Wednesday 16 February 2011
When we first put Ferdinand with the herd in December 2009 he was eighteen months old and keen. Boy, was he keen. Here he was, a mere youth, given free-rein with sixty or more willing girlfriends all interested in having his babies. He got a little over-enthusiastic and within a month or so he’d hurt his back – well, he was only little in comparison to some of our taller ladies. At the time he could really have done with a box to stand on! We worried for a while that he wouldn’t recover and we’d have to resort to artificial insemination for the herd again. However, a couple of months of relative inactivity helped and it wasn’t long after that he was straight back on the job.
Consequently, we had a flurry of calvings in August/September/October then they more or less stopped except for the odd one or two. Dan and Gordon have calculated that March will be really, really busy with the majority of the herd due to calve then. We had one this morning (very handsome bull calf), one yesterday morning (very beautiful heifer calf) and one the morning before that (also a bull calf). It’s just the beginning they tell me. The heifer calf is being bucket-fed as her mother isn’t particularly interested in feeding her although she is interested in defending her, which can make feeding times interesting. She’s taken to the bucket without any problems so we’ll probably pick her up in a day or so and feed her in the pen. Her mother is another Jenny and we seem to have quite a few calves called Jenny at the moment so have decided to reintroduce some of our ‘lost’ names. Years ago there were probably about thirty different names within the herd but unless the cow has a female the name isn’t passed down. We used to have one called Stephanie after our Stephanie, but she consistently had bull-calves so the new calf will have a name change to Stephanie.
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