Addie’s Blog #4 – The first calves have arrived!

The first calves have arrived!

Well and truly into calving. They started coming thick and fast 10 days early. We had no calf
sheds done – were busy painting the shed pit walls, finishing off fencing and a million other jobs.🤯🤯 it’s amazing how fast you can get things done when you absolutely have to! We have 20 cows in now and 4 beautiful keeper calves so far, loving their home in the calf sheds 🥰. We’ve been getting used to a new routine now that we have a school kid 😜 juggling farm work and cafe with school bus drop offs. It’s all fun and games!

We had a few days with lots of rain so lots of feeding out, putting stock on and off and getting calves in out of the rain. All in a day’s work! We are looking forward to hopefully sending milk in a week or so and we are giving colostrum a go this season too.

We had AgriVantage reach out to DWN to work alongside us through our Milking it journey. I
had a zoom meeting with their team and it was great to talk about calving and our
procedures/setup with them. They kindly gave us some Stalosan to try out to keep our calf
sheds clean and hygienic. It was so easy to spread in the pens ready for the calves. They also
sent us a Brix refractometer to measure the quality of our colostrum – looking forward to testing
it this week and seeing the results!

Time to make school lunch for tomorrow, fold some washing, get school uniform ready and get farm clothes out for the morning – who am I kidding – I’m off to the couch to mindlessly watch some TV and do absolutely nothing 🤣