🌱 This week at Red Ants Farm
Cold, wet, and still no lambs.
Every morning this week I've gone out half-expecting to find something on the ground, and every morning it's been the same ewes looking back at me, still holding on. They're wide as a bus and thoroughly unbothered. I'm the only one in a hurry.
So it's been feeding and watching. Feeding, and watching, and doing the walk again in the afternoon in case I missed something. The grass is still slow — whatever's coming, it hasn't started yet, so what the ewes get is what I carry out to them.
They'll come when they come. That's the whole update.
🐑 This week's topic
The five things worth writing down while you're standing there.
Lambing and calving are the one time of year when the information is free and the window is about four seconds wide. It's happening in front of you — and if you don't catch it right then, it isn't hard to find later. It's gone. There's no way to sit down in March and work out how many lambs you lost in August.
Nobody needs a tidy database. What you need is to be able to answer, in autumn, the question that actually costs you money: which of my ewes are worth keeping?
Five things, ten seconds:
- 1. Which mother, and the date. The spine everything hangs off. Tag number if you tag; "the black-faced one in the corner mob" if you don't.
- 2. How many — and how many got up. Born versus born alive. The most valuable number of the season. A ewe who reliably rears twins and a ewe who reliably has twins and loses one are very different animals, and by October they look identical over the fence.
- 3. Did she need help. Yes or no. Two seasons of "yes" answers a culling question you'd otherwise agonise over.
- 4. Anything odd. Bad udder, no milk, mismothered, wouldn't take it. The notes you swear you'll remember and never do.
- 5. Later — how many made it to weaning. The one that turns the rest into a decision. "She had triplets" is impressive. "She reared one" is expensive. Same ewe.
What it buys you is an autumn where the culling decision makes itself, instead of being a guess made at the yards with the truck coming.
And the bit that catches everyone out: the ewes you'd have culled on looks are often not the ones the record points at. The best animal on most blocks is a quiet, unremarkable thing that rears twins two years running and does nothing whatsoever to draw attention to herself.
📲 And how to keep track of it
All five are now in the app, end to end.
The back of a feed docket works fine. But dockets get washed, so: from a breeding record you can now record the birth — each lamb, calf, kid or foal with sex, birth weight, alive or dead, and whether it needed a hand. Each one becomes its own animal in your herd, linked to its mother and father, nothing to re-enter.
Then that same record gets a "Record weaning" step: mark each one weaned or lost, add a weaning weight if you took one, and it works out survival to weaning and average weaning weight for you. All of it shows up in the animal's lifetime history, the mother's and the offspring's.
Why weaning went in before lambing rather than after: it's the one thing on the list that genuinely can't be backfilled. So it jumped the queue, ahead of things I'd rather have been building.
Same promise as always: if you never record a birth, the app behaves exactly as it does today.
🛠️ What's new
Android, the full breeding chain, and a rain gauge that can count.
- 📱 Android is live. My Block Hand is on Google Play as well as the App Store now. Same login, same farm, nothing to move — and reminders arrive as proper notifications instead of sitting in the app waiting to be found.
- 🍼 The full breeding chain works. Mating → birth → weaning, each step flowing into the next and into the animal's lifetime history. A few rough edges got found and fixed along the way, mostly by me using it on my own stock and getting annoyed.
- 🌧️ Rain gauge: two readings in a day now add up. If you emptied the gauge morning and afternoon, the second reading used to replace the first. It doesn't any more — my own fault, and my own walk past the gauge twice a day that found it.
- 🌏 The app now knows where you are. Seasons follow your hemisphere, money your currency, reminders your own clock. Matters little in Northland, quite a lot if you're reading this from somewhere the seasons run backwards.
- 🇦🇺 An NLIS guide for anyone running stock in Australia, alongside the NAIT one.
🔜 What we're building next
Records that come back out again.
The app is good at swallowing information and, so far, less good at handing it back. That's the next block of work:
- A vet-ready PDF — an animal's treatment and health history, printed, farm name on it, for the conversation you have at the clinic.
- A block biosecurity checklist with a 14-day quarantine countdown for new or returning animals and birds. One feature, two diseases.
- Meat and production records showing up where you'd actually look. Someone processed roosters, went looking on the flock, couldn't find the record — it existed, just filed somewhere they had no reason to look. Fair hit. That gets fixed.
🗓️ On the block this month — NZ, early August
Late winter turning, depending where you are.
- Lambing and calving are starting. Shelter matters more than anything else you can do this fortnight — a wet, windy night does more damage than a cold, still one.
- Pre-lamb feeding is decisive now, not important. Beef + Lamb NZ's guidance: in the last three weeks energy is the limiting factor, quality beats quantity, and thin multiple-bearing ewes want your best paddock rather than your biggest.
- Don't graze it out. What you leave behind now sets how fast the spring flush arrives. Worst month of the year to buy short-term feed with next month's growth.
- Check the lambing kit before you need it — iodine in date, colostrum powder, a tube, a head torch that works, vet's after-hours number in your phone rather than on the fridge.
- NAIT for calves: tagged and registered within 180 days of birth or before the first movement off-property, whichever comes first. Diarise it now rather than discover it in November.
- Point-of-lay pullets go on sale as the days lengthen — which is exactly when the quarantine habit below earns its keep.
- The hens have noticed the longer days. Laying picks up from about now; if yours haven't started, feed quality and daylight are the usual two culprits, in that order.
🐔 The 14-day habit
One rule, two different problems.
Quarantine any new or returning animal or bird away from the rest for 14 days. New pullets, a borrowed ram, birds home from a show or swap meet, weaners off a truck.
Worth a mention now because MPI asks for that same 14 days for two entirely separate reasons — protecting backyard flocks after bird flu was found in wild birds in the Wellington region in July, and as the core of the basic on-farm biosecurity they'd like every livestock owner to have for a foot-and-mouth scenario. Two threats, one habit, one spare pen.
The rest of the flock list, worth doing while nothing's happening: feed and water undercover, keep birds off ponds and creeks that wild birds use, bird-proof the holes you keep meaning to fix, and if several birds are sick, ring your vet first before handling anything.
MPI exotic pest and disease hotline: 0800 80 99 66.
💡 A practical tip
The cold lamb: energy before warmth.
A lamb that's gone cold and floppy needs energy before heat. Warming an empty lamb burns through what little it has left, and you can lose it in the box. That's why Beef + Lamb NZ's lambing material sets out a proper decision tree — it turns on the lamb's age and whether it can still hold its head up, and it changes what you do first.
Don't take my word for the detail. Print B+LNZ's lamb-survival guidance, put it in the shed in a plastic sleeve, and read it now while your hands are dry and it isn't 11pm. Better still, ask your vet to walk you through it before the season rather than during it.
The tip underneath the tip: the year you need this, you will not be in a state to go looking it up.
💬 A community question
What do you actually write down — and what did you give up on?
It's the second half I'm really curious about. Everyone starts a season with a system. Most of us end it with a much shorter one.
So — what survived? Notebook in the ute, note on the phone, whiteboard, chalk on the shed wall, or all in your head and holding up fine? And what did you try to record one year and quietly abandon by the second week?
Reply to the Bulletin and tell me. The abandoned ones are more useful to me than the successful ones — anything that doesn't survive a wet Tuesday at 6am isn't worth building.