Calves, robots and paperwork

Stand in the Gap

Kathleen Duffy

All the other months curse a fair February and there are many people who say we will pay for the mild winter but let’s hope it keeps going. It is great to get the calved cows out to pasture, cutting back on cleaning and liming cubicles and using less silage. This morning the birds are singing in every tree and lots of them perched on the bird house. The yellow furze or as we call the ‘whins’ are starting to bloom. The dogs chase rabbits that they will never catch and the Snowdrops and Daffodils are out very early. I even saw pictures on twitter of Mayflowers in sheltered areas.

These last few weeks have been the busiest period for farming, we have over 40% of our cows calved. We have increased the numbers of calves born by compact calving and this, combined with sexed semen, means we have all the replacements safely on the ground. The workload is pretty full and the fact that heifers get only their own dams milk for ten days to make best use of the antibodies and pass on the anti-scour vaccinations we give the cows.

Only for the time saved using HerdAPP for immediate calf registration and all other farm events, we would be lost for record keeping. Smartphones are great gadgets to tell the “due to calve” dates, “out of retention dates” and many are syncing the calving details from the phone to the web.

The HerdAPP is especially necessary for Dry Cow therapy and Lakeland Dairies do not want milk from any cow until five days after calving even if well out of retention. We have being paying for BVD testing since 2012 and it is long past time this finished and the disease eradicated. I wish the farm organisations would really push for change.

We are hoping to have a student from Ballyhaise College to help relieve some of the Spring workload and to learn the ropes on a busy dairy farm. While Thomas is still involved in CEJA, the European young farmers in Brussels as a vice president and treasurer, we had made the decision to change to robotic milking. The robot will be going in this week, which will mean lots of changes, but this means the workload gets very heavy as we go into this March. We bought the protected urea same as last year. Last year’s calves will soon go out to the silage ground in Corfad over at my old home in Cross.

My side of the workload is paperwork. I keep putting jobs on the long finger this winter, I need to do the VAT refund application. Because of the nitrates derogation, we need to do soil sampling and measuring grass. It must be my age, but I procrastinate about everything. Paperwork is constant and one gets weary of constantly researching and filling in passwords and logins for everything. I finally got COVID last month, so I am blaming this for my lack of memory, I seem to read the same instructions several times.

I do count our blessings when you see what is happening in the world. Turkey and Syria are natural tragedies and the loss of life is beyond our comprehension. We hope to get a fundraiser going this weekend to try and help. When you see Ireland with full employment and, while there are issues on housing, we are a rich country as shown in our GNP per person.

Dairy farming has been good to us this last few years and we need to give back to others. The housing crises could be fixed if the people who own second and third houses and apartments sold them to the council, as you can only live in one house at a time. Also if derelict houses were used or sold as they are a site for a refurbished or new house and most have water and ESB already. Also allow people to build on their own land so long as they stay living locally and move out of Dublin.

I cannot watch the RTE Wednesday night programme about Mariupol Ukraine, a story of crime told by the victims. It is horrendous that war can inflict such death and terror, and no one can stop it. Every week a number of volunteers give English classes to our Ukrainian friends including from Mariupol in the Show Centre. It is lovely and yet sad to interact with them and hear their way of life before Putin started the horror of war.

They want to go back as soon as this terrible war is over but they have no place to go. They are well educated and hope to be able to pay back by working here in the meantime, but they need to have the English language first.