The herd is dry at last and the farmyard will be as quiet over the next few weeks as it ever gets on a busy dairy farm. Most of the cows can be fed for two days at a time and probably three days over Christmas with just a bit of pushing in and scraping to do on the big day.

Our Croatian team member Stan is volunteering to work Christmas Day, as his family celebrates Christmas on 7 January, so a bit of diversity in the team can have its benefits. A few of us will probably head down to the yard for an hour, however, so that no one is away from the family for too long.

We will use any spare days through the holidays to look after animal health. We always leave dosing and lice treatments until all animals are dry and dose them all in one day, so none are missed. We will also separate out a group of cows that need a bit of extra attention with their feet.

We might take the opportunity to run these girls with the heifers for a few weeks and put them through the milking parlour and the footbath a few times a week.

Most of the herd is in excellent condition after the year we had so we might also go through them and pick out some cows in need of a diet and feed them some hay over the next few weeks.

The rest of the herd will move on to pit silage and dry-cow minerals through the diet feeder in the run-up to calving. We made a big second cut of high 60s DMD silage for this job and the plan is to put the dry cows on this a month before calving and to keep them on a consistent diet right through the calving season.

We have a lot of bales fed over the last few weeks which have been creating a bit of extra work with scrapers on days when the bales are put in too close to the barrier or where the cows are doing an extra bit of sorting and pulling a bit too much out under their feet. We will avoid this over the holidays by moving to all pit silage and probably leave the remaining bales for young stock and as a buffer for the milkers in the spring if necessary.

We have a few turkeys for the family again this year so these will be dispatched and prepared for the table this week. We have a good team of volunteers most years to help with the plucking, with a sense of humour being the most important trait to bring to the table.

Unsolicited advice

We usually get fully organised and into a routine in time for the last turkey, with plenty of unsolicited advice and suggestions on how to do things better between the first and last bird.

With a bit of music in the background to help with the atmosphere, we get the job done without too much stress every year.

The turkey always seems to taste better when there’s a bit of your own effort gone into the preparation and as anyone with an eastern European employee will know, the norm out there is still to grow your own, so we have an enthusiastic addition to our plucking team this year with Stan which will hopefully make the job a bit easier.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to wish everyone who takes the time to read this column every fortnight a Happy Christmas and prosperous 2018.