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What a day we’ve had – weighing lambs and pigs and selecting the best for boxes and a farmers market, vaccinating cattle with all manner of other visitors coming and going all day on farm business. No wonder we struggle so much with the shorter day length at this time of the year.
Last night haircuts were fitted in for the men after an early supper and our hairdresser’s life seems currently every bit as crazy as ours. Is it the planets or something else causing such chaos and too much work in all our lives?
Swift’s remaining three horseshoes were removed today too, just as well as it looked like whoever shod him before had tried to make his feet fit the shoes rather than the other way around. The trimmer was very patient as Swift is not yet very used to having this done. We got there in the end and although he sometimes puts his foot down sharpish a few times there was no malice in him whatsover. She will be back in three weeks time to properly trim his feet and we hope in a few months with regular trimming and work that his feet will harden and he will be able to remain ‘barefoot‘.
We also fitted in a sausage tasting this week to choose another variety to sell at our upcoming public events. Eight new varieties of seasonings were made into patties and fried… remembering which is which on the plate as we taste them around the kitchen table is quite taxing and we all ended up with scribbled diagrams at the side to give us a clue. Everyone’s taste is so different but we eventually chose a new variety for lamb sausage and another new one for pork. We never have trouble selling bangers, it may be a cliche but variety surely is the spice of life, or rather sausages.
It is national sausage week this week but we were not able to have any events on to coincide. Perhaps next year we will make it fit with all the big promotions?
Well, we managed to dust the pigs last night in their stable and waking up today to such a wet and stormy morning means that there is absolutely no sign of the white powder on these girls anywhere. I should have photographed them last night as they were really WHITE! Let’s hope it’s worked and relieved their discomfort, hard to tell so far as nothing ever puts them off their food!
It is so wet and so windy the trees seem to have lost half their leaves overnight and are now piled on what pretends to be a lawn no doubt the rest will follow by nightfall? Still it is 1st November and the leaves have lasted a long time this year. It is however still mild.
Swift is happy enough out in the field in his waterproof rug, no riding today on account of the storm, not a good idea on a young horse. I will change his rug for a drier one later on if the rain persists all day, but he is ok for now. He is still wearing the thinnest weight rug, I tried him in the warmer one when he got so wet yesterday but it is too warm and he sweated up underneath it which was no good so I changed it back.
So I shall retire to the kitchen and have a baking session: pasties, cake and some other delicious goodies to see us all through the week. It will undoubtedly cheer Jethro up when he returns very wet and bedraggled [a certainty today] from his daily sortie to check all the animals in all the fields. Sunday remains a working day on a farm, but a glance at the Sunday papers and a roaring log fire to keep out the damp will make for a pleasant few hours after lunch until it is feeding time for the livestock once more.
4.45 pm Here is the photgraphc evidence of my labours in the kitchen.. a case of now you see it, now you don’t delicious… mmmmnn. “Any more” said Jethro?
Gone in a moment.. but golly they were good!
Animals! The wordly wise know very well never to work with animals.. but we are somewhat stuck with hundreds of them.
The latest problem is the young sow, no use to us for breeding anymore and shortly destined for sausages has gone down with lice or mites just a few days before she was due to be sent away.
This is a big problem. We cannot give her the usual veterinary treatment for external and internal parasites as there is a 28 day minimum meat withdrawal on this stuff. [We always go well over the minimum]. She must go this week as we need the sausages for a market later in the month.
We have consulted with our vet and collected from the vet’s an organic herbal powder [similar to this] with which to anoint her with. There is no withdrawal period on this as it is made with natural products and it should help considerably. The only problem is we will need to use a whole lot of this powder to take effect and will have to don goggles and face masks in order not to suffocate ourselves in the process. The pig as you can imagine will not like this particularly and not stay still, so I expect a complete whiteout, or a re-run of the black and white minstrel show, but much more pungent. At least we shouldn’t catch any bugs.
PS Swift and I had a 15 minute ridden meander in the field today. So far so good.
The back man cometh, well actually he goeth. Today Swift has been sorted out in a big way and I hope to ride him really soon. I think the horse must have been playing Twister as he was in a bit of a mess. Now I will get the saddle fitter out as soon as I can, I had not done this already as I was not sure how long to give Swift off while his sore back was mending.
I know the saddle is wide enough, but because Swift has sadly already had a back issues, I want to be really sure that the saddle is just right. Of course he may get fatter and thinner depending on the time of year and how much work he is having, but my saddle has different width plates for the gullet and air flocking in the padding which can be adjusted by the specialist fitter and we have one quite close by, which is one of the reasons I originally chose this saddle.
In the meantime we have done more leading out and investigation of big machines, tyres and other typical farm hazards. Some times he takes a minute or two to relax if there is a lot of noise but on the whole appears to have an ‘am I bothered’ type reaction which is great considering he has only been here just over 2 weeks, although on account of his age he is still rather green. He is unmoved now by the pigs and looks over the wall at them while they sleep. When the pigs wake up they study each other in depth, the horse over the wall and all the eight pigs looking right up at him, it is too funny to watch. Swift however is totally relaxed as he does this, which to me is the most important aspect.
The back man is returning on two weeks to sort out one of the suckler cows who we think is not quite right and he will just check Swift again to see all is still well.
Jethro is nursing a very sore leg, he was charged by a ram yesterday when he went to feed them. There are no bruises or unusual swelling but I think the sheep caught him right on the iliotibial band on the outside of his thigh. This can be an extremely sesnsitive part of the body and the ibuprofen is helping a lot. Luckily it was not worse.
A damp and dreary morning does not help us adjust to the time change. Why do we find it hard to adjust in October and March?
