The month of April saw a lot of evening showers making the summer tolerable for the cows, humans and other animals. Even in the scorching heat, there is still greenery around for the cows to graze. 

We replanted ginger and turmeric in our existing zero till raised beds and also in the new beds that Sanmugasundaram and Ismail made for us. We have started harvesting black gram – the first succesful attempt of cultivating it in 3 years. But the flipside to the rains – our best performing green gram crop got damaged and is full of aphids now. You win some, you lose some 😥

We also had the opportunity to host Sudhakar’s friend from ITC, Kanniah from Bengaluru. He has a farm of his own in the outskirts of the city and wanted to spend a few days with us to experience our way of running the show. He helped us organize the cow shed – made a small thatch for protecting firewood from sun & rain, built a boundary for compost pile that the chickens were enjoying, cleaned up a lot of unwanted material lyring around. If you are familiar with organization methodology, we did 5S for the cow shed, tool room and store room. 

Our cows fell sick in January with Foot and Mouth disease. Because we were late in identifying the disease, most of the native medicines that we tried for the cows went in vain. We vaccinated the cows couple of weeks ago with the help of local veterinary doctor. It is a yearly vaccination and we plan to give them every year to keep this in control. 

One of our bulls Raja and cows Varalakshmi are becoming increasingly difficult to tame. They try to attack even the regular caregiver, Prema Akka. She is requesting us to get a nose rope for these two cows in order to be able to manage them better when they are out in the open fields, grazing. We have been postponing her request for a very long time thinking the cows will get adjusted to her but it is high time we respond. What do you think we should do?

Regards

Noushadya