Because they come from the other side of the world, they tend to come for longer than a weekend. In fact, it’s often even longer than a typical vet’s annual holiday. It’s interminable.
My parents are Scottish. Where it rains most of the time. Which means they are mostly dour and miserable. Plus, as my wife points out, they raised me, which she feels might have some connection.
When they arrive they’ve typically been herded through various airports and departure gates like so many bobby calves in a SAFE video, so they have about as much humour about them as Hans Kriek at a rodeo.
But, being old, they not only quickly forget where they are, or how much of my whisky they’ve drunk, they also forget they’re miserable. And the grandkids get ice cream and the sun comes out and we all have lots of fun.
So naturally, when someone asks me how their visit went, it’s hard to quantify. It’s full of good bits and bad bits and challenging bits and bits you wouldn’t miss for the world.
Which is not unlike the conditions around the country at the moment. It’s full of dry bits and wet bits and windy bits and bits where you think you wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in the world.
The experts tell us El Nino brings plenty of dry weather, which it is doing to some parts, but it’s also bringing an awful lot of “Scottish” weather to many places. And in Southland, at least the bottom part of Southland, it’s near to perfect for dairy farming for summer.
So it’s really hard to advise farmers how best to manage a way through this summer. Some will have plenty of feed and others will be struggling. There will be plenty of cover and good growth for some and for others it will be OAD and early dry-off. Some cows will be looking a picture and some will be looking like something appalling that should be on a cat walk. It’s an individual farm thing.
And that brings me nicely to condition scoring. Some herds will have good averages and others might be bad, but even good averages can hide a bunch of variation. So it’s what’s going on inside the herd that’s key, at the individual cow level.
I’m not a huge fan of mob scoring anyway – doing 70 cows only makes sense to me if you have only 70 cows. But at this time of year scoring individual cows is absolutely critical because you need to know which cows are low and need to be dried off, put on OAD or fed more if you have any.
And feeding more makes sense. Many farmers have cut back on supplementary feed and in some cases it probably makes financial sense. But at this stage of the season the goal is getting cows back to condition score 5 for calving. Unless you have a house on the North Shore to sell you’re going to struggle to balance next year’s budget, which means keeping winter feed costs to a minimum.
Winter feed is the most expensive part of the system and putting condition on cows over winter is also the most inefficient time to do it. So, for cows calving at BCS 5 you ideally want them at 5 at drying off, which means taking the time to tease out the thinner ones and preferentially treating or feeding them. And so an individual condition score makes a lot of sense in both the short and long term.
The other thing worthwhile investing in is a shorter dry period, or at least a better managed dry period. Because dry periods are expensive you ideally want them as short as possible; or at least the later calvers separated from the earlies. So having an accurate aged pregnancy scan is key to drilling down to an individual cow level and allowing cows to be sorted according to not only BCS but also calving dates.
And sadly, although it might be easy, it means an overview of the herd is fairly useless. It’s a bit like an overview of my parents’ visit. Fine, is about all you could say, which certainly doesn’t do justice to the various nuances of emotional rollercoaster and Shakespearean drama that are contained within.
To really understand the complex niceties of my parents’ two months with us you’d need to break it down into detail. In the same way that reading my daily diary for the period gives me a much better understanding of the parent-son relationship; so getting cow-level pregnancy and BCS data will give you a far greater understanding of your herd’s situation. And it will save you money in the longer term. Investing more may be a hard pill to swallow in the current environment. But it could be worse: you could have my parents stay for two months. And run out of whisky.
