Well after 6 weeks I can't believe that I haven't talked about how awful the gates are here. Apparently they don't believe in gates that swing and they have what we call cocky gates. They call them wire gates here and it's hard to believe that they don't do something about improving these considering you can go into a paddock up to six times a day. Anyway they are probably even worse than our cocky's gates because they don't even have a lever on them like we do. You just have to push really hard on the post and try to slip the wire catch over the stay assembly. I spent about the first two weeks cursing these gates but I am now pretty good at opening/closing them. Any that I have found really hard to close I have modified in secret to make them a little easier for me!!! I don't think anyone has noticed yet….

So this week has continued with a couple more brandings at other places as well as some here at Little Rainbow. It is much more fun branding here because I am a part of the whole process and feel a little bit more involved. One think I can't understand though is why they start their brandings so late. With the first mob, we didn't even muster the cows until about 4pm then by the time we had the cows drafted, injected and sprayed it was 5:30. There were about 240 calves and it took us until around 8:00 to get them all done. One positive though was that we were pretty flat out as there weren't quite as many people as there have been at other brandings.

So after our 8 o'clock finish it was about 8:30 by the time we got everything wrapped up. I then went and did a run around the heifers and found one just starting. I decided to go home and have supper then check on her again as I had a couple of calves that I needed to feed in the paddock as well. So by the time I got home, unloaded/unsaddled the horses and had dinner it was 9:30 when I headed back out. She still hadn't had her calf so I then had to run her into the yards in the dark, which wasn't so bad because she was a pretty quiet heifer. Maybe a little too quiet as she kept stopping to look at the pretty dandelions or sniff at a clump of grass, then she would stop every few minutes when she had contractions. Anyway after 30 minutes she managed to amble her way into the yards and I got her up in the crush. The calf had worked its way back in so it was a matter of putting my hands 'up there' and getting the chains around his legs, then using the puller to get him out. Unfortunately the heifer was pretty tired and when the calf's hips got stuck she went down. By this stage it was 11:05 and I had to ring Perry to come out and give me a hand. We managed to get the calf out and left them too it, unfortunately the calf died but at least I saved a heifer. Also I was feeding five calves at the time so we just took the hide off her calf, put it on one of the others and bingo...she has a calf to look after anyway.

One good thing about all this work with calving is that I no longer panic about the calf dying on me. That particular calf probably went longer than 3 hours stuck but was still alive when he came out. Perry thinks that from the time you see the feet out you should give the cow 2 hours to have it on her own. He seems to like the head to be swollen when you pull a calf…just so you know the cow has been at it for a while!! But Chris reckons that if nothing happens in 30 minutes then there's not much chance of it coming out. From what I have seen so far I would tend to agree with Chris in this case but it's amazing how long a calf can last with his head jammed in its mother's cervix.

As I mentioned we have been doing some branding at Little Rainbow and we have managed to get about 500 done (so only 700 to go). We boxed a couple of the mobs together before branding them and this week will start to take the pairs out to truck them to pastures (for those of you who haven't figured it out yet, a pair is a cow and calf unit). Then there will only be the cows who haven't calved yet left together in a paddock.

One thing I have noticed is that Canadian's don't appear to have much stock sense or any knowledge of low stress stock handling. When we mustered the cows down at Bob's they just went around the paddock and pretty much chased the cow's through the gate. Then when they were about half-way through they decided it might be a good idea to put someone in the lead to stop them from running off. So off Jason galloped to block 240 cows that were trying to go 240 different ways, not the best way to do things I don't think!! They also seem to like their yahooing and yelling when they do their stock work which is something I am definitely not used to.

So I think the next week will be filled with more branding's so that the cows can be trucked out to adgistment paddocks…that's if the weather improves as it has started to rain today. Farming seems to be over for now which I am glad about. There was 450 acres of corn planted here and then Perry has other paddocks that he rents where he had canola planted and some grass to be cut for hay. The corn planter was 60 feet wide and took about a day to plant the 450 acres that took over a week to prepare with harrowing, discing, rolling, rock picking and fertilising. I suppose in a couple of months it will be time to harvest all of these crops, which I am not looking forward to. I am definitely not the farming/tractor driving type!!