the ladies are still waiting

The ladies-in-waiting are still waiting and I feel extremely foolish for announcing we’d have piglets last weekend, however I was guided by the date the vendor gave me for the Tamworth. I really hope one of them will oblige in time for our Open Farm Sunday next weekend.

It is another lovely sunny day and there is no sign of rain. Three hours of rain is all we have had this week and although we all love to work outside in the warm and the dry conditions it has actually been very windy and this combined with the lack of rain is now becoming worrysome.

We are waging war on the pigeons, who have homed in and attacked our well grown brassicas and netting the long strip may be the only answer. Jethro has managed to reduce numbers by shooting a few of the pesky things, but  then others come. I wonder how pigeons tell each other where the tasty greens are so that more and more come? Jethro  has even tried out a farm scale battery powered noisy bird scarer. The effect of this weird noise [like a wonky burglar alarm] was to simply upset all the sheep in the field opposite, cause the fattening cattle to stampede and irritate us and the dogs so much we eventually had to turn it off.

The beans and the squashes still need planting out hopefully today and tomorrow. Food production, we still love it but as always it remains challenging at times.

There was a new lamb last night, and there can’t really be many more to come. The lambs look well [a dry year always suits lambs] and the sheep and lambs have had their dose of clik to prevent flystrike. We had had two sheep mildly affected by maggots, and they were treated with insecticide to kill the maggots and eggs. As we deliberately lamb late in the season there is always a balance to keep between leaving the sheep in peace or rounding them up to apply the Clik. Rounding up sheep with small lambs is not easy. Every year is different but the sunnier weather has hatched a lot of flies.

a little light relief

Just a little light relief from all the chores, and how we laughed…

These brave men deserve all the applause we can give….

 

Even if you don’t like horses this is bound to raise a smile, I am still laughing now!

no news

No piglets yet! Did we put her off by cooking roast ham for Saturday lunch? The due date given was Sunday and the signs were there but she is hanging on…  Now we wonder which of the three ladies-in-waiting will be first?

The Tamworth has made a giant straw nest, this morning, and hidden herself behind this wall of straw… so we’ll keep checking.

Meanwhile it has rained for about 3 hours today and we planted all the brassicas and sweetcorn out yesterday.

We now need more rain and less pigeons who have already homed in on our little plants, shredding and consuming their growing leaves as part of a May day feast.

boys and their toys

Nothing quite like a quiet Bank Holiday weekend!

I expect the Tamworth gilt to have her very first piglets by tomorrow so I am spending the day trotting between the garden and her pen and to cheer her up along the way I am bearing little gifts of weeds [fat hen] and shot lettuces.

In the meanwhile my Jethro has just resorted to the largest scale farm machinery he has in order to prepare the brassica bed for planting out of the many seedlings. The untilled ground in the veg garden has set like cement and the rotavator, which he normally uses could not cope with the rock hard ground. I hope to post a picture later it is really too funny to see!

However, the total lack of precipitation is beginning to look very serious with yields of grain, hay, silage and British grown vegetables all predicted to be well down. We may enjoy the dry weather to work in every day but by golly the land needs the rain. Even if we get a lot of rain now it may actually be too late for some crops. A very dry April AND May is unusual.

busy as bees

We’ve had bees swarming this week and new calves born almost every day while the raging tide of new lambs has ebbed to a trickle and it will soon be time to vaccinate the lambs for bluetongue.

The-boar-that-fired-blanks has been renamed. He is now the-boar-that-works-very-well as we now have our two sows due to farrow any minute from the look of them and a Tamworth gilt bought in specially [so we'd have piglets for the open day] is due tomorrow or Monday.

So I am off this morning to ride another horse and escape this mad place for a just few hours grace.

The rest of the weekend when not seeing to these pregnant animals will be spent planting out several hundred veggie seedlings. Sweetcorn, cauli, broccoli, cabbage, red cabbage, beans, lettuce, and then we will have to water. We have a large tank which holds the run off from the grain store roofs. The onions planted some weeks back hace done nothing, it is simply too dry.

We use a Norwegian based weather forecast and they predict a lot of rain on Monday but the Met office does not. I wonder who will be themost accurate. I have a dear friend in the USA who says all the weather forecasters are simply ‘weather guessers’… Time will tell.

the long walk to life

Clearly I spoke to soon when I wrote yesterday about the lack of problems in the cows. I tempted fate. After all this time in farming I should know better!

We were checking the livestock and tagging the latest lambs out in the fields when we noticed one of the heifers calving. She appeared to be in no hurry, which is normal for a heifer, and as we meandered about the four fields nearest to her catching lambs and tagging  and tailing them we realised she really was not progressing in the usual fashion.

