Corn in, Shearing, and Cattle management

It’s quite impressive what a week of excellent weather can do to the farm… and your backs. We finally had a bit of rain this morning as I am writing this post but nothing substantial although I think this Tuesday will be a rainy day.

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Summer in May, work moving forward

Well, this week was one of those you can do almost everything still behind on the farm and literally move things forward because we had a bit of Summer weather for several days straight!

Cows now on Pastures in a Rainy Week

Well, this week has been one of those… which will be repeated until late October… or maybe not so much. This may be a very confusing first sentence to this post but quite a lot of things are moving forward on the farm and some are still a bit stuck but hopefully will, too, move in the right direction.

Regarding Feed

Feed is one of the central aspects on every farm. We spend most of the Summer foraging and preparing grass, corn, and other cereals that will be used to feed the livestock during the Winter months. And since we are now ended the feeding season it seems like a good idea to write some lines about it.

The Round Bales season is over

Finally, we finished our last two round bales for this Winter and all the livestock is now on pasture. This has been the longer period in years we had the cows on round bales, mostly due to the high-pasture cows only calving late in May.

Progress on the New Workshop (1)

As the title suggests this will be the first of a series of posts regarding the progress of the work on the new workshop. I thought that this project, as well as several others here on the farm, would make some nice content for the blog in terms of “the progress so far”.

Long and Rainy Spring Days

So I’m back in the island for so Spring projects and some livestock managing… if the weather will collaborate with some less rainy days. Days are long though, but we get some sun in the morning, lots of rain after lunch and, again, sun in the end of the afternoon.

Regarding pasture 72

Every Winter or, more likely during the early Spring (March and April) I usually work on the pastures that are in disrepair and need a more urgent and profound intervention to get them back to producing good grass. The last couple of Winters were largely dedicated to our large pasture at Espigão (about half an hectare of land), in serious disrepair with a large concentration of Hedychium gardnerianum which was gradually taking over the grazing grass area, as well as also a large quantity of an invasive species of fern.

Livestock moving and other projects

Well, and we are now in full motion of the livestock between pastures. The weather is gradually changing from the late-Winter still-cold temperature with some stormy days to more sunny and warm ones, mostly thanks to the daylight saving time, which is, by far my, favourite time of the year because you can squeeze every working hour of the day which, together with the weather improvement, makes for the best time of the year to be outside doing stuff.

Round bales Season almost over

Well, as I usually say to my neighbour farmers, “it’s that time of the year”, meaning that we are approaching the end of what I call the “round bales season”. That was the title of last year’s post on this ending of the Winter season here at the farm. It is interesting to notice that last year we ended the round bales precisely on the April 10th week, but this year thing have been much slower so the season will last at least 1 or 2 more weeks.

Winter 2022 photo dump

I’m not particularly a social media person. I keep a personal facebook profile since most colleagues in my field use it to share info on research, events, etc. There are now very interesting research social media options but people keeps insisting on fb as a primary means of communicating science. I guess this and many attitudes such as that keeps facebook going. I never understood twitter and I don’t use it. I share most of my work on LinkedIn which I find the most suitable network for someone with my profile. I’m happy to see more people from my field of studies going to LinkedIn.

Regarding the New Workshop

This has been, by far, my most important and busy project I have been doing at the farm. It’s been going on since 2018 with long periods without any work done, but it has been great to make this project going forward and, hopefully, during this year it will be concluded.