This year Suzie Corboy decided she wasn’t going to work on her birthday, and neither was her husband.
What a difference a week can make. We started the year getting very worried we were heading for another dry summer, as we had only 30mm of rain in the last 49 days of 2018. In the first seven days of 2019 we had 35mm of rain. What a relief. Thankfully the rain has continued with good regularity with enough heat that normal grass growth has resumed.
The dry conditions had a large effect on our 20 hectares of oversown winter crops on the hill ground, often called “spray and pray”. Our spraying went OK, apart a bit of spray drift when the wind never let up, and we got a bit impatient and told the helicopter to just do the job in not ideal conditions, but our praying (for rain) was a disaster. As a result the crops have been very slow to germinate and we are not confident of having high yielding crops.
We went to Gibbston Valley for an outside concert – it rained heavily, but like good prepared farmers we took our full wet weather gear and stayed dry, while watching the not-so-prepared people get wet and cold.
January was filled with the same activities as the last twenty one Januarys – we weaned lambs, drafted into sexes, weighed lambs into finishing mobs depending on their weights, drenched lambs and vaccinated with 5 in 1. After the ewe lambs had been weaned a couple of weeks, we brought them back in and culled out the lighter lambs and any off types that were never going to make the grade to enter the replacement mob. Ewes were mouthed, uddered and dagged and all ewes were condition scored and lighter ewes drafted out for preferential treatment over the summer. Our ewes all have 10 months of wool so the only way to accurately check their condition is to put your hand on every ewe to check fat/muscle cover.
Our 15-month heifers have been mated for 42 days. They easily reached our minimum mating weight of 350kg with some over 500kg, so hopefully we will have a good in-calf rate. This season’s heifers and calves will be weaned in early March, because we didn’t wean until April last year and that didn’t leave enough time before winter to lift the condition of the heifers not heavy enough to be killed at weaning. We have only been doing this system for a few years so still have a lot to learn, but hopefully we do not make the same mistakes twice!
Despite all the work needing done we still made time for a few days off farm in January. We went to Gibbston Valley for an outside concert – it rained heavily, but like good prepared farmers we took our full wet weather gear and stayed dry, while watching the not-so-prepared people get wet and cold. Many left before the headline act of Roger Hodgson from Supertramp.
My birthday is in January and I have probably spent more birthdays working than not working in the past 23 years Paul and I have farmed together, often dagging ewes. This year I made sure it was different, and even got Paul to take the day off as well. We went to Dunedin, had lunch and dinner out, I got a new fridge and vacuum cleaner as birthday presents, and we went to the movies, which we haven’t done for a very long time.
I hope you have all had a good summer both on and off farm, and have made time for yourselves to get off farm. I am regularly reminded by a friend that a farmer’s work is never done, and the farm will take up all your time and more.
