Floods, bogs and mud, mud, mud

July 22, 2011July 22, 2011 / dairymilkmaid / 3 Comments

Partial view of the flood from the house this morning

The rain came…again. Yesterday, Yarram airport received 48.5mm and today, all the roads to town are closed, a third of the farm is cut off with at least another four paddocks underwater and the car is still sitting bogged in the driveway. Thankfully, the house is nice and high, so no sand bags needed (but thanks for the offer, Julie and Doug)!

Most of this is a temporary inconvenience. The good news is that the local rivers are short and empty into the sea quickly, so the roads should be open again in the next day or so. More important is the longer lasting issue of saturated pastures and muddy tracks.

Saturated pastures (they were already saturated before this jolly east coast low pressure system decided to pay us a visit) are very vulnerable. The damage done now by cows’ hooves will cause compaction of the soil so that, come summer, water will run off rather than soak in and roots will find it harder to penetrate the soil, exposing them to heat and denying them sub-surface moisture. If you’re a gardener, you’ll understand!

Muddy pastures and tracks are also a perfect recipe for lameness and mastitis, both painful conditions that are difficult and expensive to treat.

Of course, sopping wet soil is also no good for growing grass, which means we must step up our imported feed. This means more cost, long days and heavy tractors on fragile pastures.

Those weather gods need an urgent performance review so they can refocus on their KPIs!

A day in the life of an Australian dairy farming family

May 22, 2011May 22, 2011 / dairymilkmaid / 7 Comments

I kept a time log yesterday. Here’s how our busy but not unusual day went.

5.00am Wayne hops on the quad bike to round up the cows and slowly and quietly bring them to the dairy

5.45am Milking starts

6.30am Marian hits her desk to catch up on paperwork before Zoe wakes and checks the online forecast. All three computer models agree there’s a little rain coming tomorrow. Better get the nitrogen onto those paddocks we just grazed early tomorrow morning!

8.15am Milking’s finished and the cleaning begins

8.30am Zoe and Marian shift the effluent irrigator, fill the pump with petrol and get it going.

Time to shift the irrigator

9.00am Marian and Zoe arrive on the Bobcat to give Papa a kiss and cuddle before we head off to feed the springers grain and anionic salts. The new calf spotted being born last night is a baby bull, who will be reared by one of our neighbours. We bring him and his mother back to the shed.

Anionic salts (Zoe pic)

9.30am The milking machines, the yards and the vat room are spotless.

9.40am The three of us walk a couple of cows across the road to start their annual two-month holiday before they calve.

Cows going on holiday

9.45am Wayne feeds three rolls of silage to the milkers

10.10am Zoe and Marian bring back two cows from the holiday paddock to join the springers in the TLC paddock.

10.45am Zoe and Marian refill the effluent pump and set it off again

Refuel pump again! (Zoe pic)

10.55am We all meet up again to feed the youngest calves and muck out pens. Discover one is sick and Wayne heads off to town to get treatment for her and refill the jerry cans.

11.30am Zoe and Marian are starving. Lunch time!

12.50pm Treat the sick calf and muck out more pens while Wayne welds up a broken gate in the dairy

1.20 pm Wayne’s off to feed silage to the dry cows, calves and heifers. Zoe and Marian take a look at the heifers to see if any should join the springers. We decide to do a big sort out in one to two weeks.

1.40 pm Refuel the effluent pump and get it running again

1.50 pm Load up 10 buckets of grain to feed to the youngest of the one-year-old calves. They are very happy to see us!

Grain for calves (Zoe pic credit)

2.30 pm Check a new pasture on the way back

Check new pasture

2.40 pm Quick snack and conflab with Wayne. 15 minutes later, we go off to round up while he feeds our maremmas, Charlie and Lola, and takes a bit of a break before milking.

