An early morning in the mist and the mother cows are up looking after their calves. On the left is Blackie and her black female calf. On the right is mother 78, who has the same last two working numbers as her daughter, heifer 78. We don’t have a 78 tag for this calf to continue the tradition so we’ll call him Huit instead.
The heifers, like all teenagers, are sleeping in.
The mother cows yet to calve are enjoying a bit of a lie-in, too.
As always, the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Note the vines in the background.
Otto went on a week-long school trip to the coast, a big deal when you are only seven years old. The teachers said this helps expand the kids’ horizons. They learn that there are places in the world without vineyards.
The tractor tires are so new you can still read the size on the tread. [Note US spelling of ‘tyres’.]
Cow 57 is known as ‘Old Cow’ although she’s not quite the oldest. She’s the new lead cow and is very good at her job, leading the herd to the new day’s strip of grass when I call.
The crop of lucerne doesn’t have many grasses in it, which is unusual for a first cut of such an old seeding. Maybe the February snows held back the annual grasses? Still there are plenty of nice dandelions to add to the mix.
There’s been progress on the new cattle yards. The posts are mostly in and concreted, now we wait a week for them to cure before putting the barriers up.
I finally figured out the little macro button on the camera so here’s a little grasshopper eating the lucerne. Hey man, don’t eat too much. That’s cow food.
Dandelions, a patou and Roques. A patou des Pyrénées is a Pyrenean Mountain Dog (or Great Pyrenees) and Legend is one of those. He’s about one year old now and big and puffy. He likes to keep watch for intruders.
The herd is in the Florida paddock. The grass here has had about three months rest over winter and is seeing some good early spring growth. Last year we grazed this paddock in May, this year in late March. The fertility is visibly higher with way more litter on the ground. Ryegrass seems to be doing well along with meadow fescue.
Eric’s house is right by the herd. Below Blackie Onassis is trying some of Eric’s nice grass.
This close-up shows some of the the litter that is partly decomposed – the old dried grass from last year. As the worms eat this we’ll see the benefits later in Spring. There is also some vetch or sainfoin here. You get more legumes when you stop the practice of adding in artificial nitrogen fertilizer. Less nitrogen gives legumes a competitive advantage until there’s a balance met. This balance depends on your grazing management. We’ll see where it gets to but right now we’re seeing way more legumes than in 2011.
The last photo shows some of Sleepy Hollow. We hammered this area with the herd over winter. It was grazed twice with extra hay to supplement the grass. The herd left this area about six weeks ago and it had grown so well since then that we might graze it next.
Only some of the paddock is this fertile but all parts have seen a big gain since last year. As soil fertility increases we’ll see benefits everywhere – water retention, early growth, resistance to hoof impact, drought resistance…
One question that I always ponder is what will be the steady-state species mix of the pasture after a few years. Which grass will dominate? Which legume? Right now annual ryegrass seems to be doing well in the fertile areas. It isn’t clear what is doing well with the legumes and we are seeing red clover, some vetches, sainfoin and lotier/birdsfoot in greater quantity than 2011.
The last time we merged two herds was a tough day with broken fences and cows running through vineyards and off up the road. This time we managed it a little better.
First we checked the fences. Gustav did some therapeutic cleaning of the blackberries and I fixed up some new fence.
What every smart-dressed pickup has in the back – vine posts, wire, clover seed, a rolled up Carhartt jacket and a sledgehammer.
Then we moved the ‘old’ herd to Triangle North. We call it the old herd but it contains eighteen heifers and four mother cows so the herd is rather more Young and the Restless than Days of our Lives. Triangle North is lush and they ignored the fresh hay bale to eat up the late winter grass and take a nap in the sunshine.
We moved the new herd down the hill from the yards to the Emerson-T paddock next to the old herd. There was a single wire fence to separate them. I rolled out hay so the 15 new cows could all have access at the same time. So we have a herd on both sides of the fence, each with grass and hay.
But two herds with a fence between them means a moo-off over the wire. They faced each other. They mooed.
But the allure of the hay was too strong, so they chewed instead.
The one incident was heifer 29. She wanted the hay on the other side of the fence so she jumped over from a standing start. Those heifers can jump.
They spent the night on opposite sides of the fence. The next morning we removed the fence and the herds mixed and ate each other’s hay. You can see from the first photo above that the fence wasn’t in any great shape so there was no loss in taking it down.
The merge was uneventful except for a little pushing with the new heifers and the old heifers. Blackie Onassis was in the middle of things getting her rear sniffed by the athletic heifer 29.
Now we have just the one cow herd.
The combined herd is doing a much better job of cleaning up the winter grass than the heifer herd. This is the ‘herd effect’ in action. Having a lot more mother cows helps with handling the herd moves, too.
I was just about finished rolling the Nebraska paddock with the cultipacker when the tractor lurched to the left and started sliding sideways down the hill. Ah, a flat. My bicycle puncture repair kit wasn’t up to this job.
The man at the local shop came out in his van and changed out the front tires. The new one is chunky.
The cultipacker is this thing:
It rolls and makes little furrows which improves soil-seed contact. I’ve been using it in the Nebraska paddock because there were a few places with big clods of hard clay and the cultipacker has done an excellent job of smoothing things out for seeding lucerne.
You have to wipe off the little windows every now and then to read the instruments. Instruments by Jaeger, too.
This field is now seeded with lucerne (US:alfalfa; FR:luzerne) and dactyle (US: orchardgrass; EN: cocksfoot). We have had a bit of rain in the days since the photo so the seeds are on their way to germinating.
Salers cows are red. They look like this, although usually not quite as silly as 33 here:
There’s a rare gene in the herd that gives you black Salers. A lot of the French farmers don’t like the black color, so they don’t breed from it. Jean-Claude, the farmer from which I bought my cows, is the opposite. He has been trying to breed black cows for fifteen years. He has a very good looking black Salers bull, too:
Black cows can be more expensive. He bought two black mother cows recently that cost 50% more than a regular cow. This seems odd to me: if many breeders want to get rid of the black gene then there should be a supply of cull heifers that would lower the price.
The USA likes their cows black and polled, so photos of Salers in the USA are often of black animals, like the ones at Weyer Ranch.
In the fifteen years of his black Salers hobby, Jean-Claude has never sold a black female. There just aren’t that many. This has all changed with the black heifer below.
She’s nearly three and she’s about to have her first calf. The word they use for a first-calf heifer is ‘tersonne’ but that seems to be a word local to the Auvergne since my Gascon cow farmer neighbor don’t know it. Also cows are about three when they give birth to their first calf which is late by US standards.
We’ve just bought set of cows to enlarge the herd, and the black heifer is now on our farm. She’s not a classic beauty – she short and stocky with a broken right horn. She’s an intelligent and curious cow who always seems to be in the middle of things. I like her. She’s now on our farm.
We call her Blackie Onassis, so named to honor the drummer in Urge Overkill.
There’s so much going on at the farm right now between discing and seeding, dealing with the new herd, tagging calves and building the new corral. All three elements of the farm are in major work mode. And just around the corner is hay making.
The story with black Salers is that having one in your herd guards against storms. Thanks, Blackie.
