Busy Bank Holiday On A Small Family Farm In Ireland

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]May Bank holiday, Sunday morning. The job we always do on a May Bank holiday here as a tradition is put our cows outside. And we're going to attempt to do that this morning. We're not going to put them all outside. We're going to keep some of them back, but well, they're ready to go, but I just want to hold them maybe for another week, maybe a week and a half, and let these ones get settled for us before we put the next batch outside. I can just see here the big girls are at the dung in the dinker. How did you back yourself in there and do that? It was you. I know bloody rightly. So, really pleased with our calves this year. Um, credit to the girls because they do a lot of the feeding in the evenings and the mornings the weekend. So, a lot of it comes down to them. Anyway, I'm going to do it different this time. I'm not going to put a wire around here. I'm going to actually put them straight up in the trailer with no training for the electric fence and I'm going to put them into the crush in the other farm and train them there instead because we have a lot of stuff and silage here where the cows are still a couple of cows there we're selling and two cows still the cal. I don't want them just running around the place even with the straw that's up there as well. I just don't want them tearing up this yard.

[00:01:29][ __ ] I'm going to close the gate.

[00:01:57]>> Why?

[00:01:59]>> The CS don't get out.

[00:02:10]All right. So, now comes the electric fence training time.

[00:02:41]Okay. I wouldn't touch it now.

[00:02:59]>> I left the girls and Chenade over there with them. Just keep an eye up. setting up a larger area or a larger electric fence around the bigger yard now to let them out in about a half an hour's time in this. I'm just after coming home and washed out the trailer real quick. I'm going to take that off now. And Elena is over here. She's clean out the calf house. We're going to put another coat in the bed in here and we're going to get them calves in here.

[00:03:47]Right, that's the next batch in there.

[00:03:49]Almost ready to go out. Just not ready there yet. There is a couple of bigger ones, but there's two young ones there, too, which I want to just give another week of milk to and then maybe a week and a half, 10 days, they can follow them. The house here will need a good cleaning out. Yeah, all this bedding will be taken out now this evening. This will all be scrap out, wet down, and get it ready for pressure washing.

[00:04:19]Right. So, back over here now. Gonna take this wire down. We've removed the batsy fence. We're going to let them into this yard now. We have two rows around here and let them gallop around a wee bit because they're we bit confined in this spot and they haven't touched as much since I left. So hopefully they'll behave themselves when they get out here.

[00:04:52]It's great to burn off this energy.

[00:04:54]Not me, Cavs.

[00:04:56]Right. Well, they're either on their best behavior and trying to fool us or they are actually just being quiet because they've done nothing at a place.

[00:05:04]She's eating a lump of sage there. They look like they're going to fall asleep at this stage. So, we're going to open this here. We're going to let them into this paddock here. Now, there's a lot of grass on it and it is quite heavy. I'd rather there wasn't as much on it, but it's just the way it is. That's just a training paddock and they'll be moving down to shorter grass which is on the lower end there. So, let's get them moved in and hopefully they'll behave just like this when they're in the grass.

[00:05:31]The ethic fence doesn't tick as quick as the bat one, so there'll be a bigger interval between the shocks when it's walking.

[00:05:41]It must be a surreal experience for an animal that's never been outside before.

[00:05:45]Like they don't even know what outside is. They've always been indoors since they were born. So you can imagine how curious it' make the mind. I was like a teenager when they first went to a nightclub. All right. Well, Chenade's way home now with the two youngest to put on dinner. Cars have been really really quiet. They haven't done anything at a place since they got out. I think from now on we'll use the yard over here than at home because the fact that we're going straight from the yard into the field without a delay seem to work well.

[00:06:08]So So you always learn something new as you go along.

[00:06:12]Heat.

[00:06:41]Hey, Heat. Heat. Heat.

[00:07:35]That's crazy.

[00:08:23]Okay, boy.

[00:08:26]Filter itself doesn't look too bad. It's got a bit of gunk in between the fins, but if you look in here, bit hard to get off it, but there's a heap of gunk.

[00:08:36]Get your finger down maybe a bit.

[00:08:40]this all gunk like oil baked in the bottom of it. But anyway, going to give this a good wash out now in a bit of hot water. Throw a new filter in. It'll be job done.

[00:08:55]Right, turn the key on now and that will start up the pump and that will fill up that filter.

[00:09:03]You'll hear change when the filter's full.

[00:09:35]See that for a while the dust will soak up all that oil out of the ground and then we can clean it up. One thing I didn't do is the air filters. They're fine. I done the air filter last year so there's no need in touching that. I do have to do something with this. That thing there doesn't stay up on the glass for some reason. Is there any reason why that is? Or is there glue that goes onto it? Cuz I can get it to sit up, but it doesn't stay on it. And I'll be just worried sometime I close it, the glass might break. So, I'll have to find out what the cause of that is.

[00:10:27]hopefully get a bit longer out of that one. That's what I'm at here at the minute. Sorry, my vice might be a bit horse. I'm a bit fluid here at the minute, but um just wetting down this shed here. This the car shed. Sweeping it all out. Give it a good soap down cuz tomorrow morning going to tear into this now and start washing these sheds out.

[00:10:42]Get a bit of a head start med. One thing I do have to do, I just walked in here and immediately I seen my problem. But I do have to close all of those vents there on the walls because if I don't and leave any of them opened, swallows will come in. Just two of them have to go out there as I walked in. So they come in and the problem with them is when they go to nest, which they will, the droppings is a real problem. Taps and you go to touch. It's just kicked in their door. While people might love their boards and whatever, that stuff there carries disease. What we do just to avoid that is close up all our sheds, any holes where they can get in and avoid that problem. So, yeah, that's definitely a must.

