Happy Birthday to the MySparkie/HeroDogs Blog!

Fun fact: This blog is now five years old. I first posted on 21 January 2012. 145 posts and a name change later, it’s still here!

 

It amazes me the amount of people who own/work with cattle, and yet are clueless about how to handle them. From the farmworker two farms ago who had zero patience with cows and so terrified them with his roughness and loudness, to the neighbour whose Hereford steer broke through a fence into our calf paddock the other day because he was scared and alone and being chased too hard by a motorbike. There is a fine line between too gentle and too rough with semi-tamed and mostly wild cattle, and hardly anyone seems to know where it is. Too gentle and they ignore you, too rough and they panic.

After last week’s pleasant coolness, we had a weekend heatwave. Today it was forecasted to be 30. Well, it had already hit 32 by 10am and I was soaked with sweat feeding out hay and silage to the cows even with the air-conditioning in the tractor. The temperature is finally dropping now as the rain arrives, and a cool breeze is coming in my window, carrying the beautiful smell of rain on hot ground.

Trivial Details

Two weeks and three days into January. Nothing much to say really, but I said I’d post more regularly so here I am, posting some trivial details about the weather and what’s up on the farm.

 

We haven’t actually had much of a summer yet and we’re already over halfway through it. There’s been some warm weeks but only a few scorching days, and a lot of cooler weather.

 

Harvesting season is finished now, I think, although there might be one more paddock they’re planning to do at some point. They finally took the bulls out of the heifer and milking herds last week, so our calves (now seven and eight month olds) get to safely share a paddock with the heifers during the day. But unfortunately it seems the sick cow “Stray” didn’t make it.

 

What else? Skuggi’s doing good in his training. We went to George Taylor’s (farming/camping supply store) yesterday and he was amazing. We’re hopefully starting dog school again next month to keep up his socializing and confidence with other dogs.

 

We’re planning to start collecting firewood at the end of this month, in preparation for winter. Last winter we had only a week or so once we arrived here to collect wood before the rain hit, making everything not undercover too wet to burn. And it was a very long, very cold winter where the fire burned all day every day and the heater at night.

Hello, Summer

Well, this is 2017. I’ve been posting less and less on this blog over the past four years, with 56 posts in 2012 but only 16 by 2016. Hopefully this year it will go up again.

 

The first week of the year has been fairly uneventful. The money situation is slowly improving. This sudden summer heat is incredibly draining and we have no air-conditioning at this house.

 

Farm life is probably the most interesting thing to report on this week and I realize I haven’t said much about it lately.

 

We’ve got bulls in with the milking herd at the moment and they are making things very difficult. Not all of them respect people. Recently I was rounding up the cows on foot and one of the Jersey bulls started roaring and walking towards me. I was able to get to the round concrete water trough before he reached me, and for about fifteen minutes he stalked me around the trough, bellowing, before Daddy came back with the motorbike and scared him off. Now I always take a stick I can smack them with if they start threatening me.

 

There are several cats up at the cow shed, but they are much more wild than the farm cats at Pomborneit.  But still, we’ve given them names like we always do. There’s Fatty Fluffy Catty, Gray, Plastic Cat, Stumpy, and Stumpy’s little black kitten who only just appeared last week and so isn’t named yet.

 

There is a young cow, “Stray,” who got scours last month and within a week had lost so much weight she looked like a skeleton with skin, and for a while I thought she would not survive. She was treated, but her condition went up and down a few times. By December 30, poor Stray looked like she would not live to see the new year. Her eyes sunk in, she was dragging her feet, she didn’t even have the strength to hold her own head up. But she is still here. We’ve stopped milking her but still bringing to the shed for grain, and she’s slowly putting weight back on, getting her strength back. Fingers crossed she pulls through.

 

Yesterday morning at 6am I was on top of the highest point on the farm, looking out at the sunrise. The air was already warm and the flies had woken up early because of it. About a quarter of the herd had escaped through an open gate at the top of the hill, taking an extra half hour to collect. By 8:30am, with milking finished and just the cleaning up to do, it was too warm for my sweatshirt. Another hour and a half, and I’d shed my beanie and waterproof overalls. It reached 37 degrees that afternoon.

Today, it was 30 degrees by 10am. Yay summer.