Saturday was our first day of real farming. Up to then I had been swanning around on the ride on mower, taking the tractor for a spin, feeding the fish – we have some axolotls that are supposed to breed – but generally taking it easy.

That all changed on Saturday!

It was time to get some of the cattle separated from the rest of the herd and ready to be sent to the market. It was also an opportunity to check the others and perform any maintenance that was required.

The cattle are all rounded up, it seems easy when you say it fast. The trick is to get them to go where they don’t want to go. And they always want to go where they shouldn’t be.

Next to the stock yard was a small area, not big enough to be called a paddock, with some very lush grass, and pretty good fences. On Thursday we managed to coax them into the adjoining paddock, and by Friday they were ready to be moved. We opened the gates and they galloped, like the stampedes you see in the old western movies, into the area with the good grass. Then the gates were closed behind them.

Cows are lilke a fast moving machine. Fuel, in this case grass, goes in one end, and cow manure, for want of a better word, comes out the other. And this goes on all day every day, and most of the night as well. They don’t have much time to sleep, they are always eating.

These are Limousin – nice looking cows, aren’t they?

Every cow, or heiffer, or bull or steer – I am learning the lingo – needs tow tags. One is the NLIS, or National Livestock Identification System tag. It is an electronic tagging system, like the one that the tollways use, which identifies every animal. The other is an ear tag (or a tail tag, we use ear tags) which has the number of the cow so you can see what cow it is. For example, if I see a cow in the paddock and it has a tag with number 106 in its ear, I can quickly look up my database and find out that this cow is Mabel, not Annabel, as I had suspected.

Tags are put in the cow’s ears with a tool that looks a bit like a rivet gun, and it works in a similar fashion to ear piercing, not that I have had my ears pierced.

A second thing that happens is that some of the cows have to be de-horned. This is a terrible exercise, and the de-horning tool looks like it belongs in a BDSM parlour or a medieval torture chamber. The de-horner is placed around the horn, very close to the head, and it cuts off the horn. Blood spurts out, the cow yells at you, and then you do the other horn. Not a pleasant exercise, but it has to be done.

The final indignity for some of the poor animals is castration. Steers make better meat, and you cannot have too many bulls on the property, they fight with each other as they chase the fair maiden heiffers around the paddocks.

All in all not a great day for the poor cows and bulls. But they seem OK now. They are in the stock yards and I have been feeding them fresh hay a couple of times a day. They seem quite contented.

I haven’t told them of their ultimate fate, after all they’ve been through I just can’t bring myself to telling them.