Bulling

As with previous years we were lucky to be able to borrow Paddy, a neighbour's pedigree bull to cover our cows, albeit a little later. This gave us a calving window from the end of May through to early August.

After a year off this would be Gorple's first intended year for calving, after her unplanned caesarean back in 2023. Only time would tell how things would play out.

Winter was far dryer than last year, thankfully, and the cattle held condition very well on the lovely haylage we had made from our meadow in the summer. All this made for very round cows who looked like they were due to give birth way ahead of when they were due.

First up was Bramble

After seemingly waiting weeks for them to get started, Bramble quietly - as is usual for her - had her calf one morning.

By midnight that night Gorple had followed suit, choosing the patch of rushes at the far side of the field to give birth as late in the day as possible.

Both had strong black heifer calves and we were underway.

False start?

We then had to wait over a week for the next, Swinden, to have hers, a bull calf, also black. Like her mother, Bramble, she was also quite secretive about things and after not really showing any signs of imminent birth the evening before, we found her with a cleaned up calf at first light the next morning.

Being our first live bull calf we then had the challenge of castration - we can't keep them entire and have bulls growing up on the farm. Luckily by day 5 or 6 things had descended far enough to manage this!

Another boy

Another few days passed before Buttercup delivered her calf, another bull, in the morning, two weeks to the day after Bramble started things off.

He was far more of a challenge to castrate and trying to get both testicles to stay down at the same time took quite a while!

Clover kept us waiting

We expected Clover to be the last as it didn't look like Daisy was in calf. As it turned out she really kept us waiting, but finally, nearly 3 weeks after Buttercup, we found her with a nice heifer calf after work.

After last year's stillborn it was such a relief that she had calved without issue.

With three heifers and two bulls we're still doing very well for females! And, just as in previous years, all the mothers were absolutely fine with us checking on them close to birth, spraying navels, putting in ear tags, and castrating their calves in the field.

Naming

Lastly there was just the job of picking out suitable names. We stuck with our convention of a local feature followed by a shade of their colour and have chosen:

Red Spa Inky

Twist Liquorice

Deerstone Stout

Shuttleworth Slate

Catlow Coal