Rounding up

4.10 pm Finally get all the cows into the yard – Wayne’s already got the first 32 cows milked. The cows were in one of the furthermost paddocks from the dairy, we had to set up paddocks along the way and deal with a broken fence. Also discovered a major water leak 😦

4.20 pm Equipped with tools, start prodding around in the mud.
Zoe’s taking pics now while Mama makes a mess.

Mama looks for the leak

Oops! Zoe’s got a bootful but let’s make it funny.

After a boot full of water

The cows crowd around us on their way back to the paddock.

5.06 pm The Eureka Moment! An old (but still connected) water line has burst a fitting.

Unearthed the blasted leak

5.10 pm Outta there.

5.15 pm Set the travelling effluent irrigator on a new path, refuel pump and pull the rip cord!

5.35 pm Marian and Zoe home at last!

6.25pm Wayne’s home from milking. The end of a big day.

Weeds are part of my master plan

May 17, 2011 / dairymilkmaid / Leave a comment

Marshmallow is just one of the weeds to take off this season

“Weeds are part of my master plan” sounds like a phrase the Dr Evil of Dairy might use, doesn’t it?!

We’ve had a brilliant summer and autumn, which has made the grass and, ahem, the weeds, grow like crazy. Of course, there’s always a silver lining to every cloud and we’re seeing this as an opportunity to eradicate large banks of seed that has acccumulated over time without germinating.

Naturally, the weeds grow best on our best land, the river flats. The flats are next on my list of priorities for renovation and I don’t want new pastures overhwhelmed with thistles, nettles and other unpalatable – or even toxic – weeds.

The flats are rich, deep alluvial soils that retain moisture well during dry times yet drain well during wet times. They get us through summer and their pastures are always the quickest to recover but because the grass species are so old, quality is sometimes lacking.

Still, I’m a little reluctant to renovate them for a few reasons:

1. We rely on them being productive while our drier slopes are close to dormant over summer
2. They do flood and I don’t want to risk erosion
3. We need to be careful not to disturb the balance of soil life

The answer will be to temper my enthusiasm a little, take it gently, and renovate just a couple of our delicious river flat paddocks at a time.

Watching grass grow really is exciting

April 25, 2011April 26, 2011 / dairymilkmaid / Leave a comment

We’ve been preparing for this for two years now. The house paddock has been limed to manage its acidity, soil tested, fertilised to balance the nutrients, treated with effluent and deep ripped to improve its water storage capacity. Since then, we’ve had it sprayed with a biodegradeable weed-killer, disced, sown with perennial ryegrass seed and rolled. It’s a big investment, which is why I’ve been patrolling the paddock almost constantly.

And look!

The house paddock on April 25

Here it was on April 13, just under a fortnight ago:

The house paddock on April 13

Now all we need to do is watch out for ravenous creepy crawlies and apply some nitrogen once it gets a little more established.

Gasp: the cows love fescue (and I do too)

April 24, 2011November 8, 2011 / dairymilkmaid / 2 Comments

The cows really seem to prefer the Advance tall fescue over ryegrass

I’m beginning a clandestine (well maybe I’m coming out of the closet with this blog) love affair with fescue and cocksfoot. Our Gippsland dairy farm has always relied on a combination of ryegrass and clover, although prairie grass loves to volunteer. Because the weather patterns have changed so much, I’ve started to experiment with other pasture types.

We sowed the aptly-named swamp paddock with Advance tall fescue last year. It doesn’t mind waterlogging and produces massive volumes of feed in summer – just when the swamp paddock can withstand grazing without getting pugged. I’d had the paddock sown to an annual ryegrass which reshot and seemed to overwhelm it, so had the whole lot sprayed out with glyphosate. To my delight, the ryegrass was knocked out and the fescue has come back in force.

The cows seem to love Advance. I had them in the adjacent paddock of gorgeous perennial ryegrass but when I lifted the fence to let them into the rear of the still partially inundated swamp paddock, they rushed in and stayed there to eat the fescue.