The calves born in June are coming along well and we have a couple of late pregnancies due the end of November which we are quite excited about as they are from a USA imported bull. We have our hopes pinned on girls of course so all fingers and toes crossed.
Things are drying off now as we go into summer but at the moment the paddocks look lovely and green and the cattle are content.
We have been taking an interest in dung beetles lately. We always have liked how hard these little insects work burying dung and improving our soil all the time robbing flies of the places to breed. But we have been aware that we need a range of species that are active at different times during the year to be effective. After all cows produce dung all year round! I have a friend who is passionate about these little workers and with his tireless work on farmers behalf it looks like WA and Australia generally will be getting a new range of species to trial and breed up. We think this is excellent news and as always we avoid using worming treatments that will kill dung beetles as we need every one we can get.
So as things dry off we are well into preparing for bush fire season. We had a few trees trimmed yesterday that were encroaching into our firebreak area. In our shire our breaks have to be clear 4m wide and 4.2m high immediately inside our boundary fences and around buildings. Some of the trees we trimmed up to 5 and 6m so we wont have to do them again for a few years. We are doing our last tidy up and burning a few piles of waste wood in the next couple of weeks as after that it will be too late to burn anything. We had a bit of strong wind last weekend so there was an extra bit added to our clean up. Just when you thought you had it all done and tidy....always the way.
Until next time -happy farming
Gillian