Tick Fever.

We have recently had an incident where one of our British White cattle contracted Tick Fever – not once but twice although she was vaccinated against it prior to us purchasing her.

Tick fever is caused by infection with the BABESIA and ANAPLASMA organisms transmitted by the cattle tick.  All cattle in tick infected regions are at risk of coming down with tick fever.  Our cow came from a non-tick region to our property which is within a tick area and this is one of the biggest ...

Joy and Sorrow Sit Together

It has been a week of sorrow and joy at Em Nau farm. 

The joy came in the way of a little heifer calf, born to Daphne, last Monday 08 September 14.  Daphne had been struggling with the birth over the previous weekend, with her udder gorged to capacity she was having trouble walking.  Being novices when it comes to cow births – we had only experienced a couple on the farm and had only been present for one of these – we assumed that the trouble walking was due t...

RIP Pats

Yesterday afternoon I arrive home to find Pats had died.  She, over the past two weeks since she had “come home”, had been slowly gaining her appetite back and had been wee-ing and poo-ing as you would have expected from a health calf.

Why she died we will probably never know but we are certain that she enjoyed the last couple of weeks of her short life.

Over the past couple of weeks she would walk around and graze on the grass in the calf enclosure, have a bit of bump and pus...

Pats (aka the Devil Calf) returns

On Saturday 15 Mar 14 Heather and I were attending to the afternoon milking/watering/feeding when Heather spied our neighbour driving his front end loader across his paddock.  We both gave a wave but our neighbour didn’t respond.

Then H spied that the neighbour had something in the bucket of the tractor – our conversation went something like this:

H – what’s that in the bucket? Is that a cow?

B- looks like it – might be the devil calf (laugh)

The Benefits of Vitamin C

Recently Heather and I were given a little Santa Gertrudis cross bull calf by one of our neighbours (this calf incidentally was a half brother to “Ruby” one of the calves we had born on our farm last year).  The little fellow was a few days old and had been rejected by his mother and the neighbour didn’t have the time to hand rear the little bloke.

The neighbour gave us a call and said the calf was weak and the neighbour wasn’t sure if the calf had had any ...

After the loss of Laverne we were fortunate enough to be able to get two more calves (for a bottle of homemade tomato sauce).  The two calves Shirley (continuing the Laverne theme) and Frank (as in Shirley and Frank from “A Country Practice”).  Both were around a week old when we got them and had experienced none of the trauma that Laverne had endured in her short life hence were allot more robust.

When picking them up Heather had them trussed up in the back of the ute with bailing twine...

 Well, it seems we're never short of activity, adventure or even drama here at Em Nau Farm and this latest week has been no exception.. <?Grab a cuppa/drink, settle in, and let me tell you about it.

Just in case there's a limit to the amount of text within a post, let's call this "Laverne - Chapter 1."

Last Saturday (a week ago yesterday) I was out an about and drove past a dairy farm just up the road from here. For so...