More births at the Dent-ed Barn
9-months ago(ish) we offered to look after some friends cattle on a temporary basis. With the cattle that arrived at The Dent-ed Barn, was a young bull. He was a handsome wee fellow who clearly had an eye for our 2-year old heifers. I say clearly as he sadly died whilst trying to get through a fence, escaping a flood; but his legacy lives on. In fact, his legacy lives on 5-fold in the form of Universe, Venice, ANZAC, Pitch and Waffles!
As you will already know form our previous Blog, our most tame heifer, Brindle had twins. A bull and a heifer. We believe she was one of twins (we ended up with both) but the other remained empty. This is common among twins and as such, the empty twin has now left the farm.
On the 25th April (Last Tuesday), our small Red Devon gave birth to a jet black bull calf. Appropriately, he is named ANZAC All Black Barnes (known as ANZAC). For those unaware, 25 April is ANZAC day in Australia & New Zealand. He quickly gained confidence to be away from mum and hangs out most of the day with the twins. As with most babies, he goes searching for his mother when he’s hungry or in need of shelter.
Next to arrive was ‘Pitch’, a jet black heifer out of our black ‘Blacky’ 3-year old. She is quieter than Anzac but then she is only 36-hours old so I suppose we should give her time to get into the swing of things.
Finally, today saw the arrival of Waffles – or burnt waffles if you ask our friend Katie! He is from our cream Jersey Heifer, again another 3-year old that we
have had from our first group of bobby calves that were bought when we purchased the farm. He is a dark chocolate brown with a white patched face.
Twins and three strong single babies that were all born without any assistance from Jo or me. We brought the pregnant cows into our ‘home’ paddock which is just in front of the house so we could keep an eye on them. Other than that, no special care was taken of these girls, now mums. This is the way we like it at The Dent-ed Barn, natural birthing without intervention when possible. Hopefully, the cooler weather stays away for another few weeks to allow our babies to grow nice and strong on their mum’s milk.
So, a highly successful calving for our first-time mums. I’m sure that with time, we’ll end up with a nursery of tearaways, all running around as a new-found herd. A sign of things to come is below, as Jo went down to see our new arrival and was promptly 'photo bombed' by Universe. Oh the fun they will have!
The grass is still growing well so we should have a good amount of feed over the winter months. The trick now is to slow them down and reduce the expectation of free-ranging feeding patterns. Wish us luck for the coming months; we’re going to need it.
