Carew dairy farmer Chris Atkinson has been surprised on farm with the arrival of triplet heifer calves.
Atkinson, who alongside wife Amanda, run Atkinson Ltd milking 1150 cows at peak on their Boltons Rd farm, said the calving of the three heifer calves at the beginning of the was the first he had seen it in almost 20 years of dairying.
“They’re alive and well. It’s pretty rare, I’ve dairy farmed for 20 years now and have never seen it. They’re pretty cute,” he said.
The triplets, about 16kg each, were born to cow number 166 and sire Shipyard, in “beautiful” weather conditions,
They were found by farm workers Dan, Paul and Asklee in the mid-afternoon and had been born without assistance, which Atkinson said was unusual.
“All natural, they weren’t assisted which is even more bizarre than them being triplets in the first place.”
“This is my 19th calving and I’ve never seen triplets before,” he said, although he had heard of them in the district about 20 years ago.
“It’s (also) just very odd for them all to be heifers,” he said, which made them viable.
“If they are boy/girl, the female’s sexual reproductive organs don’t develop so they are infertile, because they share a blood stream through the placenta,” he said.
On farm the Atkinson’s have had many singles and two sets of twins, so far.
He said they often got four or five sets of twins per calving.
“Ideally we only want singles, because it’s not good for cows to have multiples, but (of the triplets) we will keep them.”
Atkinson said the triplets had not been named, yet, although references to boats had been bandied about because of the sire’s name.
“We’ve been thinking on that because dad, the sire, is called Shipyard,” he said.
“All the boats (thought of) are disasters or … not very favourable.”
The farm crew, at Boltons Rd, are midway through calving.
They started on July 20 and expect to be finished by end of September.
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