What would you say to the trendy vegetarian?

March 11, 2012March 11, 2012 / dairymilkmaid / 23 Comments

We just had a young man staying with us who announced he’s become a vegetarian. When I asked why, he said it was because he liked what PETA says about not taking the life of another creature.

I try to be very open-minded but as soon as someone says “PETA says…”, I must admit that the fire doors of my mind slam shut. I was instantly infuriated. Just wanted him to leave but couldn’t say so. Instead, I told him he’d have to go a lot further than giving up chicken, pork and beef burgers.

As the weekend worn on, he ate copious amounts of eggs, dairy and…seafood. Quizzed a little more closely, he said his “vegetarianism” was really for health reasons. I urged him to see a dietician to make sure he has enough iron and vitamin B but he’s okay – he eats corn at least twice a week.

The experience has opened my eyes to the value of nutritional education when it comes to making food and lifestyle choices. Becoming a vegetarian or vegan is trendy. Thinking about supplements and vitamin B12 patches is not. Yet, according to experts cited in Wikipedia, “Poorly planned vegan diets may be low in vitamin B12, calcium, omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin D, iron, zinc, riboflavin (vitamin B2), and iodine.”

What would you say? In the meantime, grab a Coke and enjoy this hilarious clip on trendy diets from Mamamia.

What we feed our dairy cows

March 10, 2012September 22, 2013 / dairymilkmaid / 9 Comments

When I think of feed for our dairy cows, I think of grass. Unlike cows in much colder climates, ours live in the paddocks all year round and pasture is the “bread and butter” of their diets. Really, apart from hay baled in the summer and fed out in the depths of winter, that’s all our cows used to eat when I was a kid.

Everything changed, though, when a vicious drought desiccated Australia in 1982/83. That year, a massive dust storm blanketed Melbourne, ensuring that even inner-city dwellers felt the searing fury of mother nature. Like their neighbours, Mum and Dad cut every expense they could, right down to cancelling their newspaper subscription.

In desperation, they turned to grain to supplement the cows’ diets. And never looked back. We’re lucky in Australia to have such great wheat growers practically on our doorsteps. With grain at reasonable prices, we are able to buffer our cows from mother nature’s tantrums, keeping our cows well-fed, no matter whether it rains too much or too little. It also means our cows are able to produce more milk from less land – something that’s increasingly important as the population continues to climb.

Just as I created a breakfast for Zoe with the right building blocks of protein, fibre and carbs this morning, we offer the cows fibre, starch, protein and energy in the form of hay, silage and GM-free grain to top up their grass. So yes, Australian dairy cows are still pasture-fed but, these days, their diet has just a little added variety.

Night sacrifice ritual on farm

March 8, 2012 / dairymilkmaid / Leave a comment

Just in case you hear it from Zoe, I thought I’d better come clean: we do a nightly sacrifice here on the farm.

Where the nightly sacrifice is held

It looks innocent enough because it is! This paddock and a couple of others are being renovated with new seed this autumn and, in the meantime, we keep sending the cows back there night after night for their silage and hay – in other words, we are sacrificing the pasture. Aside from naturally building the fertility levels ahead of sowing, this allows us to give the other paddocks longer rests so there’s more high quality grass for the cows to eat during the day.

(PS: since we’re not biodynamic farmers, we are not governed by lunar cycles so you won’t catch us out in the dark doing strange things in the moonlight, either ;))

Where is our farm? Where are we?

March 7, 2012 / dairymilkmaid / 2 Comments

We’ve just hit our fourth anniversary of running the farm since Dad died and what a rollercoaster ride it’s been. Cockchafers, collapsing fences, drought, floods, a new water system, massive pasture renovations, the global financial crisis and a new baby as well as the loss of Wayne’s father.

The farm looks great. Matt, our farm consultant, visited on Monday and said that with the exception of a rapid yard wash system, we have all the “physicals” just about right. We should be jubilant but we’re too tired for any sort of celebration.

