Animal Health and Welfare

Animal welfare is not just about dairy farmers doing the right thing

/ dairymilkmaid / 4 Comments

“If not appropriately handled, animal welfare concerns could threaten the long-term viability of several livestock industries. Even though the industries operate within their legislated requirements, there is a real risk they could lose public acceptance.”

This excerpt reportedly from a brief by the Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry Department for the incoming Minister Ludwig makes sense. Farmers don’t have a monopoly on caring about animals and everyone has a right to feel comfortable that the food they’re eating is ethical. At the moment, much of that is based on trust that we farmers will do the right thing but when that trust is sufficiently shaken, Aussies will understandably demand that we are made to do the right thing.

In the wake of the Indonesian cruelty revelations, who could blame urban Australians for asking more questions about animal welfare, whether at the abattoir on the farm? Rather than being defensive about farming practices, I think it’s time to open the “farm gates” and show everyone what really goes on so they can judge how we are doing for themselves.

That blasted bull just had to go

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It was with a sense of triumph that Clarkie and I closed the gates behind the tall bull today.

As you may have gathered, I’m a bit of a softie and almost always feel a pang of regret selling one of our animals but Tall Bull is going to market and will not be missed. This Friesian monster towers over cows and our other bulls, gallops like a racehorse and leaps fences like a showjumper. He’s also (pardon the pun) a bully. We were awestruck when we saw him toss a Jersey bull over a fence onto the road with a toss of his massive, triangular head.

Recently, he’s just begun moving around the farm at will, too. He’s too cocky to be called safe, too big to sire easy birthing progeny and too uncontrollable to have near people, infrastructure or calves.

The decision to send him away was easy. Getting him on the truck played on my mind a little more. It started off badly. We offered him companions on his walk across the farm to the yards but he rejected them, opting to leap a fence and take on a rival. Thankfully, his speed ended up playing into our hands – he was easy to separate from everyone else because all were left far behind.

A regal presence, certainly, but not a fitting king for our farm. So long, Tall Bull!

When there are just too many mouths to feed

/ dairymilkmaid / 2 Comments

We’ve hit the wall. We’re officially overstocked. The wet season has left too many paddocks out of rotation and we just don’t have enough grass.

Our options are:

1. Keep feeding out large quantities of hay, grain and silage

This is expensive and time consuming. Days are being consumed behind the tractor wheel and the guys are quickly becoming exhausted, even with extra labour. It’s also less than desirable to drive heavy machinery over soft pastures.

2. Sell stock

Not an option either. We need more milkers rather than fewer and a short term sell-off to buy back later is a poor choice – we like to keep a closed herd to reduce the risk of importing disease and so we can be sure of our bloodlines.

3. Find some more land

Our preferred option is to find top quality agistment reasonably locally for our yearlings. That means nice, well fertilised pastures, proper animal welfare practices, shelter, good fences and reliable water. Not easy to find just now, it turns out! For this reason, we’re touring far-flung pockets of Gippsland looking for the ideal home away from home for our little ones.

Any suggestions?

False messiahs of the soil

/ dairymilkmaid / 2 Comments
Oats planted into a deep-ripped paddock

Oats planted into a deep-ripped paddock keep the soil open

There are plenty of people out there at the moment promising farmers an organic/biodynamic/permaculture nirvana. “Use less fertiliser, restore soils, improve animal health and fertility,” they cry. That’s a very attractive set of propositions to a dairy farmer like me and I have been tinkering around the edges, listening, sifting and learning.

Although alternative farming practices have been around for centuries, they’ve never been commercialised and marketed to the mainstream in the way they are today. In my experience, with that marketing has come some very questionable “experts”. I guess it’s like any emerging school of thought – there will be a mix of true visionaries, snake oil salesmen, good practitioners and fools. The trick is to work out who’s who!

Yet it seems almost every proponent of these alternative farming movements does have something to offer. Composting, for example, is a great way to improve the biological health and structure of our soils and this seems to be a universal tenet of all the alternative farming philosophies. It also resonates with me as a gardener. If I could afford to, I would “garden” the entire 500 acres but the intensive treatment we give our veggie plots is not feasible on such a large scale. Whatever we do has to be manageable.

I was all set to do an 11 hectare composting trial this year until a set of logistical nightmares stopped me in my tracks. The plan was to deep rip the soil, add lime and then hay soaked with effluent on one half of the paddock, while using more conventional treatments on the other half. I am almost certain it would have been a great success, so will have another go next season.