It is hard to explain how, after a lifetime of stockmanship, exactly how we know there is a problem, but we did. Maybe she just looked wrong, and she certainly was not getting on with the job – walking around and standing rather than lying down and pushing. Further checking at closer quarters showed we could only find one foot, a front foot. The normal presentation for a calf’s birth is two feet and a head, although almost every year we get a breech [backwards with back feet first].

Jethro and I were a mile and a half from home in a very large field with no means of either catching or restraining the heifer in a small enclosure. There was only one thing to do. Walk her gently and slowly back to the farm. We did this and she was very good and very quiet, six fields we crossed, as gate by gate was shut behind her and then we had a good half mile of open countryside and wheat fields to cross. Every so often along the way she would stop at a trough for a drink and perhaps manage a a few contractions before setting off again but her progress was good. Eventually Jethro ambled her across the last wheat field on the diagonal as I buzzed round in the vehicle to get all the right gates either open or shut back at the farm to get her straight into the yard and in to our cattle handling pens.

The heifer was very amenable to our handling of her which was fantastic and quite remarkable when you think that we bought her as a yearling and she has lived out in our fields for two years since then and she is not really used to close handling excpet for the occasional treatment for parasites and vaccinations such as bluetongue. And receiving extra  rations to supplement the grass in the winter.

The heifer did not want to go in the cattle crush so we kept her in a pen and put a rope halter on her and tied her to the gate. Jethro rolled his sleeves up and put a long veterinary glove on and we poured the lubrication gel all over his hand and arm.  It was not hard to discover why she couldn’t calve herself. The calf’s right leg was pinned back on the the far side of the cervix, and with some careful manoeuvring between contractions Jethro tweaked it forward. We now had a normal presentation for birth, however the heifer was getting tired and the calf appeared to be quite big.

The next step was to attach calving ropes to the two front legs just above the fetlock [ankle]  joints. After doing that and holding them firmly every time the cow pushed we attached the calving aid. This is a very clever machine that fits the rear end of a cow very neatly. The ropes are attached one each side of the central pole on a rachet. As the cow pushes and the calf emerges millimetre by millimetre the rachet is gently tightened. This allows the heifer to give birth naturally without the calf slipping back in every time the contractions ease.  As soon as the calf’s head is out in the outside world the ropes are taken off the rachet and the calf’s weight is supported as the heifer naturally pushes the calf out. This way the calf has the best chance to breathe on delivery and the heifer has the best chance of not being damaged internally during her first birth.

In our long farming careers Jethro and I have both seen these calving aids used on other farms in a very cavalier manner whereby the calf is forced out a  very fast rate and the potential damage done to the cow is almost unimaginable, and we think that this is a most terrible practice and one that needs stopping. We firmly believe it is a balance of helping the cow and keeping the calf alive but we also reckon that using nature and the contractions to our advantage is the best way.

If we can’t ever calve a cow, which happens occasionally, then we ask the vet to come. I think we have only had 2 or 3 Caesarians in all the years we’ve farmed, and all these cows have eventually gone on to give birth normally the next year.

The calf arrived and was laid gently on the clean concrete while we untied the cow. Although it was her first calf, the young cow immediately knew to lick the calf and loved her instantly. We fetched a thick pad of straw, peeled off the outside of a large round bale, to lay under the calf to give grip and padding for when the calf tried to stand, which would only be a matter of minutes.  Then we had a much needed cup of tea. We’d first arrived in the field at at 2pm and now it was 5.30pm

When we came back out, full of tea and biscuits, both mother and daughter were curled up, resting together on the improvised straw island. Later, after checking the other groups of cows and sheep on we found the calf had suckled and received the vital colostrum so we tucked them up together for their first night in a clean, newly strawed byre with a feed of crushed home grown barley for Mum. 

Some tasks in farming are hard work and difficult but very, very satisfying. 

Tomorrow they will go back out to grass and eventually be taken back to the herd by trailer. However, as this cow is such a sweetheart and so very placid we have decided to have her on display in a pen on Open Farm Sunday so that all the visitors can see a cow and calf, really close at hand.

raining calves

Well the rain arrived on Thursday night, in fierce bursts leaving us in a warm murky pool of humidity. Not enough rain yet, Jethro says, to do good and it fell so fast and so hard yesterday morning that it ran off the land and along the roads and is now filling up the pond. At least from the kitchen window the vegetable garden gives the impression of being damp at last and perhaps the onions planted two weeks ago will start to grow?

