Wednesday March 12, 2014

Day 58..

Machinery & Workshop Ops:- today we had a presentation on 'Agricultural Vehicles On The Road' by Gary Chance of the Lincs Police / Road Safety Partnership. As a crash investigator, Gary has dealt with numerous incidents involving farm vehicles on the road and through this talk he discussed many aspects of the law and what farm and agricultural vehicles need to do to comply (despite getting away with quite a lot). AMV stands for Agricultural Motor Vehicle and this is how the police describe such vehicles. Most accidents are caused by careless driving;
1. without due care and attention and 2. without reasonable consideration. However, accidents that are fatal usually end up being the result of dangerous driving; Falls far below what is expected of a competent and careful driver. Gary also cleared up a few misconceptions - Amber Beacons are only required by law to be activated if an AMV is travelling along a dual carriageway and it is not a requirement that an AMV driver should pull in to let traffic pass if there are 6/7 cars behind - it is the responsibility of the driver to drive with due care and attention - so should traffic be building up behind then he should at the earliest convenience pull over/in to allow the build up to move past! Really good talk with lots of useful and interesting information.

Livestock Practical:- today it was back to the lambs to do the next batch of weighing and tailing and castrating! The weights of the lambs are recorded in the lambing book which helps with the administration with regards to collating the lambing figures for this season. Tailing or docking is a routine practice that is carried out once the navel has dried up (as the lamb will be a few days old by this point) and the tail is shortened to prevent faecal matter from accumulating on the tail and hindquarters of the animal. The easiest and most common method of tail docking is to apply a rubber ring (or band) to the tail using an elastrator tool. Banding is a bloodless method of tail docking. The band cuts off the blood supply to the tail, causing the tail to fall off in 7 to 10 days.
Castration is when the testicles are removed or their function is inhibited. Using the rubber band method again, this time placed around the neck of the lamb's scrotum. Care should be taken not to place the band over the lamb's rudimentary teats. Banding will cause the scrotum to shrivel up and fall off in two to three weeks. Care is needed to ensure both testicles are below the placement of the band - the lamb is able to 'suck' them up when you are handling this area, and if one or both of the testicles is missed, it will be retained in the belly cavity, resulting in a "bucky" lamb.
We then turned out some of the older lambs and mums in to the grass paddock and because this was quite an open area we then erected some wind breaks in the centre of the field. Using some small steak posts and boards we made zig zag shapes meaning the lambs can get shelter from bad weather from any direction!