🌱 This week at Red Ants Farm
Lambing's done, and the next two jobs are already queued.
Every ewe's lambed here, and this week was mostly just walking round checking everyone's doing okay rather than watching for anything new. Another frosty morning, but you can feel it turning — the grass is starting to move again with the longer days and a bit more warmth in the sun.
Which means the next two jobs are on my mind instead: getting the lambs into the pen for docking and tagging before they get much bigger, and doing something about the weeds that are about to get a head start on the new grass.
✂️ This week's topic
Two jobs, both with a real clock on them.
Docking and tagging on one side, weed control on the other — and both are easier to get right than wrong, once you know where the clock actually is.
Docking and tagging: the window is younger than you'd think
MPI's Code of Welfare is clear on this one: tail docking should be done as young as possible, and if you're doing it yourself (not a vet) it has to happen before six months of age, using a hot iron or rubber ring — no other method is legal without a vet involved. Leave enough tail to cover the vulva on ewe lambs, and a similar length on rams. Younger is genuinely kinder here, not just more convenient — it's a smaller procedure on a smaller animal.
One thing worth doing properly while they're in the pen: record who's who, not just tag them. A tag number on its own is just a number. Matched against dam (and sire, if you know it), it becomes breeding history — which ewe reliably throws twins, whose lambs do well, who's related to who before you decide next year's mating groups. That's the record that pays off in a season or two, not this one.
And marking time is the easiest it'll ever be. Everyone's already in the yards, and lambs are with the right mothers — or as close as you'll ever be certain of. Miss that window and the honest answer to "whose lamb was that" a few months on is a guess, not a record.
The problems from poor identification show up later, not straight away. You can't reliably avoid mating close relatives if you don't know who's related to who. You can't tell a genuinely good breeding ewe from one that just got lucky this year. And if you ever sell breeding stock, a buyer asking about parentage gets a shrug instead of an answer — which is worth real money on some breeds.
Weeds: the mistake is spraying too late, not too early
The spring flush that's bringing your pasture back is bringing the weeds back too — and right now they're small, sitting under the pasture as seedlings. The common mistake, per the advice from NZ Farm Source and Beef + Lamb NZ, is waiting: once stock graze the pasture down and expose those seedlings to full sun, they take off and get much harder to control. Spraying while they're still small and the pasture's still covering them is the opposite of what feels natural, but it's when it actually works.
If ragwort's part of your problem, there's one thing worth knowing before you spray. As a sprayed ragwort plant wilts and dies, its sugar content spikes — for a few days it becomes more palatable, right when it's also more toxic. Keep cattle and horses out of a sprayed paddock until the plants have completely rotted down, not just until they look dead. Sheep are more tolerant of ragwort than cattle or horses, but "more tolerant" isn't "immune" — the safest rule is the same for everyone: stay out until it's gone.
⚠️ Neither of these is a substitute for the label or the code. Product choice, rate and exact withholding periods are a conversation with your farm supply store or rep — this is the "why" and the "when," not a spray plan.
📲 And where the app fits
You're certain you'll remember the date — right up until you need to know it exactly.
Log the docking date against each lamb (or the mob) and you've got the age on record if it's ever questioned — and a paddock note with the spray date means you, or anyone else who might turn stock out, can see at a glance when it's actually safe to go back in. Both take ten seconds at the time and save a guess later.
No pitch beyond that — the value here is not having to trust your memory in October about something that happened in August.
🛠️ What's new
A busy week of small fixes, and one change you'll notice straight away.
🥚 Today's Brief now asks for today's eggs. If you keep poultry, the egg count is on the front screen waiting for you instead of sitting behind a menu. It turned out the prompt only appeared for people who had already logged one — which is exactly the wrong way round.
↩️ You can undo a herd movement. Tick the wrong paddock on a move and you can now take the last one back, and the paddock's rest clock goes back with it.
🚪 Gates: open or shut without ending the graze. Opening a gate between two paddocks no longer forces you to close off the grazing you're in the middle of.
🐕 Correct pregnancy lengths for dogs and alpacas. Both were quietly using a generic default — 150 days — instead of their real terms. If you've a dog or an alpaca with a due date in the app, it's worth a look.
📱 iPhone app updated. The App Store version now carries the fix for the bug where tapping a small field zoomed the whole app in and wouldn't zoom back out. An Android update with the same fixes is with Google now.
🔜 Still coming: a vet-ready PDF of an animal's treatment history · a block biosecurity checklist with a 14-day quarantine countdown · exports that include the milestone and timeline data they're currently missing.
💡 A practical tip
Timing a weed spray so it actually works.
Go while they're small. A weed you can barely see under the pasture is easier to kill than the one that's taken over a bare patch next month. If you can see it easily, you're already a bit late.
Pick a calm, dry day with no rain forecast for several hours — check your product's specific window, they vary.
Know your stand-down before you start, not after. Different products have different withholding periods for grazing. Write it down or set a reminder before you spray, not when someone asks if it's safe to turn stock out.
Ragwort needs longer than "looks dead." The danger window is while it's wilting, not before or after.
Record the paddock and the date. It's the only way to answer "is it safe yet" with certainty instead of a guess.
💬 A community question
Docked and tagged yet, or still to come?
I'm curious whether most of you are ahead of me on this or in the same boat — pen booked in the diary versus "I'll get to it." And if you've got a weed that keeps winning on your place, name it — I'll ask around for what's actually worked for people rather than guessing.
Hit reply — I'll pull the more useful answers into a future issue.