I had already mentioned before that we were having more mortality from this year’s bought-in weanlings than for a long time.

Last Saturday, there in the middle of a pen, another one, still warm, lay dead. Luckily, a vet from our specialist practice was available and within half an hour he was on site.

From experience, the sooner a post mortem is done, the better, especially if the hope is that any bacteria from infections are to be isolated out and identified then a delay can make a diagnosis very difficult or even impossible. In this case, this was not an issue. When the vet examined the liver, lung and heart, there in the heart was a very large abscess which presumably led to an aneurism and so, a premature death.

In some ways it was a relief in that it meant we didn’t have to blanket-treat all the bought-in stock with an expensive course of antibiotics and/or respiratory and chlostridial vaccinations. Nevertheless, we are still not sure how much a random, serious infection could have got into the bloodstream and started an abscess that was to prove fatal in the heart.

We spread hydrated lime on the slats in that particular pen and will work our way around all the sheds to at least try and ensure that all in-shed infections are eliminated to the greatest possible extent.

Meanwhile, we had the heaviest rain of the winter on Saturday night/Sunday morning. One of the problems when a yard is slowly improved and developed over the years is that one loses track of where electricity cables, water pipes and drains are actually buried.

Anyway, with the heavy rain, we saw that water from two of the roofs, instead of flowing harmlessly down the ditch, was in fact coming back up one of the outlet pipes and threatening to flood one of the slatted tanks. This was the first slatted house I had built and it was 100ft long with no internal divisions.

To have this flooded would have been a real mess. We put the narrow bucket on the digger and gingerly dug a channel to take the flowing water away. That was fine. We then moved over to see if we could find the source of the problem. Again, we dug gently and uncovered some distance out from the cattle sheds where a junction box for the pipes had become damaged, presumably because of excessive weight going over that area at some stage of relaying yard foundations with heavy trucks bringing in cement or hardcore.

Anyway, we uncovered the old pipes, saw the damage and what needed to be done. We put in an emergency channel to take the water away. We were able to carry on feeding but we need to install a new rainwater disposal system this week. An eventful weekend!