Sunrise to Sunset

Well, it’s the Ides of March today. This day has always fascinated me a bit. It makes me want to read Julius Caesar and run around speaking in Latin, but as I don’t have my complete works of Shakespeare with me, nor do I know Latin, I’m making due with watching the episode of Xena which shares the day’s name. Awesome.

I’ve been working on the farm here for six days now, minus my Sunday off, and I’m pretty well settled into the rhythm. Usually I wake up at 6:30 and am out at the milking shed by 7 to start feeding the calves (which we now have tons of; somewhere around 35 with more being born every day), but yesterday was the last day for the farm manager at Hennie and Kerri’s second farm, so Hennie and I went over there to do the morning milking while Kerri and Hayden did the milking here. Hayden and I will be helping with morning milking for the rest of the week until a new relief milker starts in to handle the Woodville (second) farm on Saturday.

So I get up for morning milking at 4:45 and am out at 5:15 to bring the cows in (or head to Woodville if I’m helping Hennie), and we’re done milking by between 8:30 and 9:30, and then we do any last minute chores and come home for breakfast around 10. After an hour for breakfast (we always have oatmeal with raisins, nuts, seeds and yogurt-covered peanuts) I go back out to the shed and help Hayden with whatever he’s doing for two hours until lunch, unless I have a special task from Hennie.

I suppose I should do some sort of introduction for Hayden, so here goes: first of all, I have to say he’s the cutest Kiwi farm boy I’ve ever seen, and he’s my age. BUT, before y’all start with the raised eyebrows and grins, I’ve gotta tell you that he’s married, and has three kids, who are very cute. He’s the farm manager here at the main farm, and he pretty much takes care of all the day-to-day things that need doing unless Hennie feels the need to do something himself (which happens a lot; he’s a huge believer in the “if you want something done right…” philosophy). Hayden’s a nice guy with a love for his work and his family, and never looks at me like I’m a complete dummy when I ask questions like “when Hennie says to cut out the white face calves, which ones does he mean?”

And for those of you that don’t know, white faces have, you guessed it, white faces. They can be red or black and white, and their breed is actually called Hereford.

We have mostly Holstein cows here at the farm, though they are called Fresians here in NZ. Fresians are bred for their milk production ability, but are sometimes crossed with Herefords because of the Hereford’s genes for easy calving and a few other things. Herefords themselves are actually a meat breed, so Hennie only keeps the crossed calves that have conformation (shape) and coloring like the Fresians and sells the ones that have Hereford conformation as meat animals. We’ve also got Airshire cows (bred for milk production) in the milking mob (herds, or big groups of anything in NZ and Australia, are always called mobs), and they cross with the Fresians as well, and we keep all the heifers born from them. There’s one more kind of cow that Hennie keeps in the mob, which is from Holland (where Hennie and Kerri are from) and it’s breed name is long, and in Dutch, so I’m not going to try to get it right. Anyway, they’re pretty cute cows, and Hennie keeps them more for nostalgia than anything else, as they’re a pretty rare breed.

Anyway, back to the day-to-day. At 12pm I go back to the house for lunch for an hour, or sometimes an hour and a half if there’s nothing pressing to do, and I have a sandwich and a nap. Then around 1 or 1:30 I’m back out to the farm to do more chores until 3. These mid-afternoon chores are usually things like mucking out new stalls for the calves, or throwing tires up on top of the silage hills to keep oxygen from getting in and spoiling it. Sometimes I go out with Hennie or Hayden to some of the rented land and move the mobs of dry cows to new paddocks.

Then around 3pm I go out on the four-wheeler, sometimes with Hayden and sometimes on my own, to collect the milking herd and bring them back to the shed. Afternoon milking starts at 4 and we milk until we get done around 5:30. Then I feed the calves their dinner, and then we clean up and head back to the house for dinner around 6:30 or 7.

And then I flop down on my bed and read until 9:30, when I get too tired to keep my eyes open and listen to music until I fall sleep.

It’s a good life, really! It’s good exercise, good for the soul to be outside and with animals all day (unless the calves are particularly trying; then it’s just a lesson in patience), and it’s nice to know at the end of the day that you’ve helped provide part of the country with the milk for their breakfast in the morning. Even so, I don’t think I want to be a dairy farmer. There’s pretty much no way of taking a break or vacation, ever, unless you hire someone to do milking for you. Being a dairy farmer means being tied to your farm every morning and evening, 360 days a year.

But for now I’m enjoying it a lot. And by the time I finish here I think I’ll have made back most of the money I’ve spent since I got to New Zealand, which is icing on the cake.