Its been getting harder and harder to get a loan of a bull. I used to have an arrangement with my neighbor, but they've gone down the path of serious breeding. They no longer want to loan us one of their professional bulls for our motley crew of Angus-like cows.

As a result we haven't had a bull on the place for more than 18 months. Or so I thought.

In itself its not been an issue. We don't "need" more cows, in that there hasn't been that much feed and my cows keep the paddocks trimmed enough. Up until recently we have had a freezer full of beef, and we have a hefty 2 year old steer mooching around with the cows.

Most of the farms around us buy in small steers, feed them for awhile, then onsell them. We've talked about doing that as part of the simplification of the workload, so I haven't been actively looking any more for a bull to kick-start another round of breeding with the cows that we have.

Its been very cold the last few weeks, and with the extended period of no rain, very little grass growing. As a result I have already started feeding my cows from the accumulated haypile. Its pretty easy to calibrate, in that if they start mucking around with the hay and wasting it, I cut back on how much I feed them. And because we use small bales its easy to increment/decrease by a small amount. You can't do that so easily with the big bales. If the hay put out is all gone quickly I can bump up the feed. Its working pretty well, the cows look good and haven't lost condition.

(Last year I was slower to start feeding them and they did lose weight. Although they were in better shape than the cows I see in neighbouring paddocks they were still thinning down and I want to avoid that this year.)

Most the time the cows are all in one place, usually not far from where I fed them yesterday. But one was missing this morning. And that was odd, she's a cheerful, active cow who's always involved in whatever is going on. So I split out the hay bales for the cows who had showed up, kept some in reserve for the missing cow, and went looking for her.

And found her in the next paddock….with her new born calf.

Oh dear. I hadn't even noticed a birth was imminent. Sure, I have an excuse…there hasn't been a bull onsite. But clearly that was incorrect! I think there is enough evidence in these blogs now to say I don't pay enough attention.

We have had bulls jump the fence and need escorting home, (and another neigbour's hungry cows persistently jumps the fence into our place. They are so used to me chasing them out that they start heading for the gate between the two properties as soon as they see me.)

I expect a flying visit from a bull is what has happened, except usually it's something I know about. Once they are in they usually mooch around until they are evicted. I wasn't aware of this episode. I expect my neighbor tracked him down and brought him home.

Calf and mother are doing well