We are slowly coming out of Christmas hibernation this week, with something resembling a normal work routine returning to the farm. Everybody has had some sort of a cold or flu over the holidays, which hasn’t helped us to get back up and running at full steam.

We worked half days right through the lazy days between Christmas and the new year and managed to keep the cows fed, the cubicles clean and everything checked with the minimum of effort.

We have good machinery in the yard this winter, which makes the feeding a lot quicker and easier.

The only extra job we took on was training the in-calf heifers through the parlour and running them and any lame cows through the footbath three times a week.

We have this down to 30 minutes at this stage and the heifers are getting very used to the routine of the parlour now. They are getting a sprinkle of teat spray and a shake of concentrates as they go through, which will help them to settle in after calving.

It will be much easier to have them looking for the feed than trying to show them where it is after the stress of calving for the first time.

We will continue to work short enough days and take a few more days off through the rest of this month, until cows start calving around 25 January. We have calf sheds to organise now and feeders to clean and get into shape for the arrival of the next generation of the herd.

We will put the heifer calves and the pedigree bulls in separate sheds this spring on two separate automatic feeders.

We have renovated an old calf shed to handle a new feeder and we hope to put 100 replacement heifer calves for ourselves in this shed. We will put 50 pedigree bull calves into the older shed with the older automatic feeder.

We can then run the heifers and bulls on separate feed programmes, and on different milk replacer if necessary. This should make it easier to get calves to where we want them to be to wean them early in the season and get them out to grass in April.

The bulls will be pushed on for a bit longer to ensure that they are big enough to work at 15 months of age next year.

The newer calf feeders are very efficient now, even compared with five years ago.

Everything is online now so that calves can be checked from the mobile phone, also the newer electronic tags automatically load the calf on to the system and reduce the need to catch each calf and punch in numbers on the screen.

Hopefully the new one will do at least as good a job as the old one, with a bit less work.

We set up the feeders in sheds with a bit of extra space left for a pallet of milk replacer to be placed in the shed. We also feed full bales of hay to the calves in a small ring feeder to minimise the amount of running around with wheelbarrows and buckets during the busy period.

We have someone organised for night duty again this year to take the pressure off at calving, with a man flying in from Croatia for the busy six weeks.

We will share the cost again with our neighbours, with a jeep left in the yard for him to travel between the two farms every night.

The cost will be the best value for money that either of us will get in our businesses all year.

Read more

Farmer Writes: one dead and another with a bizarre ailment

Farmer Writes: New Zealand farmers hung out to dry over water