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Adding blood tests to my routine …

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We started a little earlier today to pick-up Nachshon from his hotel in Novaya Ladoga and get him his croissant & OJ breakfast. Given the morning milking hadn’t finished yet, we all had breakfast together. Turns out he hiked to Everest base camp 30 years ago.
On the way out from the office, we had a quick glance at the awards for our two show cows yesterday.

Otherwise, not too much new to report today. We got our routine tasks (ketosis, silage, push-out) done by lunchtime while the engineers around Nachshon cracked on with the modifications of the milking parlour (chiefly changing the positioning of sensors as a first step to fix ID-ing issues). A bit of action with yet more cows running free (we already had one yesterday). But this was resolved quickly.


Silage kept coming in after a slow progress yesterday and despite not exactly ideal weather. The forecast for all day rain proved again wrong.

New today was only blood testing of freshly born calves and bullocks together with students Lisa & Evelina. This is done two days after birth. Admittedly, it will take some time for me to get used to ramming a needle into the vein of these small little things. We will try tomorrow again. Trick is to hold them down, don’t get kicked and still have hands free to press veins and take the blood sample.

The evening started slow. I bought a bbq set (just to realise later there was one at the cottage already) and we started grilling the meat.

About 7pm we had to pick up the Israeli engineer from the farm. BBQ on hold. Dinner with him. Drop off. Done. Back home and finally we could relax. We decided to go back to the again empty pub britannia and watched zenit beating utrecht (how fitting with my dutch friend jan).

On the way home we first encountered a dog, then two drunk guys, then two local girls. We ended up having a little party on our doorstep before we called it a night. Good fun altogether. #issadrocks!

Jan in a very shiny jacket

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