I collected the cattle vaccine yesterday from the vets and we will have a busy week vaccinating all the cattle against respiratory disease. This is because last winter we had a terrible outbreak in the animals of sniffley noses, coughs and fevers after housing the young cattle and treating them all and looking after so many large animals was very hard going.
We have more groups of young visitors coming to the farm soon and I hope they have waterproofs to go on the farm walk. I have finally perfected the art of buttermaking to an audience, so that will be part of what they learn about and will be able to taste. I have to buy pasteurised cream as we are not allowed to use our own raw milk.. crazy but true. So I demonstrate the buttermaking and then later on in the visit we demonstrate the milking of Ruby followed by the cream separation as it works best with warm milk.
In the meantime I must have had over 20 phone calls from AOL about the internet subscription package we have been on, seemingly for years. It is becoming a total pantomine, they want to speak to Jethro, he is never in! They won’t talk to anyone else about it and are ringing form some far flung place which sounds as if it is bathed in sunshine. They seem to find it extremely hard that I don’t even know when Jethro will be available… and refuse to divulge any details to me .. I have just told them that this scenario will continue for several more weeks unless they give me the details of the deal they are offfering in order that I can tell him.
Data protection is surely just a useful foil for total lack of common sense.
Must dash, the cattle are calling.
I don’t think I can blame the lack of blogging just on the shortening days but I wish I could! The clocks change this w/e and I wish we could stay on BST rather than switching to GMT as we much prefer it. We would rather have darker mornings and lighter evenings, but I know there are huge debates about this issue every year.
It is just so very busy with the autumn arable drilling thankfully finished today, and now the livestock work is upon us with a vengeance. Perhaps, methinks, this is why mixed farming became unfashionable, because with such a spread of enterprises on the farm there is never ever a respite?
It is not just the routine of daily feeding and checking of pigs, sheep and cattle, but the annual tasks of sorting the ewes into their groups to meet with the rams. And the time of the year when the vet comes to castrate the bull calves, time also to vaccinate the cattle against respiratory viruses, and then after 2 weeks following the vaccine, time to bring the younger cattle in for the winter.
We must be mad, as well as this heavy workload, and the meat sales, we have 5 educational visits in the next month for primary school children, teenagers, and one half day visit which encompasses all ages.
Thankfully, the puppy is not here at the moment, education is vitally important to all of us and since the actual owner of the dog is away studying for a degree in Agriculture at a top University, we thought a bit of proper education for the dog would be useful too. Both students are doing very well, especially the dog, who should be back home next month wagging her tail, walking to heel and always coming back when called! Training a 9 month old puppy was just too much on top of everything else for yours truly to consider.
Every generation in this household has now either been trained in agriculture and/or land use or is in training. This fact actually makes us quite rare nowadays, and clearly shows that we are also quite, quite mad. However farming clearly runs in the blood [probably no choice with a name like Tull] and cannot be ignored, despite various members of the family trying to do other things along life’s winding journey.
There is more training to be done here too, that of the horse…. Swift arrived 10 days ago, and is being looked after by us. He is a young gelding, who hustled the mares too much in his previous home, and was a quick sale. I happened upon him by chance and was first in. He was not expensive but came without a vetting, as a gamble. His teeth have been sorted, they were really bad, his overgrown molars had lacerated the inside of his cheeks on both sides. The vet sedated him while the horse dentist worked. His back has been found to be tender and tight and is now being sorted by professionals, using chiropractic methods and Equine Touch amongst other things which I will tell you more about about another time. I was not expecting this, but I am sure he will be fine.
Swift has a very sweet nature and in a few days learnt to cope with the house cow [ he is now THE boss of a very bossy cow], some of the sheep and the pigs in the yard, oh and he has had his first encounter here with pheasants too. All these are vitally important attributes for a farm horse. On Sunday we walked slowly around to inspect all the large machinery in a quiet and deserted yard.
I am in no hurry with him and will take as long as it takes to get him used to what we expect and hope for. If his back needs a rest then he will learn his way around the farm from the end of a lead rope. If I need extra help with his schooling I have friends who will be able to help me. It is extremely therapeutic for me to escape the ringing of the phone and almost never ending streams of emails that pour into the farm office, for an hour every so often.
I may not be quite so thrilled when it starts to rain and never stops. We have had so little rain we are worried about having enough grass to last the stock through the winter and with the number of acres we have and the low stocking rate that should never be a problem, but this year unusually it is.
this is the puppy who worried the steers
This is the puppy who worried the steers..
this is the steer who chased the cat
This is the steer who chased the cat
this is the cat who killed the chicken
This is the cat who killed the chicken
this is the hen who laid the egg
This is the chicken who laid the egg
this is the egg that Jethro had for breakfast
This is the egg that Jethro had for breakfast
To be continued……….
I am not talking about a visit to the dentist - although that is one of my great real life phobias – but the burning question that is on all the minds of arable farmers after almost 2 months with no rain at all.
The ground is so hard that there is no way on this difficult land that a suitable seed bed can be prepared to sow the seed into. Yet the autumn days are quickly passing by and the risk of too much rain arriving all at once and making the land equally unworkable but in a different and equally challenging way is a very real threat.
Jethro’s machines are ready, the men are ready, and the seed is in bags waiting to be loaded into the drills.
We do have a passable oil seed rape crop [ called canola for those readers from across the Atlantic] however and I am posting a picture. This was drilled in August in a manner which conserved as much moisture as possible in the seed bed. If we can keep the pigeons from stripping it all it later in the winter it may be an ok crop, which will be great.
As I write this post early this morning the first lambs, and a few pigs are on their way to the abattoir as we start to sell some of this year’s livestock ‘crops’.
