Em Nau Farm BLOG

Where has the First Part of the Year Gone?

Here we are in autumn – the first sixth of the year but a distant memory – where has the year gone so far.  Since my last jottings we have sold Dobbs and Duffy at the Woodford sales.  We tripled our money on them in the three months we owned them so in that respect it has been good.  We have also decided to only milk Daphne and Beaudette in the mornings, leaving the calves with them during the day and separating all bodies at night.  This seems to be working well as we are getting enough milk in the mornings to feed Eddie and Bubbles morning and night plus have a little left over for the pigs and whatever else we need milk for.

The “Devil Calf” Patsy has been seen on occasion but still hasn’t been cornered and brought to justice.  She continues to reside next door and was last seen cutting a forlorn and lonely figure standing in the mist last Tuesday morning at the bottom of one of the neighbour’s paddocks.

Someone at Em Nau Farm celebrated her big “f” word birthday (and it wasn’t forty) late in February – we celebrated by having the piccaninnies come up for a visit plus we had some friends around for lunch.  It was a great day overall although someone missed their nanna nap in the afternoon.

We have also just purchased two new cars (Yaris’ssss) so we can save petrol driving to work (H is going back to five days in mid March) – the Hilux is costing about $100 a week to drive and the Corolla is about $70/week.  Our plan is to just use the Hilux and Corolla when we need to and for work we just use the new cars.  It is paying benefits already with my first tank costing about $45 for three quarters of a tank (at the bottom of the petrol price cycle) and H filling up for about $55 (at the top of the cycle) so estimates are we should be spending about $50 each (on average) on petrol a week.

As I said at the beginning we are in autumn and for SE Qld we didn’t get the summer rain we have experienced over the past couple of years.  We have had intermittent showers, enough to keep the house tank partially filled, but nothing to fill the dams.  From the long range forecast we are also in for a dry winter (as you can see from the Southern Oscillation Index link on our home page) so, fingers crossed, we hope there will be enough feed to get us to the next “wet”. On saying this the Millennium Drought and big droughts in the 1980s were broken by March rain, so there is hope.