Well, what kind of led you towards this career path? What kind of got you started with everything?

Well, that's a long story, but I'm going to make it really short.

I've had a health challenge about 30, excuse me, actually over 40 years ago because my daughter was a baby at the time.

And I went to my primary, and he told me that I had hypoglycemia.

and that I would have it pretty much for life and it could turn into other debilitating diseases.

So at the time, I knew nothing about health, nothing at all.

I ate just about anything.

would

What should farmers be checking and preparing before calving gets fully underway? What should we be doing right now?

For me, especially for the calf rearing space, I'm a big one on checking your water quality.

If we've got...

Or water quality, especially if it's got high minerals and contents or antagonist type things like iron or E. coli, that can actually change how our animals perform.

And so for me, that's one thing I always encourage, especially new farms, if you've swapped from one farm to another and it's had lots of issues on farm, that's something I tick off as a must do, is check your water quality first, because as we know, water is a key nutrient to animal performance.

And as for everything else, it's, you know, getting well prepared, checking that you've got everything that you need.

There's nothing worse than, you know, getting to a Sunday and you find you haven't even got the basics like electrolytes ready for those calves when they hit the ground.

And I know we talk about it and we sort of gloss over it a little bit, but just how important is it?

Can you explain that one to us?

Yeah, that one's, when we came up, like when we first got together with the calf experts, there was a lot of three cues of colostrum and the quietly and the squeaky clean became sort of a mantra of ours that's now been adopted with the squeaky clean and No one's really adopting the quietly like we have.

Most people will quantify, but quietly is hugely important because when we get stress, we get cortisol level spikes, but we also have less available blood in our gut.

And so because we're trying to get colostrum across that gut, we need it.

We don't want the animal in flight mode.

Because they are an animal, they're not a human baby or anything like that.

They're actually an animal.

Can you give us a bit of a 101 on that? And I mean, because calf rear is a face sometimes with that decision and, you know, milk out of the vat and then CMRs, what's the right one to use?