The two male pure breed Guernseys were born in February and are currently separated from the rest of their herd in a field at Les Varendes.
‘We get two new ones in early in the year, January, February time. These ones both came from the Naftels’ organic dairy farm. They’re very supportive of us,’ said Conservation Herd manager Will Harford-Fox.
‘They’ve got a few weeks left where we’re weaning them off milk, so they’ll stay here for that.
‘Then we’ll move them to another field where we’ll just get them a bit more used to the diet by eating the kind of rough grass that they have, and it’s usually later in July that we take the next-oldest two, and put those together.
‘As soon as they’re comfortable with each other then they can go in, so then they’ll be all eight together.’
The calves were donated to La Societe in March.
‘They’ve grown quickly and they’re quite tall already – they were almost half the size when they first got here, but they’ve been eating, drinking their milk ravenously and we’re slowly reducing the amount of milk they’re getting at the moment, so they’re eating more hay and grass and nuts,’ said Mr Harford-Fox.
He said it was important to keep bringing through new calves for the herd and the land that they manage.
‘There is a degree to which replicating a sort of family can have benefits, so by having different ages of animals, they will eat different plants with different preferences.
‘The older they get, the rougher stuff they can eat, and so the variety of what they can eat kind of adds to the land management that we do – and having that variety helps us with those sorts of ecological outcomes.’