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March 12th, 2012
09:43 pm - Charting an AHEMS diary to keep memories real.
First day of diary placement at Boltons Park Farm with Rupert! Had to leave Mary B @ half six to take the tube all the way up to High Barnet and thought we got lost finding the correct bus stop up at Hertfordshire. And then realised they didn't accept Oyster up there so we had to buy our bus tickets (as in made with paper, not card-ish material) with cash. :-o We then walked for fifteen minutes in the cold with no proper footpath so we were walking along the roadside with speeding cars zooming past us. Countryside people are crazy drivers.
Charlie, she's so, unpredictable. I think she was really stressed up today or something, she kept having mood swings in the later part of the day and seemed unhappy with us. Or at least with something (hopefully it wasn't us, but I fell asleep while she was talking today and I think I got on her bad books since then...?)
First thing in the morning we had the health & safety briefing, then we gave the calves milk (from powder). Laid new straw for the calves and post-natal cows, gave them water and food. Then we went to clean the water troughs which were all coated with algae and filled them with new, clean water for the heffers (cows that have not been mothers yet). We also watched her use the computer and learnt stuff (more like statistics) about bulling (where horny cows allow other females to jump on top of them 'cause they are willing to be served, i.e. be jumped on by other cattle, which is like an indication that they are in oestrus) and number of days since the cows were artificially inseminated. But I fell asleep during the larger part of this computer thing so I had Rupert tell me stuff about that afterwards. And then lunch up at Hawkshead, the restaurant serves the WORST espresso ever plus carrot cake in an effort to give myself a sugar rush, which as the term suggests, was short-lived.
*Pregnancy lasts for approximately the same as that of humans (9-10 months),
dairy cows lactate for 305 days out of 365 a year,
calves are separated from their mothers when they're 24h old (which given the really short amount of time wouldn't be really enough for them to get sufficient colostrum and antibodies for their immunity).
According to Rupert the average dairy cow (does it apply to Holstein-Freisians only?) produces 38.5 litres of milk a day. The farm does two rounds of milking a day, once during 5/6am in the morning, once during 3/4pm.
After lunch we raked up the straw that bulged out of the heffers' fences and chucked them back in (but the straw was honestly kinda too dirty towards the bottom layer) and then we did milking.
The cows were assembled at an area and one by one they walk into the cages (?) (it was intuitive to them, they didn't need much prompting to walk in). The cages have two doors both on the same side, one in front and the other behind. When they walk in it's through the back door but they walk out through the front door when they're done with milking. After the cages close we dip their teats in iodine, wipe them dry to make sure the milk collected is germ- and shit-free ('cause they lay down in their own shit and it can dry up on their nipples), then plug up the vacuum pumps and let the machines do their jobs. Then after the pumps were done they released themselves from the udders and we gave the teats afterdip (what it contained I don't know). Then the cows walk off and empty the cage for the next milkee. Initially I got kinda frantic 'cause I messed up once when I didn't manage to afterdip one cow's teat and Charlie told me there's a time limit of 90 seconds before the cage door automatically opens, so I GOT MY HEAD INTO THE GAME and I thought we were quite a good team? But all of a sudden Charlie got really stressed, as if she wanted to flare up at us but was witholding herself, so Rupert and I were like apprehensive and had mixed impressions of her.
Also, the calves grew so quickly! I remember they were tiny when I went up to Hawkshead for the AH Practical two months ago and now they're all on pellets and have really rough tongues that scratched me when they licked my hand. So now I get really scared when they press their face against any part of my skin :-s
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June 18th, 2011
09:57 pm - Writer's Block: Band on the run
Yesterday.
it remains the most covered song of all times, and i always vividly remember the black-and-white video of him singing this song.
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