Richard Perkins moves his cattle to a neighbor's paddock for spring grazing, setting up single-wire electric fencing and managing water logistics. Viola the cow is close to calving, while sheep, lambs, and poultry are rotated through the farm as he plans around a bird-flu ban.
Chapters
Okay, welcome back to another video, folks. Back on the farm, we are getting the cows out today. Big day. We're taking them across to the neighbour's land and they're going for a very quick pass across the entire neighbour's property before they're coming back to our farm. Beautiful beech trees. We don't get beech trees at Ridgetown, but they are pretty. So starting to green up, but not the best forage. And it's very wet still. Still. So I'm aiming to give them a third of this field so that we're calling K1. Then they'll have about nine days in the backfield. Much bigger field. Same in the front there. So get the fence up. I'm gonna try with a single wire if necessary. With the calf we'll have to have double wires. I'm hoping a single wire is enough. Super soggy. Okay. So we're using this quick fence just to create a pathway down and that should help get them in the right place. Clover May already knows what's going on. Viola is about to calf, so maybe not the best time to move animals. But I think birthing on pasture is preferable and she'll be happy to have the fresh grass. I was thinking to move them after breakfast, but I don't know if they're gonna let us. Now they know what's going on. So this one's never seen electric fence before, but we've got 10,000 volts running through that line, so I figure shouldn't take more than. It. So in other news, boilers, batch two are coming out and we're still in the position of waiting till when the bird flu band lifts.
But the guys have done a great job netting this lean tube barn up and we thought we'll add boiler manure in here into the old haylage, let them mix that in a bit with their scratching action. That will start this composting really well. It's composting nicely down below already. And then hopefully we'll get pigs in to dig that over before we pull it out and windrow it.
But this is now the emergency boiler shelter number two, and it's quite clear that the batch one are not coming out of that tunnel until they're one bad day, as it were. Slaughter week all next week we're having an early work weekend starting on Friday and then we start slaughter on Sunday. We're going to be slaughter pack, slaughter pack, slaughter packs, six days back to back. Scanning to be pretty intense for the new crew and pretty intense for us, to be honest. Well, that is not a sight I ever thought I would see and I dare say I won't see again. This is not a bad little spot for these birds. It's a little bit draughtier than they've been used to in the brooder, but this has been netted up. Guys did a great job netting this back piece off so that they can't get under the barn. Now, temporary, hopefully. Well, good. 10,000 volts seems to keep them in control. We're thinking that's enough food for the day, so probably we'll just make up a new paddock to tomorrow. We're using these simple single wire reels and we're bringing up water manually. We normally tow an IBC trailer up with us, but because we're moving so quickly, up to a few thousand square meters a day, we'll just be dragging that heavy weight around in the wet ground. It's easier just to come up with water. They're not drinking so much now because they're out on pasture with a lot more moisture in their feed, and so I doubt they will be drinking more than we can bring up easily with the rhino when we come on checks. So sheep have trimmed this down, I would say, whilst there's still food they can eat. They are over grazing by staying in here longer than three days. Hey, so that's the rules of grazing. It's all about how long you stay, how long till you come back. And we've been here a little while now, so we are technically over grazing. That's fine. We are not, you know, we're not concerned by that because this is just a temporary staying until the grass is getting going. But what we can do is move them up into the other forest paddocks. Now, there's definitely not as much forage in the other forest paddocks, but there's a lot of tree browse that they can start working on. So I think tomorrow we'll start shifting them up. Lambs are looking bouncy and big, aren't you? Hey. Hey. Definitely. Really like the feel of how this place has opened up. Very nice. It.