[00:12:00]Heat. Heat. Another door something stopping it.

[00:12:44]So the water goes down through these little nozzles here or little grooves and that creates kind of a funnel which makes this bike spin inside here and that's what gives you your tobo head.

[00:12:54]It's quite a simple design, but if it gets any kind of dirt written in here, it doesn't always work that well or even a bit of wear and that usually means that you'll have to replace it. But we're going to clean it first. See what that does.

[00:13:40]Today is the 27th of April and it's the first time I've ever went to a feed with the slurry tanker. It's hard to believe, but that's the way it's been this spring. It's been too wet and now the ground has really dried up. It hasn't been the warmest. It's very cold this morning and you can see it in the grass.

[00:13:54]The grass hasn't really got that growy look to it. It's a bit still a bit yellow of itself and that's just purely down to the cold evenings or cold nights, but that will improve over the next few days hopefully. One thing I definitely can see is a lot of docks.

[00:14:08]There's two paddocks here beside me.

[00:14:11]Show you around here. Quite a few docks, but not an awful lot of growth coming back on it. They get plenty of fertilizer and everything, but there's not a huge amount of comeback. Even the receding is struggling a bit. So, we wouldn't say there's a huge growth at the moment, but it should really kick off over the next few days. I'm hoping anyway at least.

[00:14:34]All right. So, I'm just having a quick look at this. See why these aren't working. So, second one in and the sixth one in on this side aren't working.

[00:14:42]There's usually a bit of harmonue or something. And I can see here on this one there's a stone just right there. Do you see it? Ah, went down the pipe. Do you know what it'll do now? It'll run down the pipe and it'll come out and that'll solve the problem. Sweet bits of gravel and stuff. You'll always get stones to go into them.

[00:15:03]Now we have one more. Where is it?

[00:15:15]All right. So, that's that meadow done.

[00:15:17]It's only slurry. You've seen it a million times before on videos on YouTube. So, kind of skip over that stuff now. But, it is important things to get done. Right. I'm tipping home for the spuds.

[00:15:26]So, we're down here in that parlor and we have to do a quick mini service as we call it. We changed these pulsation tubes and we changed these liners.

[00:15:35]They're well crusted now. So, it's time that we're changed. Long overdue actually. We always normally do it early spring and then we do it again in the autumn time, twice a year. Milk tubes and things get changed once a year. This here, I haven't actually changed them in two years. That's the pulsation lines.

[00:15:49]They're actually all right. They only carry air, so they're not as important as your milk lines, which do need to be changed. Another thing I'm going to do this year is change these cups. They all need to be done. They haven't been done in a while. Um, they weren't in stock when I went to look on them in the qu.

[00:16:02]So, I'll wait and hopefully have them in a few days. So, let's get this sorted first. Nicole is going to give me a quick hand here and we knock this out fairly quickly.

[00:16:39]Right. Just let that soak in for a bit.

[00:16:42]Um while we see to another Garrett, she'll get a bit of an audience now whe she likes it or not and hopefully she'll be cal now in the next 2 hours. Co's going to give her a wee bit of silage there. I'm going to wash this down real quick because she's just after informing me as well that we're out of straw. I completely overlooked that. Going to get this job finished up. It's a wet day job as you can see. That's why we're at it.

[00:17:13]But hopefully it'll pick up maybe after lunch and can get a couple of BS.

[00:17:57]Okay, a few people ask me about how they get on with the plastic pallets. Well, that's your answer. Absolutely useless.

[00:18:04]The ones up in the other house were a bit stronger, but again, they broke as well. But I thought they would have carried a bit better than this now, but still they didn't. This in here, the whole bottom's completely gone. Now, there are companies that do ones that are especially supposed to be for calves. I think they're about €150. I've seen them online. They're probably slightly bigger than them. And I'd need one, two, three. I'd probably need four of them. But to me, I'll go back to probably using the timber pallets for a while because they come free underneath the fertilizer bags. Anyway, if I was going to do something else in this, what I would do probably is I put a road blocks across here to hold it into this house. I' put a couple of lines down every so often to the wall and I put pig slats on them. And there you'd have a good job. Pig slats will not break and you can gap them whatever way you want.

[00:18:48]But as I say, for the size of this house and the few cars that we have, timber palace do the job. And I think I'll go back to using them. Now, any nasty rats in here? Yep, we have rats in the farm.

[00:18:58]Everybody does.

[00:19:12]There is the pallets done and what was left of them. Um, so I'm going to wet this all down now. I'm going to give it a wash shed. I'm not going to put it into this video. I think we've covered a lot on this video. I'm already cleaning the silage bit over there at the minute.

[00:19:23]Going to getting as many things knocked out before sage time as we can, which will only be in another couple of weeks.

[00:19:28]Ky will carve the Nate when she's done and outside. We'll get this washed hopefully before the end of next week.

[00:19:34]Get that all finished. Maybe this one as well. We'll see how we get on. So, you can probably hear that wind on the camera as well. That's coming from the north. There's blue skies. But don't let it fool you because that's a sharp wind.

[00:19:44]We had a man here this morning. He was shivering when he got out of the car.

[00:19:47]It's cold. Very, very cold. Hence the reason I have a hoodie on me and I have the hood pulled over me head most of the time when I'm not talking on the camera.

[00:19:53]We'll see you in the next one.