We have taken the opportunity at the same time to wean the lambs – to take them away from their mothers – and give the ewes time to recover before the breeding season starts again for us in November. Next week we will sort through all the lambs again, send any more that are ready away to the abattoir, because like fresh seasonal plums lambs do not keep well once matured. The remaining 300+ will be given a dose of wormer and put onto fresh grazing and then weighed again in a fortnight..
The ewes will have 2 weeks to dry up their udders and then they will be carefully sorted through and any really old girls will be taken from the flock to spend a well earned retirement on some conservation grazing. Last year’s oldies will go away on their final journey soon but we have a customer looking for old bloodlines amongst our pedigree flock and he will come and pick some first.
The rest of the flock will be checked carefully for their condition: too fat or too thin [and their diet adjusted accordingly], their udders to see it is still in full working order [no good a ewe having 2 lambs and only one side of her udder working] and finally their mouths to see they still have a full set of working teeth [ no dentures here]. The whole flock will then be sorted and treated accordingly: extra grass, less grass or a red splash on the back of the head which is their one way ticket to join the ‘old girls’. A shepherd’s year starts in Autumn and once you understand the process I find the work has an enjoyable rythmn to it, well it would only be fair to say that I have worked with sheep for many, many years!!
The harvest is almost done, we are just waiting for the oats which were simply too green last week to cut. However we seem to have hit a sudden rainy patch so Jethro’s idea of going to the Great Dorset Steam Fair next weekend may not happen. It is absolute heaven to him to spend a day amongst the soot and the fumes watching others tinker with old machines. A few years ago he had the same idea as harvest seemed to be progressing well and guess what it rained then too. We only need 2 clear days when the oats are ready but I am not planning anything until it is all in the barn.
What sort of day have you had?
Here it is – day 2 of harvest 2009 so already Jethro is immersed in big machines. He is now gone all day driving the combine and reported this morning that he didn’t get to bed until 1 am last night, and this is only the very start of the season!
My day has been really thrilling… since the monsoon last Thursday [2 inches of rain fell in a few hours] we appear to have had an explosion of flies out in the countryside resulting in a major attack of fly-strike in the sheep, despite the long acting repellent they had sprayed on to them earlier in the season.
For the first part of today I spent several hours picking maggots and unhatched eggs off the worst of the poor sheep, after first applying a hefty dose of Crovec to kill the eggs and larvae. Later we sorted out the rams dealing with their fly attacks they’d had and while we had them in we trimmed their feet and marked a few to send away that are not good enough to breed from, or have perhaps passed their prime.
There is nothing like a really smelly finish to the day with the all pervading smell of rotten rams feet still lingering in the nostrils as one starts to cook supper, lamb burgers of course!
Tomorrow, we will get in all the rest of the sheep in and check them all over for strike. We will also be applying a preventative dose of Crovec to the whole flock and this will hopefully last the rest of the fly season out. We ordered this product urgently this morning to be delivered later today as the stocks we normally keep on the farm are enough to treat an outbreak but we do not keep enough in stock to do the whole flock as preventive treatment.
At the same time as checking them and treating them I was weighing and marking the lambs with coloured spray marker which will be ready for slaughter soon. I mark them really clearly so these lambs do not get any fly repellent sprayed on at all. As big strong animals, who remain close to their mothers who are sprayed, they should not be subjected to an attack by blowflies. The meat withdrawal times are 8 days on Crovec and I always more than double this before sending any animals away and if possible like today I simply do not use a product like this on any animal due for slaughter in the next few weeks. At this time of the year it becomes a finite balance of keeping the animals well and protected from insects and also making sure any animals sold for meat sold are totally safe and wholesome.
We have also had the vet here today for poorly pigs but I shall tell you about that tomorrow.
So much has happened here on the farm since June. Currently, we have over 50 piglets, 30 calves and several hundred lambs. Yesterday we were wrapping the last of the silage bales [cattle food for the winter] and also combining.. We were a trifle stretched, everything seems to happen at once and there is no time for anything much least of all blogging, but I am back now after a fair gap and with your support I hope to keep going.
Well, sincere apologies for lack of blogging. Open Farm Sunday was a resounding success with our visitor numbers reaching 4 figures…. wow, had we known that would we have done it? Anyway we all survived with the help of so many kind volunteers who gave their time and knowledge freely.
OPEN FARM SUNDAY
We had an inch of rain on Sunday morning in a very short time, I just wanted to get back into bed after waking at 6am, I was so worried about the day. I only went to bed after midnight after stuffing carrier bags for 3 hours with some very kind friends and family who joined in to help this laborious task.
However fifteen minutes before our gates were to open a streak of blue sky appeared and we actually had a fine day, which made all the difference. It was wonderful to see so many happy smiling people enjoying the animals and machines and we hope they learnt something about how their food is produced.
Well, we are already planning for next year now - 13th June 2010 – while the clearing up and taking down of displays goes on and we will have a major de-brief when we get time.
The new piglets all arrived in time and I hope to put a pic on soon. We have more visits this week of school groups and pre-school while we are still set up for visitors and the concrete yards are so clean. It truly seems that the work of a farmer is never done and it is no longer just about producing food - sharing knowledge and improved public relations seem to be just as important.
Food for thought and food to eat, indeed!
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
Our pig saga continues. Having replaced our very rare boar that perhaps had not done as he should with an older, proven close relative of his [his Uncle], we now discover that perhaps he had actually been alright after all.
A few more weeks should hopefully produce the evidence we desperately need. In the meantime his immediate death sentence has been lifted and he is now amusing himself in the empty cattle shed digging for tasty treats of old barley that had fallen behind the troughs where the cattle couldn’t reach.
