Busy Week! - New Arrivals!

Hi again y'all! Cannot believe it is Friday already! This farming-lark is seriously exhausting! Nah, just kidding - we have nothing to grizzle about, especially when we think of the farmers who struggled through the major snowstorm, seeing thousands of dollars of potential income being destroyed by Mother Nature.

We have been trying to monitor Beefy's health as he tries to recover from scours - a jab bought at the vet, plus some electrolytes, has given him a bit of a boost but he is still quite weak.  He is being hand-fed with calf milk powder: this morning he only drank half and then wanted to feed from Daisy as well (but I think he was too weak to really get much off her), but tonight he drank all of his two litres and was quite stonkered!



Pippi is still feeding well off Daisy (who is continuing to be mostly cooperative about heading into the shed for feeding) - Pippi is a real slurper (makes more noise when feeding than Kieran does!). Big breakthrough with Daisy's calf Ginge - he is now letting us stroke him while in the shed, although still a bit suspicious of us.



Ruby



Yesterday Brian and Kieran fetched our two new girls - two Highland cattle cows - from Lachie and Leigh Smith's stud (can't think of the special Scottish word for such a farm) at Gorge Road. Both girls are a lovely shade of ginger and suitably hairy, with horns. (Of course, that's not to say all Scottish girls are ginger, hairy or horny! Please keep all rude comments to yourselves!)

The one-year old, who we've called Kiltie and the plan is to breed from her, made an immediate impression by breaking her horn on the stock crate, leaping over the stock crate to get out of the trailer, leaping over the farm-gate, galloping to the next gate and leaping that as well (cracking the top wooden rail in the process)! So is she a highland dancer or what? She ended up in the calf paddock so we decided that was better than out on the road and have left her there to calm down and get used to the change in situation.

Lachie thinks she may have been stressed by having been in such close quarters with the older cow (Ruby is two years old and these kind of cattle have quite a hierarchy going on). Ruby is wary of us too but was much calmer once off the trailer (maybe it was Bri's driving that they didn't like?) Ruby is destined for gracing our table.
We had hoped to get Kiltie to wander back over to the paddock Ruby was in but Kiltie seemed blind to the open gate and it ended up being Ruby that wandered through to the cow paddock.  So now all our bovines are in the same paddock and seem to be all content with each other (although Ruby spent much of the morning following Daisy around - most likely only wanting to ask her why she's not wearing a fur coat too!)