IT’S LIKE THIS...
a lot lighter and younger, that problem has been virtually eliminated.
We plan to scan the cows this coming week.
As soon as they are scanned, we will start sorting them. Since the cows rearing heifer calves will be grazed separately from those rearing bulls, any that haven’t already been segregated will be done now.
Fighting
We do an additional sorting of the bull calves, by age.
We finish all our males as bulls under 16 months so, by sorting them by age at this stage while they are still running with the cows, it avoids any fighting.
If we mixed them after weaning when they are a lot stronger, it tends to be more stressful on them.
Cows that are scanned not in calf will be put with the cull cows.
We also faced the usual anxious wait for the herd TB test.
We had one inconclusive, who will either be sent for slaughter or can be retested in 42 days.
We hope to get some fertiliser out on grass this week. Better late than never.
Some urea will be spread on the silage ground and we will start off with probably 2 CWT 18-16-12 per acre on the grazing ground.
I plan to do work on some of the paddocks.
A few fields that were re-seeded last year had been in paddocks. We took down the wires to reseed so I am planning to put back up those wires and put in a few extra paddocks.
We are trying to set them up, roughly, as paddocks that will be grazed in two days.
So, instead of 5, 6 or even 7 paddocks in a rotation, I hope we will have 8 or 9.
We weighed our beef heifers a few weeks ago. They averaged 547kg, at an average age of 523 days.
At the moment, they are on 8kg barley, wheat, oats and molasses plus 12kg of good quality first cut silage plus .5kg straw. I think they are well on target to average 360kg carcase, at 20 months.
Hopefully, there will be a price lift between this and then.