1418 reporting for duty

Time for the bulls to go out, early Dec mating gives us an early Sep start to calving.

I've drifted off calving earlier, an extra month just gives that bit extra breathing space around the seasonal grass growth pattern. Having calves a month live-weight behind is a small price to pay for better herd well-being, and less stress on the Management.

The winter-saved calving paddocks, closed from Jun 1st till Sep 1st, give me time to finish a few more lambs beforehand, the block grows 5-6000 dm by Sep to put the cows on for calving. 

Meanwhile they've run out on the hills till end Jun, come off them before they do too much pug damage into the sidling wintering block, where they'll get balage if they need it, 2 months there, then into the calving block.

So here's 1418, home bred 2yo bull, introduced to his yearling consort. You'll see a flash of white on the heifers, that comes from a Hereford I used over 10 years ago, the odd white head and foot lingers. Apart from the Hereford, haven't used an outside blood bull in over 20 years.

The herd isn't on an official recording system, I keep my own records, and I think things are ticking along quite well.

Here's why.....

Nessa Carey's Junk DNA and The Epigenetics Revolution move one to the view that "what you see is what you get" performance, unadulterated by correction and heritability equations could in fact be the best thing for breeders to be chasing. That outlier corrected out of the hunt by BLUP, could in fact be the individual with the epigenetic modulation of RNA expression to take the flock or herd to the next level of production.

I've devised my own system of cow lifetime production measure, based on mean annual ratio of weight of calf weaned, with penalty of zero for barren, 0.5 for wet/dry, and 0.75 for calf died.

One thing sticks out like the proverbial....

If there's one selection criterion a commercial breeder can hang his hat on, I think its early calving. These cows inevitably have the heaviest calves, and will be the most likely to do it again next year.

I have a selection index for young stock that adds this dam performance to the mean weaning and yearling wt ratio.

Works great......

1418 was 124% for his wng/yrlg ratio, and his dam 114% lifetime calf prod, 238% index.

Drought Aftermath - Back on Track

For many hill breeding farms the aftermath of last summer's extended dry has been a long climb out of, both physically and financially, and for many, the effects will linger for some time still.
Am personally pleased to see our ewes, now just a month off lambing, have regained a respectable liveweight, the 2ths, 48kg at mating April 1 are now 61kg, having gained 13kg in 4 months. Similarly, the MA ewes pictured are upward of 65kg.
Normally, they'd be shorn before lambing, but we had to can it halfway through after a couple went down in the yards with grass staggers, but a bit of quick thinking and a 50ml dose each of calmag avoided any losses.
The hills pastures, shaved bare of rough top and now rejuvenating with a fresh short young sward, are a prime candidate for mineral imbalance. The associated grass staggers, (hypomagnesaemia), is a problem you see more with cattle than sheep, so I'm a bit chuffed at having made the connection with the ewes off pasture for the short time in the yards and after a walk in from the hills.

As luck would have it, or rather by 6th sense, I felt back in Mar/Apr I'd need to make some extended provision for cattle feed should the drought extend right into and even maybe through winter, so I kept 30 acres of hill sidling in reserve. The cows are on this now, munching their way through 6000kg dm/ha nice mature feed, in their 6 week build-up to calving where they'll come down onto the flats to a controlled calving rotation.
Having sold off the hill block the beef herd used to run on 5km up the valley, its taking me some time to work out a suitable management system, but this latest find of summer reserved pasture on sidling country of limited use otherwise, is ace in the hole to get the cows through the critical winter pinch. Theyre not having to compete with the closer grazing ewes, they're not stressing my fences trying to push somewhere the grass might be greener, theyre not eating at the macrocarpa hedging round the place and risking aborting their foetii, and theyre not pugging great footmarks in wet winter ground, plus I dont have to feed out hay.
Bliss......
You never stop learning in this game.

The $345,000 Burger?

Anyone with an eye on the long, long term future for animal farming will be interested in the following link:

http://www.gizmag.com/lab-grown-meat/20625/?utm_source=Gizmag+Subscribers&utm_campaign=4b3a3308c2-UA-2235360-4&utm_medium=email

This article outlines one area of progress to date, probably current state of the art in the creation of artificial meat.

NAIT Deferred

I'm in a sweat over the whole NAIT issue, however noble the vision is.
For the life of me, I cant see what the difference between a visual bar-coded tag and an EID one is, in the realm of traceability.
I guess it does give the X-box generation who will eventually take over running the show a button pushing continuation into their careers, but I dont think an electronically based system is wise.
Anybody who's been without power after natural disaster like a flood or earthquake for any length of time will be able to attest to what life in a power outage is like, electronic toys totally useless.
And we're contemplating basing a whole industry on it?

One of the major irks I suffer with the tagging requirements is tag loss.
At least 30% of my beef cows have lost one or both their tags by CFA time, probably more like half of them.
Right now I've got a 5 year old bull that needs moving on, lost one tag, which means, under ASD rules, I have to go through the inconvenience of sourcing a replacement tag, not to mention actually getting it into the ear of a 1500kg animal who's not going to be all that enamoured about the job.
Re-tagging after loss of one tag needs to be seriously looked at, I mean, what exactly is the point of a backup tag?

So OK, one might say EID's going to make life easier, if you've got a tag-reader.
Tag readers dont replace missing tags for you.
I've started using EID's and already, some of my 2010 born calves have lost their backup number tags, which ushers in a new problem.
To find out who the missing animal is, have you ever tried reading the number on an EID tag without glasses, or a reader?

Too many of our policy inventors havent walked the necessary mile in their victims shoes.