As opposed to the “physicals”, the “financials” are still tight and there’s no prospect of a holiday.

“When do I get to experience the farm lifestyle everyone talks about?” was Wayne’s question. “We don’t seem to be getting anywhere.”

Matt’s colleague, John Mulvany, has drawn up a hilarious (but serious) farmer lifecycle chart and we are firmly seated in the FCTF TAF section. As such, we’ve only had six days off in the last year and three of them were while I was in the labour ward!

We decided it was time to rewrite our Farm and Family Plan. Like any other family business, it’s impossible to separate the two. We’ll look at where we are now, what we’ve achieved and our targets for the next 18 months. Top of the list is one day off per month!

What farm fanatics do

March 4, 2012March 4, 2012 / dairymilkmaid / 3 Comments

My little red book is indispensable

If ever you see a farmer crawling around in the grass, it’s not because she’s convinced she’s a cow. She’s a fanatical leaf counter. One of my weekly rituals is a “farm tour”. I stop at almost every paddock with my little red (easier to spot in the grass than the classic black) book and get counting.

It’s the best way I can be sure there’s just the right amount of grass ahead of the cows and answer the questions of our farm consultant when he visits (see you tomorrow, Matt!).

This little book is also whipped out every time I notice a cow who needs treatment, to record the specs of a punctured tyre or even a BIG IDEA.

I should be able to remember all this stuff but with two littlies, a farm and an every-now-and-then desk job, life flashes by too quickly these days. On second thoughts, if you do see me crawling around, nose to the grass, I could just have gone crazy!

Not just an old tree

March 3, 2012March 3, 2012 / dairymilkmaid / 6 Comments

With hands and faces stained purple, my brother and I perched in this old tree every summer of my childhood. The exquisite mulberries were just reward for a hard day’s labour in the scorching heat filling sacks with buttery yellow ragwort flowers.

I looked forward to hoisting Zoe up that very same tree this year but the tradition will stop with me.

She has at last succumbed

The tree has writhed across the landscape ever since I can remember but now she has a hideous crack right up the base of her trunk that must have made life not just tough but impossible. Normally, she would be covered in heart-shaped leaves hiding almost black fruit in early March. Instead, just a handful of leaves remain even though thousands of buds seem poised to burst open with new life.

She was the last productive member of an ancient orchard Dad told me was planted by the farm’s settlers before they realised it was an island on a floodplain. The house was later built a few hundred yards away, reached only by the worst floods. She could well be 100 years old.

Her death brings the cycle of life into stark focus. My Dad and brother are gone; Zoe and Alex walk beside me these days. When Zoe turned one, we planted a mulberry tree in the garden to celebrate. It has borne its first fruit this year.

Have you seen a cow with blood all over her udder?

March 2, 2012 / dairymilkmaid / 2 Comments

When Zoe’s city cousins came to visit the other day, they were horrified to see one of our cows with a crimson udder. “Oh my God, she’s bleeding!” cried one of the boys.

Painted but not quite like this Picasso Cow (thanks to Libby Lambert for the pic!)

“No, it’s okay, she’s just painted,” laughed Zoe.

They were almost as astonished by Zoe’s reply as they were horrified by the thought of all the bleeding.

Why do dairy farmers paint cows?
We buy paint for cows in bulk. We use orange to denote a freshly calved cow still producing colostrum, blue when we want to keep an eye on a cow for some reason, red when she’s undergoing treatment and green once the treatment is complete.

The red paint is a warning to everyone who milks the cow – first, she needs treatment and, second, her milk must not enter the vat. Instead, it is collected in a separate bucket and discarded. Thankfully, Australia’s food safety regulations are very stringent and no trace of antibiotics may be present in milk.

You might also see cow’s backbones right near their tails painted different colours. But that’s a story for mating season.

