🌱 This week at Red Ants Farm
The beef and deer farmers have started asking for tick treatment.
Something I've noticed behind the counter at the farm store this week: the beef and deer farmers have started coming in asking for tick treatment. When the people who do this for a living all turn up for the same thing in the same week, it's usually a good sign the season has turned.
Closer to home: I shifted the herd onto a fresh break first thing Saturday morning and didn't get around to recording it until hours later — one of those small gaps between doing the job and writing it down that farming throws up constantly. Turns out that's common enough that we've just built a fix for it (more on that under What's New below).
So this week's Bulletin is about ticks. Not the Australian paralysis tick, which is a different and nastier story, but our own New Zealand cattle tick — and the reason cattle owners in particular should pay attention to it in spring.
🐄 This week's topic
Ticks on the block.
Why now. Ticks have three feeding stages, and each has its season. According to DairyNZ, nymphs are out mainly in spring, adults in early summer, and larvae from late summer into early winter. The nymphs about now are last autumn's larvae, which spent winter in the base of the grass and are hungry. Knock them back now and there are fewer adults laying eggs in December. That's why vets talk about tick control in spring and again in autumn.
It isn't just a cattle tick. Despite the name, it feeds on sheep, goats, deer and cattle, and turns up on horses, dogs, hares and birds. A heavy load takes enough blood to slow growth, and it's the young ones that suffer most — calves, lambs, kids and fawns.
Theileria is the reason cattle owners worry. It's a blood parasite spread by ticks, and it only makes cattle sick. It was first recognised in Northland in 2012 and has spread a long way since. Watch for a cow that's slow, lagging behind, breathing hard, or has pale or yellow gums, udder or eyes — especially cows around calving and beef calves 5–10 weeks old. If you see it, call your vet and don't chase her. A badly anaemic cow can collapse if she's pushed.
🌾 The surprising part
Most ticks aren't on your animals. A tick spends only a few days of each stage feeding. The rest of the time it's at the base of the grass, and it can wait there up to a year for its next meal. Long, rough, shaded grass along bush edges and gullies is where they sit. Treating the animals only gets the ticks that happen to be on them that week — which is why timing and paddock choice matter as much as the product.
Before you buy a treatment, check four things on the label: that it's registered for the animal you're treating, that it covers all three stages, how many weeks it lasts, and the withholding period for meat and milk. If you milk a house cow or goats, read that last one first.
📖 The full guide
There was more than fits in an email.
The tick's calendar, where to check your animals, Theileria, and moving cattle safely are all in a new Farm Guide: Ticks on the block: cattle ticks, Theileria and when to treat. Free to read, no account needed.
📲 And where the app fits
Twice a year is exactly the kind of thing that slips.
In My Block Hand you can record a treatment against one animal or a whole herd at once, with the product and its withholding period, and the app shows the withholding on each animal until it clears. Add the next treatment as a job and it reminds you when it's due, instead of you working out in March when you last did it.
🛠️ What's new
First, the important one — then break-feed times and equipment warranties.
⚠️ If you've updated your iPad or iPhone recently and My Block Hand won't open at all — update the app. The newest Apple software stops older versions of the app from launching, which looks exactly like the app being broken. Open the App Store, search My Block Hand, and tap Update. If it says Open rather than Update, you're already on the latest. Deleting and reinstalling an old version won't help. If you're on Android, none of this affects you.
- Set the real time on a break-feed move. Moved the fence first thing and only got round to recording it later? You can now set the date and time the move actually happened instead of it defaulting to right now. The rest-clock behind the herd starts counting from the time you choose, and if you get it wrong, undo it on the paddock card and record it again.
- Warranties and receipts on your equipment. Add a warranty end date and a photo of the receipt to any piece of gear. Most gear won't have one; for the ones that do, the equipment card flags it 60 days before the cover runs out, so there's time to book it in. Live on the web and in the phone apps.
- Two new Farm Guides. Why have my hens stopped laying? works through the reasons in the order worth checking — including why a drop in October or November almost never has anything to do with daylight. And the ticks guide above.
🔜 Still coming: a block biosecurity checklist with a quarantine countdown · a vet-ready PDF of an animal's treatment history · more Farm Guides.
🗓️ On the block — late September into October
Written from Northland; most of it travels, the dates shift with you.
- Ticks: check young stock at the tail, udder, inside the back legs, brisket and ears. If you're finding them on the animals, there are plenty more in the grass.
- Sheep: book crutching now rather than when you need it — everyone wants the same fortnight.
- Lambs: if the first clostridial shot is done, the booster is the one that gets forgotten. Put a date on it today.
- Pasture: growth is running ahead of stock on most blocks now. Decide this week which paddocks you're shutting up while you still have the choice.
- Chooks: lay should be picking up as the days lengthen. If yours are going the other way, the new guide will help. Rats come back with the warmth, so feed goes in something with a lid.
- Everything: check shade and water before the first properly hot week, not during it.
💡 A practical tip
Photograph the label.
Next time you open a new tick treatment, drench or vaccine — before it goes on the shelf, take a photo of the back of the container with your phone. The active ingredient, the dose rate and the withholding period, all in one picture, dated automatically.
It takes four seconds and it fills the most common gap in people's records: they know they treated something, they know roughly when, and they have no idea what was in it. Six months later the bottle's gone, and so has the only information anyone actually needs.
💬 A community question
Where on your block do you find the most ticks?
A particular paddock, a gully, along the bush line, on one type of animal more than the others? I'd like to know whether it's the same pattern everywhere or different on every block. If you get the Bulletin by email, just hit reply — I read every one, and I'll share what comes back in a future issue.