Take a look at this picture from a couple of days ago. Notice how Coco, the cow on the right, is outside the electric tape?
What’s wrong with this picture?
The entire pasture is ringed with a permanent electric fence. We use the portable tape and standards to break up the pasture into smaller paddocks so the girls will graze down the grass and not just pick the tops off the grass over the entire property. Coco decided that she didn’t like that plan. This is what happens if you try to get by without enough electric fence standards.
Splendid beast, Coco, basking in the afternoon light
Coco actually didn’t want to get too far away from the others for long. She wound up following them around, just on the ‘free’ side of the tape. I could still go up to her, pet her and even feed her by hand, but she didn’t want to go back into the smaller paddock.
Eventually, I managed to lure her back in with a bucket containing a tiny bit of palm kernel meal. Have you ever seen a child who’s addicted to sugar? That’s what our cows are like with palm kernel. Until we get a dog, this is the best way we have of moving them. Most of the time, though, they’ll just follow us around.
Farmlet reader, SH, contributed US$25. Yesterday, Becky and I went to RD1 and used those funds to buy a dozen more portable, pigtail fence standards. Thanks so much, SH.
[…] Since a while before Christmas, we have been making our own yogurt, butter and cheese here on the Farmlet. With a litre of good organic yogurt costing NZ$5.00 and upwards at the supermarket, it makes good economic sense obtain beautiful creamy milk and make our own yogurt from it. (We apologize if the source of the milk sounds vague. Actually, Coco teleported it back to us from the future, if you must know. Maybe when sanity returns to New Zealand with regard to pasteurization laws, our cows won’t have to use their abilities to bend the space time continuum in order to provide us with milk before they calve.) We do not make all our own butter or cheese yet. We make as much butter as we can with the cream skimmed off the top of our six litres per week of creamy Jersey milk. We are getting a lot of satisfaction from doing these things ourselves, and it is good practice for the day when we finally milk our own cows. Whole, raw milk (Yes, the container is nearly half full of cream) […]