No spare cash puts the focus on the essentials

very easy for dairy farmers to spend money on all the things we need, from fence reels to weed spray, dog tucker to gumboots.

There are even a few grocery items among the shelves of farm supplies. We can book things up at Farm Source and buy now and pay later, sometimes even interest free.

This can be useful when times are tough but don’t forget, later always comes. Normally with the end of the season kind of in sight depending on how dry it is, you might be putting plans in place for drying the herd off and using dry cow therapy.

I see there is even a television ad on at the moment, purporting the benefits of the latest plastic rubbish in DCT applicators. I have never been a great fan of DCT because it strikes me as odd to treat all cows in the herd with an antibiotic regardless of whether they need it or not, and there are penicillin withholding times that can be tricky to manage and also it is very expensive. But if you have a problem with persistent udder infections in your herd dry-cow therapy can be useful.

I hear about strains of bacteria that have mutated and become resistant to nearly all forms of antibiotics causing havoc in hospitals around the world, like the flesh-eating necrotising fasciitis and, more recently, reports of a drug resistant sexually transmitted disease, gonorrhea scaring the medical community.

It makes me wonder if we have lived in the best of times when antibiotics were invented and they still worked because those bugs are pretty good at adapting for survival by developing a resistance to common forms of penicillin.

This leads me to believe that maybe encouraging the cow’s own natural immune system to battle the bugs might be better than blanket treatment, year on year, with expensive antibiotics, and when some cows get mastitis, cull them. Or is that false economy?

‘‘It makes me wonder if we have lived in the best of times when antibiotics were invented and they still worked because those bugs are pretty good at adapting.’’