As September comes to a close everything is finally starting to come together.  The milk tanks are now installed in the new dairy room and fully working, and the milk vessel and pumping system is all up and running to get milk across from the main tank.  Just waiting on the pasteuriser, cream separator and bottle filler to slot into the gaps.  So avoiding any disasters the micro dairy should be up and running at the end of October.  And milk and cream on sale once we have food safety sign off in November. 

We can start making Cheese from the pasteurised milk from then and fingers crossed should have some batches matured for Christmas.  We have been trialling some changes to the cheese makes and have a new style on the way which we are very pleased with so far.

This month has included the national Red Tractor week promotion, Trust the Tractor.  We had our farm assurance audit in the summer and passed which means the milk we sell can go into red tractor labelled products.  The Red Tractor farm assurance covers animal welfare, food hygiene, traceability and environmental management so is a really good way of checking that the cows are well looked after as well as showing the products are made, stored and treated appropriately.  Once the dairy is up and running we will start looking at whether to get certification for our own products as well which means getting additional specialist audits for the dairy and cheese room itself as well as the existing one for the milk.

It has been busy in the fields too with the maize silage finished this week.  This, with the grass silage will make up the bulk of the cows winter feed and they are always keen to start eating it as soon as it is ready.

 

While most normal people have been enjoying the lovely warm days of summer, thoughts on the farm have turned to winter.  During spring, summer and autumn our girls are out on the pasture but in winter they live in a large straw bedded barn, rather than the cubicles many farms have.  This means getting ready for winter is a mammoth task and providing fresh straw bedding every day of winter means we have to buy in more than 500 tonnes of straw from other arable farms and cart it back to the farm.

At the same time we have to deal with the 500 plus tonnes of dung that came out of the barns from last winter and has been rotting down over the summer.  This has to be spread onto the fields to give the crops and grass food for next year and has be done before our clay ground gets water logged in the late autumn.

Late summer is a very busy and slightly smelly time on the farm and on top of all the field work it is the time when we get most calves born too.

Over the summer our Facebook friends have been suggesting names for this years heifer calves.  Each year we breed 20 to 30 Friesian Holstein heifer calves.  We would expect nearly all of these babies to make it into the milking herd in two to three years time when they have calves of their own.  We had nearly 350 entries into the calf naming competition and the three winning names who received a cuddly cow were: Heffy Flump, which was chosen as a winner by Chelsea who works on the farm and is now the name of the first calf she bred.

Lily Pops, which was picked out by my husband John and belongs to a calf with very long eye brows! And Mooberry was chosen by me and is one of our darker calves who has colouring like the pet cow I had when I was little.

These three girls are living alongside a new group of friends including Daphne and Willow.  They have their own pens like each of the other calves.  The girls will stay in here for the first six to eight weeks, this makes sure they each get their own adlib food and water and then milk twice a day and don’t get pushed around by older bigger calves when it comes to feeding time.

When they are eight weeks old these three will be weaned off milk and then move into the group pen where Tulip, Meadow, Rio, Arya and Hermione currently live.

At three months they will all move to Chalvedon to join the older calves like Gertrude, Lavender, Buttercup and Natee in the straw barn where they will live until the following spring when they will be old enough to go out to graze on the fresh grass.  We have named all the calves born since January with names suggested on Facebook:

Arya, Buttercup, Clover, Daisy, Daphne, Ermintrude, Flossy, Gertrude, Hermione, Jasmine, Kimmy, Lavender, Meadow, Natee, Oreo, Petal, Queenie, Rio, Summer, Tulip, Veronica, Willow.

These join three calves we had named earlier, Glacier (whose mum and sisters are very white and we always name after types of mint) and Rhubarb and Custard who are twins born in July. 

With another 10 heifer calves expected in September and October we will be using a further 10 names as they are born – Arwen, Bella, Connie, Elsie, Freya, Juniper, Marigold, Olivia, Tinkerbell and finally, yes Marion, we will be calling one Pamela just for you.  We are saving Snowdrop or Snowflake for when we get a very white calf again.