Young Calves and when things don't go according to plan

No new babies this morning on the river although baby 2 missing. drove around the paddock and eventually found the little thing curled up asleep about 200 metres away from mum who was feeding on hay. Never disturb a sleeping calf when it's that young. It shot up and ran straight into a barb fence, fortunately it couldn't get through and lay down to sleep. I could see us spending the next hour chasing it around the next door property. Sometimes good fortune strikes.

Over the river to feed out some silage to the prospective mothers and remove three of the weaners from the wrong paddock. That went smoothly. The paddock that was in use last week was harrowed and the next piece of replacement fencing started.  Strung up a temporary bypass fence and removed the old wire for recycling and took out the insulators. Lastly lifted the old steel posts but left them in situ as markers for the post hole borer.

This new run is also about 100 metres but instead of steel posts we are putting in recycled plastic round posts. The bad news being that we are back to working on ridge country and off the alluvial flats. The last section we did up here averaged about 2 hours per hole with the jack hammer. The holes need to be 750 mm deep and it is pointless to cheat on the depth. We have a pallet set up with the generator and 25 KG jack Hammer and will find out on Thursday how bad things are.

We managed to get home by midday and have a refreshing coffee and scones before we split forces, one going up the hill to check next door's springers and the other starting on the mulching of the orchard pruning's. The missing calf in that group was found and no new mothers but the mulcher shattered a main bearing and the rest of the afternoon was spent removing said bearing. While the unit was disabled in the workshop we took out the chipper blade and put a sharp edge on it. This is not the first time a bearing has failed so at least we have some experience in the replacement process. May be lucky and get a new bearing tomorrow but at worse it may take a couple of days. No dramas as there are plenty of other jobs still o the list.

Productivity for the day down as some items still remained on the day list. That's a surprise!