The August Bank Holiday was a busy day for me working with stock. I, with help from the troops of course, brought in a batch of heifers, weighed them and dosed them for worms.

We then batched them according to weight, hooked the cattle trailer on the jeep and proceeded to cart the lightest batch to the land away from the yard. Quads, electric fence posts and reels, as well as battery electric fencers, all had to be carted down first to set up paddocks.

By the time I had my paddocks set up and all the cattle in the field, I had made quite a few trips up and down the road. Something I used to love when I was sixteen and mad for driving, but now I see it just as something that eats into valuable time that I could be using to do something more productive.

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It really makes me appreciate having most of my land in one block.

How and ever, since Dawn was working and I was doing daddy daycare, driving up and down the road with the kids in the jeep wasn’t the worst way to spend a bank holiday.

Clover

As there is still quite a lot of clover in this particular field, along with the best crop of docks that I have ever seen, I closed the heifers up into a small area for the first night, forcing them to eat both grass and clover and hopefully introducing the clover slow enough to avoid bloating.

I let them out into a bigger paddock on Tuesday morning, and all appeared to be well.

My fencing contractor arrived on Tuesday morning also to start constructing the loading pen that I mentioned in the last article and it was a good thing too - because before I managed to get home from work on Wednesday evening, my neighbour very kindly rang me to say that he thought there might be something was wrong with one of my heifers.

He had been working most of the day in the adjacent field and the heifer had spent a lot of time lying on her own with her head down.

My initial thought was she’s bloated from the clover. My second though was, 'Feck that. She’s only in there two days and I now have to go and start gathering her back up again, and at 7pm, willing volunteers to help are usually scarce on the ground'.

Anyways, I did manage to get some help, none of the them were what you’d call willing or volunteers for that matter and two of them were wearing pyjamas (they stayed in the jeep) but between us, we managed to get the batch of heifers gather in to test out the new pen.

Sunburn

The moment I saw her I knew that it wasn’t bloat that was my problem, for which I was thankful. No, my problem was photosensitisation or as most people call it, "sunburn".

All around her eye were swollen and she was obviously in pain. Although commonly known as sunburn, photosensitisation is not really sunburn; it is, however, caused by exposure to UV light.

It generally happens to light coloured animals, ingestion of certain weeds can cause the skin to become sensitive to light and that, coupled with an animal that already has liver damage due to something like liver fluke, can prevent the liver from properly excreting phylloerythrin - a metabolite that can cause skin damage when exposed to sunlight.

Thankfully, in most cases a course of antibiotic, a pain killer and housing the animal in a shed for a week to ten days will usually lead to a full recovery - fingers crossed.

So that’s what we did. She’s now in the shed eating silage and getting injected every evening, but hopefully not for long.