• Once more, from the beginning…

    Veterinary technician Jane Narrimore begins readying Thistle Hill cows for the transplant of fertilized eggs from England.  We’ve been working with two American partners and a half dozen British breeders to find the purest Devon genetics available…mate those cows and bulls…freeze the embryos and bring them to the United States. Some of those embryos will be implanted here in Virginia; the remainder in South Carolina.  The first step is to synchronize our cows cycling so that the implant occurs precisely at the time that particular embryo was flushed from the English cow: at the age of 8 days! Watching Jane is Jerry Hall, who came over from Delaplane to help…

  • Tree, spare that fence!

    Too late!  Good neighbor Ira McDowell clears away one of three trees that came down on Thistle Hill fences in the past few days.  It’s a combination of the heavy rains and the wind. We were lucky to find Ira at home.  This is deer season, after all! Actually it’s surprising the fence held up as well as it did.  This is a lot of weight.  Might as well give Gold Cup Fencing a plug.  They do good work! Because of the flu, I’ve leaned heavily on neighbors for the past week.  Some, like Jerry Hall, came all the way over from Delaplane.

  • New Year babies….

    This bouncing baby girl is minutes old and Mom is just setting to work cleaning her up.  She’s more messy than usual, because she wound up in a pile of leaves; but it makes a nice bed. Grandma has never had anything but heifers; and now this daughter has had her first calf, a heifer.  So much for the laws of probabilities. Even more remarkable is this proud mother, the sole remaining member of Wooz’ original Angus herd.  She is 15 years old and this is her 13th straight calf!  Unlike most of her original herdmates, she was able to transfer to an all grass diet and it probably prolonged her life…