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Cows, grass, hay. Cow and blackberries. Chess club waiting for the kids to arrive. Broyeur of doom. Hammer (intact male calf) showing off his beefy assets. Just like Huggy and Hoff, Hammer has his own theme song.

Three of the mother cows needed their nails tended to so the bovine pedicure guy came over. He brings a fancy hydraulic portable gate and places it at the end of our chute. Salers cows aren’t common in our part of France and this was the first time he’d worked on them. He’d never hadContinueContinue reading “Mani-pedi at the farm”

I was driving down the old sunken dirt road between my farm and the neighbors’ and his heifer herd came to visit. They are of the breed Blonde d’Aquitaine, the dominant cow breed here. Blondes are very big cows with large muscles and small bones for their size. They render very well. The Italian feedlotsContinueContinue reading “The blondes next door”

The herd is eating its way across the Nebraska paddock. Tongues are good for cleaning noses. Heads down eating. Little Hoff is almost hidden by the lucerne. Gremlin the bull hanging out with the older women. Twistie, age 17½, showing her fine conditioning. She came to the farm a year and a half ago andContinueContinue reading “Know your paddock”

The barn fire is smoking and the emergency services are there. Maybe it flared up again? Maybe it burned for two days? The steel girders that hold up the structure are burnt and buckled.

Our friend Kevin is visiting from the USA. We went off to Auch, the main town around here, to find a good source of square tube steel for welding. On the way back Kevin pointed out an intense smoke plume. The smoke was very thick but the air around it was clear and not hazy.ContinueContinue reading “The darker side of hay”

The herd made it on to Nebraska without incident and are munching away on the lucerne/dactyle mix. It is pretty sparse where they are now up by the house. I think I let too long go between disking that part and seeding and the weeds had a head start and limited the lucerne growth. We’llContinueContinue reading “Herd on an old cornfield”

It is late summer and we’re running out of fresh grass. The green area in the middle distance is Nebraska, named after the corn field that was there when we moved in. It has been in lucerne since spring and is now ready to graze. It is the last paddock on the farm that theContinueContinue reading “The last paddock on the farm”

Yesterday I visited the farm of a friend of mine to check out the calves she has. There are some crosses, including this cute one that is mostly Charolais. This Blonde/Salers cross calf below was abandoned by her mother and so has become well attached to humans. It is quite a shock to have aContinueContinue reading “In the summertime when the weather is hot”

…is not like the other ones. I think Huggy Bear is a cross. He’s lighter than all the other animals in the herd and his face has a grading of color which I’ve never seen on any other Salers. His mother (Old Girl) was pregnant when we bought her and maybe the neighbor’s Charolais orContinueContinue reading “One of these things”