I just found out about greenhouse gases on my dairy farm

March 2, 2012 / dairymilkmaid / 3 Comments

Well, that was an interesting exercise. Gillian Hayman took all our farm data and produced some colourful charts with the Dairy Greenhouse Gas Abatement Strategy calculator. Like most animal-centred farms, the vast majority of our emissions come from the methane burped up by the cows.

Where our greenhouse gases come from

In total, our farm produced 13.3T CO2e per tonne of milk solids in 2010/11 – quite a bit above the average 10.2T CO2e per tonnes of milk solids recorded by the DPI Farm Monitor Project of 2009/10. Why is it so? Ironically, it could well be because our cows eat so much grass rather than grain.

So, what should a dairy farmer do?
According to the authorities:

“Production improvement options and best management practices are most often linked to greenhouse gas emissions reduction. At present, well managed farms have few options to reduce emissions without significant changes to their farming or feeding system…A great deal of research is underway within the Australian dairy industry to decrease the release of methane and nitrous oxide from farming systems.”

In the meantime, we will keep planting trees and be judicious with our fertiliser use.

Why would an average Aussie give farms a second thought?

February 28, 2012 / dairymilkmaid / 3 Comments

What does the average Aussie think of Australian dairy farming? Apparently, not much. They’re happy that their milk and other dairy foods are exceptionally safe and high quality and that’s about it. They know they are blissfully ignorant and most are happy to keep it that way.

This was the message from Neilson’s Courtney Sullivan when she addressed the Australian Dairy Conference last week. She’d selected some drawings made by milk drinkers to give us an insight into their thinking. A cow with eight teats and two udders produced milk that somehow got to a factory, then a warehouse, then into a massive shopping trolley that finished up in a massive house.

So, why are you here reading a dairy farmer’s blog, dear reader? You are obviously an exception from the norm and I’m very pleased that you are so far from average (still, it is very rare to meet an average Australian, who shares a home with 1.6 others and one-third of a dog).

Apparently, the Australian Year of the Farmer believes that the average Canberran family gets excited about loyalty cards when they think of farmers. Victoria Taylor took her family to the Canberra Show last weekend and you’d be amazed to read her blog post about the experience and the lasting impression made by the Australian Year of the Farmer stand.

Love to hear your thoughts on what makes farming interesting to those not currently up to their boots in it!

Making up for the heat

February 26, 2012 / dairymilkmaid / Leave a comment

Do you tend to eat less in the heat? I do and so do our cows. This is the third day of hot weather here and there’s another on its way.

Once the mercury rises over about 25 degrees Celsius, the cows begin to find it uncomfortable. We’ve sent them to a shady paddock for the day and to make up for the fact that they’ll spend most of it under the spreading branches of the willows, we’ve also changed their feed pattern.

A cool spot for a hot day

According to the gurus at Cool Cows:

Cows will eat less overall, so increase the energy density of your diet where possible. More starch or added fat can be useful tools.

The risk of ruminal acidosis is increased during hot weather by several factors:

Cows prefer to eat in “blocks” in the cooler times of the morning and evening each day in hot weather;

Cows tend to select against low quality forage/fibre; and

The natural buffering system the cow relies on to combat ruminal acidosis does not work as well in hot weather.

Feeding of a high quality fibre source in the diet that helps maintain a stable rumen, but still contributes energy rather than just gut fill, is therefore essential in hot weather. For high-producing herds already being fed plenty of starch via grain / concentrates, this is particularly crucial.

Recent research work in Arizona (where they know a bit about heat!) suggests that heat stressed cows switch metabolism and have an increased need for glucose within their bodies. Feedstuffs and feeding strategies that either provide the cow with more glucose or spare the amount she uses in her normal body processes may therefore be useful in hot weather.

For these reasons, they’re getting some extra grass tonight in a fresh new paddock. What about the farmers? Lots of refreshing baths for baby Alex, the minimum of farm chores and an early morning sojourn into the cool forest.