New Fashion in Nose Rings?

What looks like a punk accessory for fashionable cattle actually has a less glamorous purpose. The young cattle when they are penned together start to try to suckle on each other. If the suckling is enough it can cause lactation in the heifers, which ruins their udders for milking. Hence the accessory which discourages the behaviour.
And if you think the nose ring looks uncomfortable you could consider the other, more traditional, method of discouraging suckling in young cattle.

This photo probably isn't clear enough to show that this heifer's tongue has been cut into a point so that it can't physically latch onto a teat.

In the Barn

Although the cows in the last post were pictured walking in from their grassy field to be milked, they were not going out again to sleep in the field. That can only happen in summer when the night time temperatures are warmer than freezing. Until such time they will stay in the barn overnight. Their calves stay permanently inside the barn. Bull calves get fed for about 20 months before going to the place that cattle go to when they are nice and meaty. The heifer calves will probably go on to be milking cows.
The food was meant to be for the cows, but Hugh thought it looked good enough to play with (and it did smell quite tasty...).

Agriculture

During our travels through the Franche-Comté region we saw lots of land with young crops - mainly cereals. Here is a picture of some canola growing in a field, and some silos (which I snapped through the windscreen as we drove past). There were hundreds of hectares of crops, but usually in small plots, with no fences - so I presume that these fields are continuously cropped.

Cows coming in for milking

The area is also famous for its cheeses, and both Stephan's and Annick's fathers had been cheese makers. There were many dairy farms. Most of the cows we saw were brown and white, a local breed called Montbéliard.
(Click here to find out more about the Montbéliard breed.)

Our hosts organised a visit to a dairy farm for us. The farm was only small, with about 30 or 40 cows being milked. The milk goes down the road about 5kms to a fromagerie where it is made into cheese.

The by-product of cheese-making is whey, and Annick works for a company that dries the whey into powder and exports it around the world. In her job distributing the products she speaks both English and German, as well as French, and she is currently learning another language (I can't remember if it was Polish or Russian). However Stephan only speaks French, so he and Roger (who only speaks English) had quite interesting chats!

A Walk in the Countryside

Walking in the countryside...

Running in the countryside...

A sheep...

The first morning in Dampierre-sur-Linotte was fine and we all went for a walk around the village and down a rural lane. Here we saw a sheep, just in case we were homesick. As you can see in the photo it bears little resemblance to one of our merino sheep on the farm back home in Australia.

We also saw big piles of firewood along the edges of the lane. The local community has a lot of forest, which is managed and harvested to allow all the residents of the village to have an annual supply of firewood. Stephan said that he is going to take out their expensive oil-fired central heating and replace with a wood-burning unit before next winter.

Farewell Ash

We are all feeling a bit sad today, because Ash, our dog at home, died. David, who's been living in our house and looking after her, emailed this morning with the news. She had an accident jumping off the ute and got run over by the sheep feeder apparently.
Ash was Roger's number one sheep dog, and the only one we kept when we left the farm. She was also the only the dog that the girls aren't scared of. Hugh liked to play with her and he would roll around on the ground with her. He would give her biscuits to eat and he has on occasion tried to clean her teeth with a toothbrush.
I have found a few photos with Ash in them for her final farewell.