Drying the Cows off for winter...

(photo of last years calves growing well on one of our runoffs close to the home farm)

We finish milking our cows in the first week of June to give the ladies a good break over winter, this is important as they are in calf and due to calve around the 8th of August. They need to be fed well to meet their nutritional requirements to keep weight on over winter, which keeps them warm and healthy so they can grow strong healthy calves.

We break feed a mixed crop of Kale & Swede, then Silage and Hay are feed to them in the paddocks. We Winter graze all our own stock so we can keep an eye on them and make sure they are all getting enough to eat, we can also bring in any lame stock and treat them straight away.

This is also a great time to get lots of extra jobs done on the farm and general maintenance. We have been very lucky weather wise with reasonable rainfall throughout Summer so we are going into Winter with a good cover of grass and because we are low stocked and have extra support land we aren't hard on the farmland. We farm grass as much as we farm Cows and we need a good balance of both. We produce all our own feed for our cows and we are proud to be a completely self suffient grass based system.