It is not just rain that is falling fast – new calves are arriving almost daily. So far without too much trouble [fingers crossed], one heifer [a young cow, calving for the first time] needed help, last week, late at night in the dark. The calf was almost out and swinging from her rear end with his hips held fast at the narrowest point of the heifer’s pelvis. A good pull and the bull calf was out, safe and sound. It is unusual for a calf to get stuck at this point because a calf’s head and shoulders are usually the widest and most difficult part to push through the birth passage but because we were there all was well and neither calf nor heifer were distressed. .

Cows are totally occupying our minds just now. With Open Farm Sunday coming up we are working on our displays and activities. We are building two model cows in order that anyone, but particularly the children, may try their hand at milking. There is however one problem the instructions have no measurements and no one here has any artistic talents. We are getting there by degrees, enlarging this cow piece by piece.. but hope that FACE may come up with the actual measurements soon. It does not even say how tall to make the beast! I am sure it will all be fine, in the end, but we all do wish at times at least one of us had the ability to pick up a pen and draw a cow or a sheep or a pig…

dry lands

I had a drive round all the grassland last night checking the sheep and the cattle before dark as we do every day at this time of the year.

It is extraordinary how the land has dried out and the grass is already burning off. The narrow sheep tracks which criss cross the chalky pastures are already browned off, and the ancient grassed roads in the old parkland are looking yellow instead of green and we are still in mid-May. Looking at the grass closely, one would guess we were in August, as the growth of new grass is not currently keeping pace with the rate at which it is grazed.

650 acres of grass seems like a lot of grazing until the rain stops falling. According to my diary, two years ago we were almost swimming at this time of the year with inches and inches of rain that never stopped falling. It sure looks like it’s already shaping to be a dry year.

the real country life

Reading last week in the Telegraph about life inthe countryside made me laugh out loud.

Why has there been such a long a gap in my blog entries .. not due to any shenanigans on my part that’s for sure.  And there it was again on Sunday - in You magazine, the very same topic .

Laugh, we haven’t stopped!  Well, in between wondering what expenses will next be charged to the public purse by over 600 professional persons and simply coping with all the after effects of all the sex and all the seeds.

Yes, I did say SEX, but sex is as normal an occupation for animals as breathing or eating. Sex, or service as it is often referred to in the farmyard, happens a lot in our herds and in our flock and Spring is the main time of the year for us to reap the consequences. It is just as well, putting it simply, if there was ‘no service’, they’d be no animals and we wouldn’t be farmers. 

So far we have had over 300 lambs and are already in double figures for calves. We have one young pig due from 24th May and another two sows now do look to be in pig [fingers crossed]. We have a lot more calves due and still about sixty sheep to lamb.

The ‘dodgy boar’ may not be dodgy after all, he can be forgiven though as he was however young when he met the ‘muddy girls’ and a complete virgin, so perhaps it took him longer to put the pieces of the jigsaw correctly together. They are after all out door, and very free range, pigs and it has become clearer to me quite why some rare breeds are so rare!  The friendly boar has has a ’stay of execution’ and will get another chance to sow his seeds again if the two sows produce good litters of piglets. We are all hoping all will be well and he will go on to be a champion sire.

And while I am on the subject of seeds I can report that the arable crops are doing well and I have a forest of tomatoes waiting to be turfed out into the unheated greenhouse from the ancient conservatory. However as the greenhouse is currently full of seedlings [caulilower, red cabbage, broccoli, leeks, lettuce, cabbage, more cauliflower and purple sprouting broccoli, and sweetcorn] ready for the large vegetable garden, and the large garden is waiting for Jethro and his rotavator it may still take some time. I have resorted to feeding fertilser to the plant plugs that look sad to avoid the work and expense of totally repotting so many plugs just before outdoor planting.

At the weekend I sowed lettuce, radish, more lettuce , basil , carrot, spinach, swiss chard and hoed all the onions and garlic. I have been late with the sunflowers and have had complete failures of certain types of courgettes and runner and dwarf beans. So bad were the failures that I have wondered if they were all sown in the same bag of compost. The beans and courgette seeds just vanished. Normally I have very green fingers and it is very unusual for germination to fail and on such a scale. The later resowing of beans are just erupting now so it looks second time lucky for them. It is too soon however to see if the new courgette seeds have worked but the one courgette plant I bought early on from a road side stall for fifty pence is almosty in production so next year I must be much earlier for the indoor ones.

We are now desperate for rain here. It appears to be the sort of year where the grey clouds come and are swept away on these strong cold easterly winds. Jethro says this is a farm that either gets all the rain or none, and after two washout years in succession this could be the latter.