The cattle were turned out this week too and we had a major rodeo as we let over fifty cattle out on to the lush spring grass. Every year is reassuringly the same – the cattle trumpet their joy at being let out as they run down the road kicking their heels in the air. It never fails to lifts one’s heart especially as the task of feeding them twice daily with home grown cereals and homegrown hay or silage is lifted. One old farmer friend used to state: ” The day of bondage is ended for another year”, until November when it all starts again with the next batch of calves to be weaned.
While examining the sows who are very quiet and really quite tame for pigs I made the terrible mistake of stepping over one very friendly girl to try to read her ear tattoo. I had one leg on each side of this chattering supine pig [who always chunters away as if she is having a full conversation] this proved to be a major error. Even with my glasses on I struggled to read the number and she got a bit fed up with me turning her ear inside out and peering at her. So she stood up. As a full grown sow this meant I was now completely astride the pig, with no way for my feet to reach the ground. “Uh oh” I thought “this could be painful”.. and with my hands I pushed down on her back to try to ease myself off her. This extra pressure to her to her meant “go” and she shot off across the orchard to join her friends with me on her back. “What are you doing?” came the cry from across the pens.. “Trying to get off” said I. Shock turned to laughter, both from those on the ground and from me on top of the pig, which made it worse as I couldn’t laugh and get off at the same time.
The sow decided she’d had enough - and gave a sharp turn to the left and humped her back firmly depositing me onto my knees on the hard ground. My pride took the greatest fall, although more than a week on I still bear the bruises, and I definitely won’t being doing that again..
We’ve just had a bird survey done by a RSPB volunteer. It is very interesting to read the results however as it is done at a specific time over a 3+ hour period it can only be a snapshot of the birdlife here at Prosperous Farm.
The list includes: Blackbird, Blackcap, Black headed gull, Blue tit, Carrion crow, Chaffinch, Chiffchaff, Collared dove, Dunnock, Goldfinch, Great tit, Green woodpecker, Greenfinch, Grey partridge, House sparrow, Jackdaw, Lapwing, Linnet, Long tailed tit, Mallard, Meadow pipit, Moorhen, pheasant, Red-legged partridge, Robin, Rook, Skylark, Swallow, Whitethroat, Wood pigeon, Wren, and Yellow hammer.
In the same week that this survey was done we saw both Buzzards and Red kites, heard the Cuckoo and the Little owl call as well as the Song thrush sing in the garden. Several Canada geese also visited the pond, we heard them long before we actually saw them, and there have been so many Magpies around that the imminent arrival of the next generation in the family has worked out first to be a girl and then a boy.
It is rewarding to know that the conservation work we are doing is helping to maintain and increase the flora and fauna. We now have a whole meadow of Cowslips and have recently shut the gate to keep the livestock stock out. We will only open it for grazing later in the season in order to preserve these delightful spring plants.
I hope when it is my time to leave this earth it is peaceful and quick, and not right in the middle of a public footpath.
Sheep are notorious for their ease of dying, and today one very pregnant ewe died suddenly, in the middle of the footpath, in full glare of the warm spring sun. It must have been quick, she had not struggled as the ground was not on this occasion torn up by thrashing limbs, and there were no obvious clues as to her demise, plus she looked perfectly alright yesterday.
However the warm sun shining on her once active body attracted flies by the multitude and the usually pleasant [if you like animals] warm sheep smell resonant of lanolin and grass is soon replaced by something very distinct that cloys in the nose and throat, and is best avoided.
It is in the nature of farming and working with livestock which inevitably leads to coping with deadstock some of the time. We have a large on-farm incinerator which we are licensed to use for sheep and as I write this she is now a cloud of smoke in the previously clear April sky.
Unfortunately after the excitement of last week and the thought that perhaps I had at last found the right horse, it was just not meant to be.
A delightful ride out, unaccompanied, which made my heart sing while my head firmly told me that this delightful little horse was too green to be considered. If he had had another 6 months riding out then the result would probably be just what I am looking for.
I have also sadly discounted the other one who had up to now run a close second. My head told me she was good and steady but my heart wasn’t really interested in her.. funny how vitally important it is for the two to be in unison.
As I have said before finding a good horse is like finding a good husband or wife… very difficult but it can be done. Although unfortunately for many it is not always first time, and there is always the settling down period for all parties whether they have four legs or two.
Good sheepdogs fall into this same category and right now we are still looking for one of those as our good old girl has finally retired from the field, she is still very fit in body but her mind is not as it was. Her life span is not however guaranteed as she has taken to chasing vehicles and biting tyres in a big way and can no longer be easily stopped. The Manitou wheels are her favourite this week and just when she has a big chunk of tyre in her teeth, the machine often goes into reverse. We have tried everything we can to prevent her doing this but we do still allow her out in the yard when we are there to take her chance otherwise she’d be shut in all day and she’d hate that.
Anyway, I am not too downhearted over horses and am just off to ride another one today. What could be better than riding in the glorious sunshine? Even with over two hours to drive each way.
Like before, on the phone, this horse sounds good and could be what we are looking for, but I no longer read too much into what people tell me. I ride it and handle it before deciding what to do next.
Sleeping on a difficult decision is always useful too. When young I was particularly hopeless at this, but age has helped to temper my impetuous nature a little, and I am optimistic that there is a little horse out there somewhere with our name on it.
The lambs continue to arrive in a steady flow, helped along by the glorious weather, and Ruby is over her mastitis and providing us with milk once more.
POSTSCRIPT: this is my 100th Post! When I started to blog I had no idea how quickly 100 posts would come around. Time passes quickly in our busy lives and the words seem to flow from the fingers quickly too. Thank you to all my readers and particularly those who are kind enough to take the time to comment.
