A Special Delivery at Cherry View

Just a quick update on some lovely news from Cherry View this month. There was great excitement earlier in December when Becky’s cow Pat started to prepare to give birth to her first calf. Becky bought Pat from family friends in Derbyshire when they retired from dairy farming and sold their herd in 2016.

Pat settled in straight away when she moved to Cherry Burton and soon established herself as a family favourite. She is a very friendly member of the herd and always enjoys a scratch under the chin.

She did an amazing job of delivering her baby on Wednesday 13th December. When Becky gave her a feed at 5pm she had her tail slightly raised but ate happily, by 7pm she was licking her new baby heifer calf. What a star!

Birchcross Control Pat with Cherryholme First Pat

Incredibly at her young age (she’s three), Pat is one of the largest cows we have on the farm. She has joined the milking herd and lives in a deep straw bedded yard. She is a really good milker and her milk is sold through The Milk Shed.

Baby Pat is still milk fed and lives with her friends Baby and Dandy. They have a special heat lamp to keep them warm in this cold weather.

All of our cows are purebred and they are registered with Holstein UK, the pedigree breed society for Holstein cows. Baby Pat’s official name is Cherryholme First Pat. Cherryholme is Becky’s prefix, all Holstein cows Becky breeds will bear this name to show where they came from (it’s a bit like a surname!) We keep the family name of all our cows on the farm the same, Pat gave birth to a baby Pat and so it will carry on. This helps us to follow the progress of each cow family down the generations.

We can trace most of the cow families at Cherry View back through many generations of homebred animals. One of the oldest cows in the herd, Winton Moto Eva 3 (Winton is Mr and Mrs Waring’s prefix) goes right the way back to Winton Chrys Eva bred by Grandpa Waring in 1959. Interestingly, this cow’s first daughter, Winton Pel Eva 2 was in the Guinness Book of World Records more than once in the 1980s as the highest yielding cow in the World! She is pictured below. Her milk yields were simply incredible, giving far more milk than cows do even now!