April has been a busy month with school holidays and Easter to fit in also.
School holidays are always good as I (Katie) can get lots of work done around the place. With the kids, I pulled down an old fence which was a bit of a hazard for both man and beast. We also chipped out Bathurst Burr on our flat, while Justin sprayed out the thistle rosettes. No. 2 Child grumbled to me, “They’re called holidays for a reason.”
We also bought a new feeder from Advantage Feeders. This one is a trailing unit and we will use it to follow the ewes around. For the time being, we have put Grower pellets in it and separated out the bullied lambs from the big bullies. Shy-feeders are an industry-wide problem and we are testing a prototype reader (brown wooden panel in pic) which will log the animals’ EID ear tags. This will show us which animals are eating from the feeder and which aren’t. Splitting the animals up does help, but we find that we just create another paddock with bullies and bullied. We are still trying to work out the answer to this question – along with the entire meat industry.