Twenty cows - twenty calves

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One of my helpers on the farm says pragmatically - 'where there are livestock, there will be dead stock'.   He says so because, even with our best efforts, we can't guarantee good outcomes for our animals always.

But I am feeling very pleased with myself at present.  This year my 13 cows and 7 heifers have produced 20 live healthy calves.  All births were unassisted - including the heifers.  We've had cattle for 6 years now.  In that time we have only lost one cow at calving, but we've also had perhaps 4 or 5 failures to get pregnant and lost 3 calves - all in maybe 50 tries.  So we're very happy with 20 / 20 this year.

Three of the Mums have needed a bit of encouragement to establish feeding - including the very last one who is still confined to the yards as I write.  Te Papa Henny is a heifer having her first calf.  She produced a heifer calf, but then abandoned it.  It took a while, and an urgent transfer of 14 animals back to Moora from an agistment property, to even work out which cow owned it.

Once that was accomplished we confined Henny in the cattle crush and allowed the calf (now named Te Papa Puni) to feed.  Because there was not enough milk via that approach we had to provide other supplemental milk - which is always problematic because mums produce in response to feeding.

Two previous recalcitrant cows had got with the program after only a couple of days, but Henny has been more stubborn.  Yesterday (after a week) we decided to give up - and feed Puni ourselves.  I went off and spent $70 on 20 kg of milk replacement formula.  Then this morning the darn calf turned up her nose at it!  So I got Henny back in the yards and in the crush.  Puni fed immediately.

Then tonight when I went out to put them into the crush again, for the first time, Henny was standing for Puni to feed without being confined!  It has taken 8 days, but I think we may have got there.

For those aware that acquaintance with us likely means your name will get used one day the names of the 5 heifers and 15 bulls for this year are:
F01 - Iskandar
F02 - Owen
F03 - Otto
F04 - Jordan
F05 - Casey
F06 - Sam
F07 - Fazilah
F08 - Finnbar
F09 - James
F10 - Maya
F11 - Rod
F12 - Adam
F13 - Dmitry
F14 - Leigh
F15 - Allan
F16 - Jeanie
F17 - Rahman
F18 - Shaik
F19 - Koji
F20 - Puni
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