Another two calves and a lot more lambs have been born today. Lovely sunshine here but still a cold wind.
The plants in the greenhouse are doing really well. If we don’t get a move on in the actual veg garden they will be huge by the time we are able to plant them. Even the first 24 sweetcorn plants have popped up in their individual pots yesterday, it is wonderful to see new growth and new life all around and to be part of it.
However, before we can plant out my seedlings we must do something about some of the hens. A few of them laugh at the electric fence and spend all day in the veg garden. I tried to shut them in last night and planned take the scissors to their wings this morning and up the charge on the electric fence as well. We also need to find where two are laying because it is not in the snug nest box and I know I am short of eggs.
Mmmmm… my plans did not go very well. I’d cleaned out and disinfected one hen house yesterday using Jeyes fluid as we seem to have an outbreak of red mite and I have opened up the other hen house for them. I use these two houses in rotation with a major disinfection and long rest period in between each use.
At bed time I find four out of the five hens sitting on the disinfected hen house in a huddle. In the dark I manage to take three of them [one at a time] to the ’clean’ house. One hen was missing, not sure where she slept despite shining torches in all the trees, and the other naughty hen refused to be caught. But there were still five hens scavenging this morning and yes you’ve guessed it – two of them [ the two I can't catch] back in the veggie garden.. this led to the word “gun” being mentioned by Jethro at breakfast.. this usually comes out for pigeons and rabbits.
Almost a week has passed since I last blogged and it has been another really busy week. Lambing is now properly underway, and we have had another calf born safely. We’ve had three calves so far this spring and it is lovely to see them skipping in the sunshine.
Unusually, I have driven almost 1000 miles this week either viewing and riding horses to replace the previous horse who didn’t settle, or undertaking farm business. I am quite glad to be at home today for once even though I have been working flat out since 6am..
I think I have found a suitable horse for riding around the farm and hope to return on Monday for one more ride on him before agreeing to one month’s trial. It has been very hard to choose between two particular horses [ and of course they were 200 miles apart] after looking at and riding many equines over the last few weeks.
Only two were not as described in their particulars, or by their owner [with one, I should have remembered to ask about feet before doing a 250 mile round trip], and we have seen a huge variety of types and breeds, but it has finally come down to a choice of two and after next week I hope to be able to write more about the experience.
I have however met some lovely people along the way. The trust that has been shown to us, to take horses out unaccompanied and alone by someone that they don’t really know [or have any idea if we can ride] has been amazing and a very important part of the process. One little horse was almost discounted as when rode her for the first time, in the company of other horses, she almost went to sleep. Taking her out on her own, a month later, was much better, however I think she will probably be the last losser… but I am trying to be very objective about the whole process and have also taken advice. If the two finalists could have merged together I believe we’d truly have the perfect steed, but I guess that only happens in dreams.
We have also had a farm walk this week with fifty visitors of all ages. These educational visits are brilliant for making us have a major tidy up around all the buildings. Perhaps it is time for visitors in the farmhouse too… but since the Dining room is already overflowing with educational material for OPEN FARM SUNDAY, perhaps it will have to wait. It is always very interesting to us to hear new questions from the public about what we do, and to see how they act when visiting a farm. There are always a few people who think they can go anywhere they like on the premises and others who make the day for us by being so polite, patient and so very interesting.
All the plants that were potted on last weekend have grown on well, and I still hope to plant the onion setts very soon but must be careful not to over do the bending.. all our backs are creaking right now and we are all queuing up for the chiropractor. The cauliflower seeds have come up in record time but I am slightly confused by the instructions in the gardening book and no longer sure if we are growing late summer ones or early winter ones.. so long as we can eat them in due course that is all that matters.
PS: Poor Ruby has mastitis again, and is back on the intramammary tubes. We had to rush out and buy milk for the house, and hope she will be better soon. She has been turned out with the bull by day and is back in her byre at night. We hope to be back on her milk by Wednesday as we always go over the reccommended withdrawal period for all medicines.
Happy Easter!
Once again the days seem to have have flown and I have a gap in my regular blogging. This is partly due to the workload here and also from a much needed few days away from the farm.
The grass and crops are growing well and the sheep start lambing this week. We’ve had 2 calves born so far, and more due very soon. The greenhouse and conservatory are very full of plants waiting for the milder weather to plant out. 500 onion setts await immediate planting [ they only arrived last week by post] but since it has rained all over the weekend I have caught up with transplanting tomato and cucumber seedlings and sowing the sweetcorn, courgette, pumpkin and squash seeds under cover of glass instead.
We are also deep into planning for Open Farm Sunday and LEAF have sent us many packets of seeds to distribute to the children when they visit the farm. These seed packets are provided by DEFRA and in our large batch seem to be predominantly red pepper seeds. There is also Rocket, Cress and Basil but as a seasoned gardener and grower of veg from seed I am very surprised by the choice of seeds since these packets are meant to encourage children to grow things. How many children actually like Rocket and how many will have the patience to try to grow peppers?
The day itself is not until 7th June, and that to my mind is late in the season for growing peppers. I have some grown from seed planted earlier this year that are ready to finally pot on now and I have planted the Defra pepper and basil seeds which arrived this week in the hope that we will at least have plants on display. Nearer the time I shall sow cress and rocket for the BIG DAY. I now have even more seed packets coming from another source, quick growing lettuce this time. If we don’t use them all I shall send them in to the local schools so they will be used up. I expect the numbers of visitors we will get on the day will depend almost entirely on the weather.
