Last saturday we had to put the herd through the stock yards so that we could vaccinate the new calves and check that they were all OK. All the males also needed to be converted from bulls to steers. I won’t say anymore about that because it makes me cringe to think about it.

During this process we discovered a weak calf. It seems that her mother has either neglected her or is unable to feed her. It seemed that she was anything up to a week old, and unless we got some food into her she wouldn’t survive.

My wife got some advice from nearby farmers and we started feeding her on powdered milk. By Tuesday she was looking much better and eating hungrily.

The danger, we were told, is that the calf can scour. This is a disease which causes diarrhoea, and can lead to the calf dying from dehydration.

Today we noticed, or rather my wife did, that the calf, whom she has named Annie, after Orphan Annie, had diarrhoea and was looking much less healthy than yesterday. So we asked the vet what to do. He gave (sold) us some electrolyte solution and a feeding tube. You put the tube down the calves throat and pour in two litres of electrolytes three times a day until the cow picks up ” usually within two to three days.

Now I wasn’t about to do that. It is dangerous. NOt for me, but for the calf. First, you need to get the tube into the oesopagus, and not the trachea, which would force the liquid into the calf’s lungs and she would drown.

What you need is a competent nurse.

Fortunately, our daughter is a nurse. Equally fortunately, she was off work because she just came out of hospital yesterday, feeling somewhat sore and sorry. Nevertheless, we needed her assistance. My wife held the calf, my daughter put the tube down its throat and poured in the electrolyte.

And me? I stood back at a safe distance and watched. See, a piece of cake.

The first one to die got sick, sort of. About three or four months ago she broke her leg. We noticed that she had a limp and managed to get her into the stockyards where we gave her a dose of penicillin. Most of the cows who start limping are doing so as a result of footrot. Apparently it is an infection under the hoof, a bit like an abscess, or so I believe.

But the penicillin didn’t fix her up so we got the vet out to have a look. He told us that she had broken her leg. Prior to getting her sore leg the cows were roaming over the far side of the hill at the back of the farm. The hill leads down to a creek, and while they are mostly quite happy there, it seems that she probably broke her leg, probably by getting too close to the creek bed and perhaps falling in.

Whatever the cause, the vet said that she may recover if she is left alone. So we put her in a paddock by herself and made sure that she had plenty of food and water. And there she stayed for a couple of months. She still had her limp and didn’t seem to be putting on any weight, but otherwise she seemed OK. Then one day she lay down and didn’t get up again. The problem for us is that it is very difficult to tell if a cow is suffering much pain. So we don’t know whether we should have done something about her earlier or not.

The second death was a quite different story. We were moving the herd from one paddock to another. I won’t go into the details, except to say that due to my studpidity one of the cows, who unfortunately was pregnant, had an accident and tore a large part of her hide so that a large part of her left side flesh was exposed.

We called the vet but he said it was too bad an injury and the cow had to be put down. She is now buried over the hill and we have all learnt a very sobering lesson.

The strange thing is that even though the extent of the injury meant that the poor animal was in a lot of pain, she didn’t show it, but merely followed the herd into the paddock and grazed with the rest of them. If you didn’t see her wound you would think that she was in perfect health.

The vet said that because these are preyed upon animals they instinctively show no paid, because that would make them a target for predators. So they stoically suffer in silence.

It is a terrible thing to inflict pain on an animal. It was a hard learnt lesson for us, but I’m afraid even harder for the cow. We must be more careful in the future.

What’s wrong with today? It is raining. It is pouring. Throughout the country old men in their droves are snoring. Young men are snoring too but that is because they spent last night at the pub and now are too crook to go to work, but that has nothing to do with the weather.

When I lived in the city I hated the rain. If I had to drive to work the trafic congestion increased ten-fold. Driving around Sydney in sunshine is never much fun, but in the rain it is the stuff of nightmares.

Of course, I could catch the train. But the trains had a habit of being cancelled, late or crowded, usually all three. So 13,000 people would pack into a carriage designed to accommodate 27. The train would move about 30 metres from the station and then stop, due to maintenance problems, driver problems, or merely out of habit.

At 11:15 you would finally arrive at work. You had missed your 9:30 meeting, but then so had everyone else. You spent the day in wet clothes and soggy shoes. No one was in a good frame of mind.

I hated the rain.

Of course, these days we have been conditioned to love the rain because NSW is in a constant state of drought. But whenever it rained it seemed that everywhere got a soaking except the places that needed it. The farmers out west never got it, and neither did the catchment area for Sydney’s dam. How Sydney could be in the grip of a monsoonal downpour but it’s catchment area, the size of Tasmania, miss out, is beyond me. Who designed this system anyway? Probably a project manager.

But now I live on a farm. If we have no rain we have no water. That means that I can’t drink coffee, so I die.

Yesterday and last night we got 30mm, and in the past 10 days we have had over 100mm.

I may treat myself to a shower and a second cup of coffee.

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.

Nearly five years ago we left Sydney and headed to the South Coast of NSW. We spent nearly a year in Bega, and for two city people that was quite an experience. We then headed back north and settled at Culburra Beach. For those who aren’t familiar with the area it is about 25 kms south east of Nowra, more east than south. And about 2 hours drive from Sydney.

We are now at Toolijooa, which is about the same distance from Nowra, but north east, perhaps a bit more north than east. And it has been a big change for us.

Work wise it makes no difference. I am still about the same distance from my client base, but with easier access to Wollongong, which is the closest major city.

There are pluses and minuses as far as I am concerned. At Culburra Beach I was very close to the water. The beach was just over the sand hills, maybe 50 metres away. The river and the boat ramp where I launched my boat to go fishing was 2kms down the road. Now the beach is about 3kms and the boat ramp 6 or 7. But they aren’t big problems.

Even though it is only about a 40 minute drive back to Culburra Beach we miss many of the friends we have there. One of my fishing mates who used to work in IT, and still does contract work use to drop in every week or so for a cup of coffee and a chat. It is a long way for him to go for a cup of coffee. However, he is a Project Manager, and as all programmers know, Project Managers are not too bright, so he mightn’t think that an hour and half round trip for coffee is a problem.

On the plus side we are much closer to our families. Our youngest son lives in Wollongong, but our other children, as well as my wife and my brothers, sisters and parents live in Sydney. So we are closer to them.

It is the farming bit that is the problem. There are around 100 cows on this farm. Actually they are not all cows, some are bulls, or so I’ve been told – I don’t get close enough to them to find out.

So I now divide my time between writing code, and opening and closing farm gates. At least these are beef cattle and I don’t have to milk them!