The Farm

---

As you probably know I’m working on a farm in New Zealand at the moment. I thought I’d just write a little bit about the farm and whats happened on it since I’ve been here. It’s a dairy farm and we milk 750 cows twice a day, through a 50 bale rotary parlour, it takes about 3 hours all together. The cows are outside all year round and they aren’t milked (dryed off) for about a month in the winter, during this time they are normally fed, hay, silage and feed crops like fodder beet and swedes.
The cows calve in the spring (August-September) and last year they were having 40 calves a day on the farm, the calves have 3 days on the mother and then we start to milk her again.
It takes 3 people to milk every day, one to put the cups on (the suction cups) one to take them off, and one to get in the second herd and move the effluent irrigator. We start milking at 4:30 every morning and 2:30 every afternoon, and the first herd have to be in the yard ready for that time so someone has to start earlier than everyone else.
Since I’ve been here its been pretty miserable weather generally. Normally this area is quite dry, or so they tell me. In an average year my boss spends about $15,000 on power for the K-line irrigators that we have, this year he has only spent $4,000 because it has been so wet. One day not long after I started the farm flooded because the river blew its banks. We used this as an opportunity to paddle around the fields on a rubber dinghy haha. In some of the fields the water was so high the water troughs were completely submerged.
We have been pregnancy testing recently, to see how many of the cows are in calve. This involves the vet inspecting them with a camera and sometimes using his hand. We had very good results this year, 100% of our heifers were in calve which is very unusual and 90% of our cows were in calve which is above the district average of 88% which is really good.
Not much else has happened since then, each day we just milk, then do a few odd jobs for a few hours, have lunch and then milk again in the afternoon. I find the milking pretty boring because its so repetitive but I’d still rather be doing that than some other jobs.

---