The sun is shining and it has been a beautiful day. Consequently our spirits are boosted. The cat stretched out beneath the kitchen window and the dogs played on the lawn. The swallows have arrived next door, so ours shouldn’t be much longer. A bird, as yet unidentified, has put a roof on an old swallow’s nest in the garage. It is a crude effort, with many big pigeon feathers around the opening. Nature has its unsavoury creatures too. The first blue bottle crawled on the kitchen unit.

The thermometer in the calf shed reached 23°C, but fell to 4°C during the night. So it is important to still focus on keeping young calves warm at night. I took the jackets off the older ones as they were bursting at the seams. They bounced around the shed with glee. Then they settled down to groom themselves. Within a short space of time their pelts were curled better than with any curling tongs; their characteristics and colours coming into their own. It’s one of the things I’ve come to love about the crossbred herd. They range from red to roan, red and white to chocolate and back to jet-black. There was a time when I thought that I’d never get used to being without a black and white herd.

Now I love the spectrum of colours. There are still quite a number of black and whites born each year as we breed the Jersey-cross ladies to Holstein-Friesian. Any calf up to three weeks of age still retains its calf coat.

The sunshine was coming into the shed yesterday evening and illuminating the lovely colours. When I looked in over the gates the calves looked up and stood to attention. It was as if they were waiting for something. They were fed and full. Their rumens have been developed with copious amounts of Calfage; a truly wonderful product. We came across it at the Millstreet Dairy Show a number of years ago. It is lovely to see them cudding away happily. What they need now is grass. If this nice weather keeps up we will have them out in no time. Philip put up a training fence in two of the pens over the weekend and every so often there’s a loud belly roar when an inquisitive calf gets a shock.

COLM RETURNING

Colm will be returning from his travels next week and both Tim and I will breathe a sigh of relief. The trouble is that after a week of this sunshine, the farm and farmyard will look entirely different and Colm will wonder what hardship we were talking about. Just after one day’s sunshine the circumference of puddles and pools has receded.

The milk lorry came early this morning and instead of two mucky wheel prints all the way out the drive there are two multi-patterned raised prints drying fast. They might someday become a fossil and tell a story of compaction by a heavy vehicle with patterned tyres. It might even tell a tale of unusual weather events of the time.

So instead of hardship, Colm will return to grass coming fast ahead of the cows. The meal feeding will have finished. About 30 calves will be ready to go out. Slurry will have been spread, fertilizer will have been applied. But he will notice some damage under foot in the fields. Should he dare to wonder what we were talking about; Tim will be ready to ponder what he does around the place at all. That should make for a lively discussion around the kitchen table.

That’s probably what we’ve missed most with Colm away. It is great to have a young and enthusiastic brain around the place. He will be full of energy (I hope) and ready to get stuck into breeding the cows. Tim has been pre-breeding heat recording, along with tail paint monitoring. Together we will evaluate how we coped while he was away.

We know that Colm is coming home and that is really nice. It must be difficult for parents to know what to do when sons and daughters have gone away to work with the intention of coming home. One is never quite sure what they might do. The lure of a steady income can appear much more rewarding than the building of equity at home on the farm with the parents. There’s a balance to be struck between working away from home for a while and knowing when to return. Leaving it too long to make the commitment can result in both sides getting despondent. The time to work together might be past and that would indeed be a sad day for both parties. CL