There is so much to think about for this big open day from First Aid cover to portaloos to catering and just what will interest our visitors and most worryingly will we have enough helpers? We will all be adding events management to our CV’s and do seem to be managing all this quite well without having a degree in the subject. Between us we just have several lifetimes of experience, an understanding of Health and Safety and buckets of common sense!
I thought I had not time to blog today [ I will explain why in another post] but then I was sent this you tube clip.
Watch, enjoy and be awed.
I am able to update the blog now as we were literally just about to go out to weigh the cattle from the sheds and administer their bluetongue vaccine booster but the heavens have opened in a sudden deluge and instead I find I have a few spare minutes to quickly tap the keys before starting another large task. It is very cold, and very wet and I think I am now not sorry to be stuck indoors.
The 400 acres of drilled spring corn and our first row of early potatoes in the garden will benefit from the rain. Unfortunately we had not quite finished rolling all the arable seed beds after drilling, but as we have had a run of almost perfect weather there are few complaints. Within five minutes of the squall arriving the tractor drivers have phoned in to say they are now returning to the yard.
Our first suckler calf of the season, a heifer, was born on Saturday and is doing well, although her mother is currently not in the greatest shape and is under the care of the vet. This particular cow had lost condition and has had blood tests to try to work out what is wrong when she is eating well and well in herself but she is lacking in condition. We knew she isn’t ill, as such, as she gave the vet and I such a run around in the yard on Thursday when he came out to examine her. Eventually, after several attempts of nearly getting her to the gate [even with food] only to have her return to the far end of the yard we had to let out Ruby the pet cow out in order to get them both up the race and into the cattle crush.
Persuading Ruby back into her byre after the patient was safely penned was slightly perilous too. It is Ruby’s first time out of the byre this winter and in the warm sunshine she was very frisky. I waved a bucket with food in the bottom from the end of the yard and she is so greedy that she galloped up the concrete, flat out, kicking her heels out to one side as she ran. I stopped her quite easily but then rather lost my nerve to continue with persuading her to go back to bed as her byre was still some distance away and she was desperate to get at the food even if it meant barging into me. I handed the bucket to Jethro [who had just arrived] and he grasped it, rather like the baton in a relay race, and sped down the yard with his naughty red heifer galloping flat out after him…
I had a laundry disaster this morning while washing the white coats which we wear for meat sales… I mistakenly left a black ball point pen in the coat pocket, even though I had checked the pockets. On removing the washing from the machine, while avoiding the puppy’s razor like teeth, an black inky mess stood out from the bright whiteness of the coats resulting in a huge groan from yours truly.
Then, I had a brainwave from something I had seen on the Victorian Farm. In the programme which covered washday and laundry [which took all week and nothing else could have been done] a dim memory flashed through my neurons at lightening speed. MILK! Long before the age of modern detergents milk had been used to remove ink.
As we have a house cow and we have plenty of spare milk I soaked the two white coats in five litres of milk for over two hours and duly washed again at 60′ with my usual persil non-bio plus a whitener. Result. I hung the coats out in the sunshine and instead of black streaks all over I just have a couple of stubborn very small ink marks which I think is a really great result.
The sun is still shining and the grass is growing well while all the time the tractors are still rolling on the arable land.
The growth of the new grass is much easier to measure on the other side of the fence as it is nibbled immediately within the field boundaries. The ram lambs still come for their daily feed home grown barley but are less keen for it which is a sure sign of the coming of the spring grass.
The stock work is piling up with vaccinations due, cattle still to be weighed and all manner of sheep to be moved to fresh grazing on previous set aside to give the sheep a natural nutritional boost while at the same time home resting the home pastures before lambing.
There are just not enough hours in the day or enough manpower available at the same time to get through all the urgent tasks at the exact time they need to be done. The pressure we are all feeling, from the arable and livestock sides of the business, is so typical of mixed farming systems in the spring and autumn. After all these years we ought to be either hardened to it or have come up with a better plan but we haven’t yet and everything usually works out fine in the end.
The boar appears much better and will now be used on 3 of our girls.
In the meantime we plough on with the computerising of the accounts and the planning for various access visits including Open Farm Sunday on 7th June, and various other educational access visits.
The cattle can clearly smell the grass growing and know spring is almost here. This morning they are running about in their open sided sheds kicking their heels in the bright, warm sunshine. Tomorrow we will weigh them and calculate their daily liveweight gain over the winter and for the oldest beef animals estimate their time of dispatch. Our wonderfully patient beef customers are getting a little restless and I promised them an update on when their beef boxes will be ready.
In the meantime I have just weighed and selected another eight lambs to send this week and this afternoon we will be checking on the progress of the fattening pigs, however I am sure they will be a few weeks off yet. Our fattening lambs are almost gone for another year and come mid April we will be delivering the new crop.
Progress on the arable front is good too with the drilling almost done and the fertiliser application on the wheat making good progress.
In the meantime the hired boar has arrived and is firmly in quarantine. This is not our first experience of hiring boars and we are frequently dismayed to find that some rare breed pigs are apparently kept in indifferent conditions. We are not sure he is even fit for the purpose he came for. Personally this morning I think he still looks poor, and we are debating whether to even try him or just send him back. He was dosed with Dectomax, an anti parasite injection, before we even took him off the trailer as he has arrived with what looks to us rather like both mange and worms, still his appetite is good and that is always a good thing with pigs. Pigs who are not eating is usually a sign of something terminal. Keeping these rare breeds going is not at all easy but we are determined to get it right and make a really good job of it, I just wish every other rare breed pig keeper tried to do the same.
In the meantime we’ve found a boar of the same line as our sterile one and can fetch him very soon. This will be good because we really prefer to have a closed herd, which makes us much less vulnerable to outbreaks of parasites and disease. It also means we are totally responsible for the pigs’ management and we prefer to do that too.
