Apple Gully Farm: Dealing with the weather

Watching the cattle during the heat wave in February made me feel happy not to be a cow. They have a built in summer and winter wardrobe, as memories of scarce winter feed fade they shed their heavy winter coats along with their scrawny shapes. They are down to their summer short back and sides but they now weigh in at a hefty 600 to 650 kilos. There are shoulders and hips in there somewhere but they are well padded by burgeoning rumps, sirloins, briskets, chuck and rib eye steaks. Lugging that sort of weight around creates its own portable heat wave.

By mid morning the cattle head for the shade of the trees by the dam and there they relax till late afternoon. Occasionally one will channel it's distant relation, the hippopotamus and wade shank deep into the dam. Cattle don't have a vast range of facial expressions, but the blissed out face of a Hereford standing in a dam on a 37 degree day is a joy to behold.

Come winter, our cattle cope well with the cold weather by growing in a woolly coat on top of their already thick natural leather jackets. If only the grass in winter would grow in the same way. Where we are, winter means scavenging over thin pickings supplemented with hay. If you want to train a herd of cattle to sit, roll over and beg, bring them bales of hay in winter.

4 degrees outside and not much better on the inside,
the calf is wearing an old jacket

All of this brings me to the Asian water buffalo Bubalus bubalis.

While extreme weather plagued our east coast, we were in the hills of northern Vietnam, trekking through the winter rice paddies.

The Asian version of a tractor, plow, cart, family transporter and producer of baby buffalos - the water buffalo, spends most of its life in cool squishy mud, the water buffalo has no need for a winter coat because winter in Asia is usually a non event. This year the temperature in the hills around Sapa in Vietnam was close to freezing for days on end.
Water buffalos died in their thousands- over 20,000 to be exact.