As we all know (especially ourselves in the last while) if you’ve cattle out, they occasionally take hedges as a suggestion instead of an instruction. This time, however, the shoe was on the other foot – as we had a couple of unexpected visitors come calling one evening. Surprisingly, for the little amount of patience I usually have when dealing with people, I have it in bucket-loads when working with cattle – especially if there’s a genuine reason for their escape. This was the case here, as one of them was simply looking for a romantic liaison, though she seemed quite content with one of the in-calf ladies to jump on.

As long as nobody working with me spontaneously explodes due to the amount of softly spoken expletives coming from my general direction I can keep my head, as cattle will always react better to a gentle tone of voice even if you’re calling them every name under the sun. After traipsing up, down and around the meadow more times than I could count, we finally got them split apart and back to their respective places, though every tick in the surrounding fields must have found me, as I discovered later.

I presumed that adventure would bring our last two cows into calving after all their exercise, but they certainly know how to drag things out with us still waiting for their calves to arrive. In typical fashion they’ll probably both decide to calve at the same time instead of being considerate and spacing them out.

As long as there’s not a third caesarean to contend with, as predictably our Blue heifer needed a sunroof exit for her calf. With the bull being unknown for his calving difficulty, though his breeding suggested about average, we gave her the usual hour after the first bag to see how she’d progress and though she certainly tried her best, once I handled her I had a fair indication of what the vet would have to say.

Thankfully it went like clockwork, and even before all the stitching was completed the calf was up walking around looking for a feed. The heifer took to her immediately, which is all one could look for in that situation, though her future here remains unknown for the moment as to my eye (or to be more exact, my hand) she has a narrower pelvis than ideal. As I joked to one of my friends, I could serve her with a sexed Jersey straw and revert to having a house cow along with an acre of spuds in case the world goes to hell in a handbasket.

Elsewhere on the farm things have been running smoothly, breeding has typically started off with one repeat on an older cow but as she’s one of our better breeders she’ll get a couple more chances and so far the others have held.

The remainder of our slurry was spread for a second cut if we feel like taking one but as it stands we have enough silage made to just about cover us for winter, with three more fields baled last week and another two we’ve left with the hope of making hay next month. The extra two weeks of growth certainly bulked up the bales per acre though it might be at the expense of quality.

The creep feeder was introduced to take some pressure off the cows as grazing was becoming scarce. As we’re in no environmental schemes, pasture was topped early while ground conditions were perfect unlike some previous years. Almost as soon as it was dropped, three calves were inside it and the remainder followed in the next couple of days. A quality high-protein nut is our usual go to, and the calves appear to agree, with the trough emptied every morning.