I have bad news and good news: First the bad news – I clearly spoke too soon on the drilling front as the very clever little box of ’chips’ which calculates the correct seed rate has gone on the blink and is causing MAJOR problems for Jethro. The original seed drill was so much simpler.
Now the good news is I just walked past the hired boar’s box and he is shouting for his tea already.
Yesterday we felt as if we experienced all four seasons in one day.
We awoke to a bright spring like morning with brilliant sunshine that warmed up the old conservatory to a summery 22′C. We have lots of seeds already growing in there for the garden.
In the afternoon the weather deteriorated with a severe wintry storm with a lot of hailstones and the day was rounded up with a dark autumnal windy evening. Weird.
The horse went back to Wales this afternoon, very sadly she never settled here in her new home. However I think she has taken a piece of my heart back with her and in all honesty I can say that not all the horses I have had in my life have done that.
We have moved some pigs around today and it is amazing to see how high a fully grown young sow (gilt) can jump while they are working out the electric fencing system. They get used to the ‘hot’ wires pretty quickly and it means they can live the life that is best for a pig, outdoors and rooting all the day long.
Last night Ruby had more suspicious clots perhaps indicating a continuation of the mastitis in one quarter of her udder so we stripped it out [milked] by hand and put in another veterinary cream tube, and again this morning. We will just have to see what tomorrow brings.
The Noroclav cream syringes filled with both antibiotic and anti-inflammatory in the form of prednisolone have worked wonders on the heifer’s udder.
This morning Ruby’s udder appeared to be back to normal, and after this morning’s milking the third and final dose was administered into each quarter via the teat. The recommended dosage is 3 syringes per teat at 12 hourly intervals. This has now been done and we hope all will be well.
I also discovered that the withdrawal period is not as long as I thought, perhaps I just did not read it right without my dratted reading glasses! 60 hours is the stated requirement so doubling that puts us on 5 days so by next weekend we should have a good supply of fresh milk once more.
Tonight’s milking was also straightforward, so here’s hoping.
Ruby the shorthorn heifer was very sore this morning and couldn’t be milked. She appeared to have mastitis in 3 of the 4 quarters of her udder. We rang the vet immediately who told us to use milking cow antibiotic syringes twice a day. These are little plastic tubes with an antibiotic cream that is inserted into the teat and the creamy contents squeezed into the udder. We keep them in stock in our medicine cupboard along with the dry cow syringes which are used to dry off cows after weaning or when milking ceases.
They advised this as the first treatment only, rather than injecting antibiotics as well. There were no signs at all last night of any trouble in her udder and we actually had over 3 gallons from her yesterday from 2 milkings. However, she was so sore first thing today that Jethro was quite worried that he might have to dry her off completely, and I had to rush out to buy milk as yesterday’s supply had to be poured down the drain and there was none even for a cup of tea.
Tonight Ruby was MUCH better, so much better in fact that we are all thrilled and amazed. Jethro was able to use the milking machine and her behaviour was actually no worse than usual. She stands quite well while eating her food and then I think when the machine feels as if it is pulling on her udder, rather like a calf suckling for too long, she kicks it off. Usually Jethro manages 3 sessions per milking and after she kicks it off for the third time he stops.
Jethro inserted more of these antibiotic tubes after milking and will do so again tomorrow morning. If all goes well it looks like we could actually be back on our own milk soon. The withdrawal period for the tubes we used is 96 hours [4days] however we will double it [as organic farmers do] and tip away the milk for 8 days after the last treatment.
It is not just the household that uses this milk. We use the surplus milk to supplement the feeding of our weaner pigs and we have one fattener, due to go on Wednesday who really loves this extra milk. He was the smallest of a batch that were sold last week and to make up for being on his own we have been giving him milk twice a day, he rushes to the door and then rushes to his dish when he sees the bucket of milk and it has had the desired effect upon his figure. He was too lean as his greedy brothers obviously pushed him out of the way while they ate the most but he has now gained weight at an increased rate with extra food and milk. As an uncastrated boar he must go before he reaches his piggy adolescence and starts producing testosterone as testosterone taints the pork and renders it uneatable. From tomorrow, I shall cheer him up with some old brassicas from the veggie garden, as the garden needs clearing, until he goes on his last journey to make up for the sudden lack of milk.
We have no idea how the mastitis started. Ruby has clean straw every day, her udder is washed with teat wipes before every milking and udder cream is applied after every milking. The area of her byre she is milked in is washed every time both before and after milking and we have an old dishwasher through which the milking machine and all the pipes go twice a day. This dishwasher has been adapted so the tubes and clusters are actually connected to the upper parts of the machine.
We are really meticulous over the hygiene aspect as it is raw milk that we all drink. I guess it was just a case of bad luck or the fact that bacteria lurks all around all of us all of the time.
Today I was going to update you with news of our heifer and calf and describe the challenges of walking along perilously on the top of an old christmas cake as the remaining snow sounds and feels exactly like desicated Royal icing, long after the festivities have passed.
However, I now feel all this rural whimsy can wait.
Instead, as a freelance writer, both published in print and the on web I feel very strongly about this campaign – RESPECT THE BLOG and wish to draw everyone’s attention to it. Thank you to Cheshire Wife who spread the word.
These links explain what has happened in blog land and Don Mills Diva is right to draw attention to it. By everyone I mean those who write and read blogs and generally care about the written word. This is the original article published by Times online.
When I write on here I try to enthuse and inform and explain the complexities of rural life to those who don’t know, while at the same time trying to appeal to those who do know. It is a hard task. Remaining anonymous is also hard at times too but advice was sought before the blog started and this is how Arcadian Advocate writes.
