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You can plan so much with livestock but just like the weather, they can surprise you. This autumn saw the first cases of bloat on the farm. Two animals were affected, with one getting it twice.
The first was in a weanling in early October. Unusually, he was bloated leaving a paddock rather than having pigged out on clover after going into it. The same calf was born three weeks premature, so this may have some bearing on what happened as there was a suspicion of pneumonia the second time. The other animal it happened to just gorged on ration. He ignored the silage when feeding that morning and, a few hours later, he was balloon-like. It was another unexpected vet job but thankfully both animals are thriving well.
Given there’s such a high clover content on the grazing area, I always expected bloat to occur there, especially after a move to a new paddock. Another example to expect the unexpected.
Housing
The in-calf heifers will be housed by the weekend, the fine start to this week prolonging their grazing. They’ll get their tails trimmed and IBR booster and we’ll assess what further dosing they may require after Christmas. Their arrival home is a signal that calving isn’t a million miles away.
I’m back straw-bedding cows this winter as a planned extension got delayed for reasons beyond my control. It means extra costs and labour but stock numbers are similar to other years, so that means it’s not an even bigger issue but it’s still fewer hours off work than I intended.
It’s been a tumultuous 2019 so far in the beef sector and there are a few weeks to play out yet.
For now, we all seem to be looking east in the hope that China will ride to the rescue. I’m unsure if African swine fever will bail out Irish beef to the same level it did for Irish pig producers, but at least it offers some firm hope after a difficult year.
For the first winter in a while, I’m not involved in amateur drama. While I miss the enjoyment and hard work that goes into it and I’ll miss travelling around the country visiting different towns and villages, I’m actually enjoying doing nothing. My next step is to put a technology curfew on myself and just go reading in the evenings. I’ve a backlog of books to catch up on. Even though I don’t have lines to learn this autumn, some from the last production are proving very hard to shake off.
We toured the country last spring with Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore. A very black comedy and a play that was controversial before it ever reached a stage. McDonagh wrote it in 1993, yet nobody brought it to life until 2001. At the time, it was viewed as a potential threat to the peace process. In it, I played Padraic Osbourne. An idealist intent on forcing his way on the world, Mad Padraic as he was known cared for his country, his cat and not a whole lot else. Picking up the script last September, I read the following line for the first time.
“I know we’re already a splinter group, but there’s no law saying you can’t splinter from a splinter group. A splinter group is the best kind of group to splinter from anyway. It shows you know your own mind.”
During the intervening 14 months, it’s proven to be a difficult line to forget.
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