coast with our first lot of rain today – which has turned the farm to slop straight away 🙄 but the grass is continuing to grow, and the stock are happy 😃 

Our now 5-year-old has just started school – we had cross country first up which Charlie came first and the eldest – Indy (12 years old) also came first! One thing I love about dairy farming is being able to attend our children’s school events and working our businesses around our family life. 

Off to move more fences and feed out more silage and hopefully fit a bit of rest in there too 🙈 (after about 12 loads of washing of course!) 