I think it will work best on our most troublesome soils. Some parts of the farm have a layer of compacted soil or “hard pan” caused by an acidic reaction, which prevents water from penetrating deeply. This means that those paddocks get very wet soon after rain but dry out extremely quickly. I’m aiming to break down that layer to increase the plant available water capacity of the soil. Paddocks of this type that are due for renovation have been deep ripped, limed and planted to oats, which have long, quick-growing roots. In the last couple of seasons, I’ve found that deep-ripped paddocks planted to long-rooted plants like brassicas and oats have remained more permeable than those planted immediately to rye grass.

I’ll keep on learning more about alternative farming techniques (with ears and eyes open) and gradually trial them on farm.

Beautiful birth

/ dairymilkmaid / 5 Comments
Cow 506 beginning to calve

Cow 506 beginning to calve at 11.50am

By the time I took this photo at 11.50 yesterday, I’d been watching over cow 506 for an hour or so. She’d been showing all the classic signs of a cow about to calve: restlessness, getting up and down. It was a relief to see her labour had progressed. I came back again an hour later to make sure everything was okay and look what I found! Licking her little one with gusto, she looked very comfortable.

Cow 506 licks her newborn at 1pm

Cow 506 licks her newborn at 1pm

Of course, it’s not always this simple. Sometimes the calf is too big, sometimes breech, sometimes the cow herself has a problem. With 340 cows set to calve over the next few months, it’s an anxious time for us.

To make it easier to keep an eye on our ladies, we do a weekly sort-out, drafting cows that are about three weeks from calving out from the rest so they can get extra special TLC in our calving paddock. This paddock is small and close to the house and dairy. We check it three times a day and, if any of the cows look like they’re about to calve, we hop up during the night to check them as well. Some of the signs are a swollen vulva, mucus, tight udder and unusual behaviour. The reality is though that, despite breeding programs meddling with the cow’s biology for thousands of years, almost all of them calve quite easily.

I hate comparing women with cows but, at almost 36 weeks myself, I can’t help wondering why it seems so much more complicated for us!

What is a factory farm?

/ dairymilkmaid / 4 Comments
Zoe with a seed drill from the 50s

Zoe with a seed drill from the 50s

When I was a teenager in the early 1980s, we bought the next-door neighbour’s farm and the one across the road to milk around 180 cows. At the time, it was an impressive herd.

Today, that’s quite small. The average Gippsland dairy farm now milks 265 cows on 130 hectares.

Turns out our farm is almost perfectly statistically average! Like many of our neighbours, we have a full-time employee and engage relief milkers to manage the workload. We no longer cultivate our own paddocks or cut our own hay because the job has just got too big. Instead, a specialist contractor with specialised, ultra-efficient machinery does it for us. Our very average farm of today would have been considered huge back then. Maybe even a factory farm.

Even so, the well-being of our animals has not diminished over time. We care just as much as we ever did and love of the land, the outdoors and our cows is why we farm. And now, thanks to the work of researchers, we are better equipped to keep them fit and healthy.

I don’t know what you’d classify as a factory farm these days but the low price of milk certainly puts us all under pressure to get bigger (and therefore better able to gain more efficiencies). Here in Australia, where cows are “free range” rather than housed and feed-lotted, big farms can be just as animal and environmentally-friendly as average farms like ours on one condition: the people who operate them still care.

Which of these cows is the mother?

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Which is the mother cow?

Which is the mother cow?

This morning, we found a new heifer calf curled up in a corner of the calving paddock. She’d been licked clean but judging by her tucked up sides, she hadn’t had a drink. Why not? Her mum was nowhere to be seen. This is not uncommon – cows often leave their calves in remote spots while they go off to have a feed or a drink, so we got the calf up and tried to attract the mother cow’s attention with our best imitation of plaintive-sounding calf noises (not “moo” but something like “mmmmbeaaaaargh”).

Two aunties immediately rushed over. We call cows that haven’t calved but would love to steal someone else’s poddy an “aunty” and they can be exceedingly convincing. Not this time. They still had bulging bellies and no sign that anything had been recently stretched (IYKWIM). The mother was clearly not particularly maternal and was still waiting for her milk to come in properly.

The only thing to do was to organise a line-up. Cows due to calve within the next three weeks get a daily ration of grain that is half what they’ll get when they rejoin the herd in the dairy, so we spread their breakfast out and did an inspection. Who do you think it was?

Sustainable and cheap food: how does a farmer get there?

