Valentines Day

We don't really celebrate Valentines Day as we think it is more important to do something nice for our wedding anniversary.  We will be married 36 years next month and we are thinking about booking into Thala Beach Lodge for a night.  We will see how things are in the west first.
I am pleased to report that we had 47mls of rain last week.  It is not drought breaking but buys us a little more time to find markets for our cattle.  We sent cows to the meat works last week and the price we received for some of the cows barely covered the cost of freighting them to Townsville.  It is very disheartening.
Back to Valentines Day.  We had cattle work to do.
We have cull cows that needed to have their calves taken away from them in order to be sold.  The calves are about 7 months old and they are well and truly big enough to be taken away from mum.  We leave the weaners in the yards for up to ten days.  After  five days we start tailing them out into a nearby paddock.  "Tailing out" means letting them out into the paddock and staying with them, so that they don't run amok, and then bringing them back into the yards each night.  We tail out for about 5 days or until the weaners are quiet enough to be left in a paddock.
Last night we had hardly any sleep as the cattle yards are close to the house and the calves called to mum all night long.  The cows also do their bit and call back to the calves.  It really is quite noisy for the first couple of days until the calves settle into their new routine of eating hay and weaner meal. We still have another weaning to do as some of the calves are too young to be taken away from mum.  That will be in another couple of months time.  Over here we like to leave them on mum as long as possible.  The cows make a lot of milk on the lush pasture so it is all good for the calves.

We leave the cows in a paddock beside the yards.  We find that if we take them to a paddock away from the yards they find their way back to the yards anyway and we are left with a lot of fences to repair!

The black nose on 430 means that it will be culled.  Don't want black noses in a droughtmaster herd!  Also anything with horns will also be culled.  We are trying to breed a poll herd.

The male portion of these weaners will be taken to our western properties for growing out and joining to the females when they reach adequate size.

We are happy with this crop of weaners both in size and conformation.