/ dairymilkmaid / 2 Comments
On the path to slow food

Slow food versus cheap food conundrum for farmers

Quality food, lowered emissions, biodiversity, soil health, maximum animal welfare, cheap food. So many messages coming from consumer groups, so many implications for how we farm.

Slow Food Australia has a philosophy that resonates with me as a farmer:

“SLOW Food fosters community awareness of food that is good, clean and fair – that the food we eat tastes good and should be good for us; that it is grown and made in ways that respect animals, the environment and our health; and that the producers who grow or create it should be fairly rewarded for their endeavour.

Slow Food Australia’s website also carries a media release that says, “Almost $40 of every $100 spent by Australian households now lands in the cash registers of either Coles or Woolworths”. In light of the milk wars, this is a worrying statistic. While Coles denies the price cuts will be passed on to farmers, Woolworths admits they will. Even consumer advocate group, Choice, agrees farmers will bear the brunt. It’s hard to imagine that any company wielding that amount of market power won’t put pressure on suppliers to lower costs, which will inevitably flow on to those with the least market power – farmers.

The milk wars will have their greatest impact on farmers in states like Queensland, Western Australia and New South Wales but the story is no more rosy in my state, Victoria. According to official figures, most of the state’s dairy farms have a return on investment of 1 to 3 per cent, forcing a focus on financial survival.

Our farm is similarly affected. We want to improve the farm, so Wayne and I are both holding down second jobs. The plan is that these improvements will make the farm more profitable and sustainable. We are making progress but farm life is currently anything but sustainable from a personal point of view. You just can’t work this many hours forever.

So what’s the answer? For our family farm, in the short-term, it means no compromise on milk quality or animal welfare, while planting as many trees as we can afford. At the same time, we invest in anything that will make the farm more efficient and profitable.

In the long term, it means incorporating more and more organic principles into our farming methods and marketing our own milk directly to consumers who appreciate what we’re trying to achieve. The problem is that none of this comes cheaply and is out of the reach of most farmers (including us, right now).

If consumers really do care about sustainable food, driving prices “Down, down, down” is not the way to make it happen.

Heifers, bulls and fear

/ dairymilkmaid / 3 Comments

Today, we drenched and vaccinated the most dangerous animals on the farm: heifers and bulls.

At two years old and weighing about 500kg each, the heifers are as skittish as teenagers and have no concept of their own might. They’re not used to being yarded and react quickly and unpredictably in the unfamiliar environment.

Bulls, on the other hand, are well aware of their power and are quite prepared to use it. As we rounded them up, one neatly threw a competitor over (or through) a five-foot fence with a toss of his head. A timely reminder to treat them with respect.

We used an oral rather than a pour-on drench because it’s been so much more effective for our animals this year. The warm, wet season has been ideal for worms. The 7 in 1 vaccine we used protects us from a debilitating disease called leptospirosis and the animals from a suite of nasties.

Drenching and vaccinating the lot of them in one day was really the only way to do it, even though it amounted to a rather daunting task that quite literally took two hours of blood, sweat and tears to accomplish. Still, it was worth it. They might be the most dangerous animals on the farm but they are its future.

Where there’s mud, there’s mastitis

/ dairymilkmaid / 8 Comments
The track with one fence moved in and one more to do

The track with one fence moved in and one more to do

“Where there’s mud, there’s money,” is the old farming adage but I’m a bit of a contrarian. Where there’s too much mud, there’s also lameness and mastitis.

Muddy tracks to and from the dairy hit cows with a double whammy: they soften the hoof and then coat it with the perfect breeding ground for nasty bugs. It’s heart-breaking to see a cow hobble along, so we rest lame cows and, if their hoofs become infected, treat them with antibiotics.

Mud also contributes to mastitis, a painful infection that afflicts cows and women alike. Dairy farmers have been tackling mastitis for decades from practically every angle. We can choose sires based on the resistance of their daughters to mastitis, have learned that being quiet around cows makes them less prone to infection and developed new detection and treatment techniques. We know exactly how much mastitis is in the herd: the milk processors give us daily test results as part of their stringent milk quality standards and if our milk shows evidence of too much mastitis, we are paid less.

Dairy Australia’s web site offers some great tips on combatting both lameness and mastitis. One of the recommendations is to get cow tracks in order.

Ours aren’t bad but they could be better. One 400 metre section in particular has the fences set too far back from the gravel of the track and some cows like to walk along the sides, which quickly turn to slosh. Today, we’re moving the fences in. It’s a pretty simple job that should save us a lot of grief when winter comes.