So for those who also care about the integrity of what we WRITERS do and care about our copyrights then please follow the links and join in. Every word counts. I know what is ‘blogged’ is very much in the public domain, but I write [think and type] every single word on Arcadian Advocate and I’d be very upset if any of it was used without proper permission or acknowledgement.
Sometimes AA’s posts are written in haste, sometimes not, it depends on what is happening on the farm. I hope the readers can’t necessarily tell the difference. If I get an idea or a news story or picture from somewhere else then I put a link in the text.
Blogs mean a lot to those who write them, and also to those who read them. Real journalism matters too, and although there is genuine overlap between blogging and journalism they should not be confused.
Integrity is vitally important to many of us, but surely it should matter to everyone who writes [and reads] especially in national/international read media. I accept that we do not necessarily know the whole story but why then does it appear that there are so many shortcuts taken within the business of writing? Is this a result of all this technology?
More snow fell last night, followed by rain and sleet however our troubles here are nothing compared with those who live in Australia, especially in the State of Victoria and are coping with these terrible bush fires. How they would welcome a dose of the cold wet stuff, and that puts everything in perspective for us.
We are in now uncharted territory as the combination of rain and melting snow on previously saturated ground is a new one. We watch almost hour by hour as the pond levels rise and the fields start to flood.
The problem with the overflowing pond is that it can overflow through the Victorian buildings to fill the yard and we have no where else to move the housed cattle to.
warm and dry for now
All the melt water from the village runs down the road and into the pond, on top of all our own ‘run off’ from the surrounding fields and yards.
Frost is forecast later tonight, perhaps it will slow the rapid thaw but the problem is that the roads are running with water so they will probably be like glass tomorow and we know the County Council is short of grit and no longer bothers to salt the rural byways.
It took an hour to get to the local railway station 5 miles away this morning.
Spring seems a long way away but would be very welcome right now.
land or sea?
This was a field last time we looked.
Farming, especially with livestock is not without its funnier moments [I believe the famous phrase is 'never work with children or animals'] and we have had an absolute classic this morning. I have just stopped laughing long enough to try it get it down in detail and hope that those who read this blog will find it funny too.
Ruby, the house cow heifer calved as you know 2 days ago. The calf while he is so small cannot manage to drink all she produces and it is time to start to get her used to the milking machine. Once we start milking properly the plan is to milk her in the mornings only and leave the calf on all day, removing him from her side at night. It is the ancient cottager’s system whereby you can rear beef and have milk at the same time and we will let you know how we get on. There are websites with information too.
Jethro put the halter on her and then moved her bucket with the feed to a better place in the byre to tie her up near the milking machine. Ruby is a very greedy girl and very swiftly plunged her head into the bucket of meal while at the same time inserting one of her little short horns into one of the long thin pockets for tools on the right leg of Jethro’s boiler suit. At this point they were both completely stuck, tied together as it were. Jethro unable to move and Ruby unable to eat. There followed a lengthy tussle between the two of them and a lot of cursing from Jethro. He was trying hard to get free but remained stuck fast and stooped low as she pushed harder and harder downwards in the direction of the bucket while grunting from the effort as she tried desperately to reach her delicious food.
Me, I was paralysed with laughter, clutching the gate for support, silent to start with as I thought it would be bad form to show my intense amusement but in the end something gave: the seam on the boiler suit burst open with a loud ripping sound, Jethro was released, Ruby finally got her food and I could actually laugh out loud. Oh dear… the tears of merriment still fall every time I think of it.
The good news is that Ruby coped with the clusters of the machine well and only lifted her legs in a minor protest once or twice and we milked off about 2 – 3 pints. She soon settled and stood quiet when Jethro scratched her back. The part milking out will help the heifer as she is a well bred Shorthorn cow, bred to be a good yielding cow and the calf is only sucking one teat at present and is replete on that. This is Ruby’s sire.
Of course it could have been worse, there may be those who point out that Jethro could have been hurt but he wasn’t. Ruby really likes people and should make an excellent house cow in due course.
The deep and crisp snow shows no sign of going and the animals must be feeling hungrier as they now rush up to the tractor for their hay every day. The sheep are clearly not as stupid as many people seem to think either, they pick the hay over, eating what they want, and then lie on the remainder, chewing their cud contentedly, as a way of protecting themselves from the hard frosted crust of snow.
Mollie seems fine, albeit in our human eyes perhaps a little more fed fed up than usual. Hay 3 times a day is what she gets as the rams she lives with make ‘feather’ beds out of most of it. By giving her a chance of hay 3 times a day she has first pick of the forage before the rams, she is totally the boss of them. Woe betide the boys if they dare try to take a mouthful from her pile before she has had enough. Her ears go flat back and her teeth are bared and her hind feet do a quick jig, the rams have learnt this is not a good sign and immediately back off. We do however set out a lot of separate piles of hay so they can feed at the same time. Mollie moves the rams along from pile to pile, with one sour look, while picking out the choicest strands of homemade hay for herself.
The snow is so deep and hard that even she has taken to walking in the vehicle tracks and only very occasionally trotting instead of her usual top speed around the field. I have just cleared all the icicles from her fetlocks and given her an extra feed of soaked sugar beet with a chaff mix. Her very expensive rug [nb: for rug, read 'duvet'] is keeping her toasty warm from her ears to her tail and although many horses have been brought inside during the snow she still prefers to be out and it is what she is used to. Even fetching her in, at present, would be nigh on impossible as we have sheet ice for several hundred yards from the field gate to the stable yard where the farm machines travel daily. I thought the Rhino rug was a huge expense when I rushed out and bought it the day she arrived but owing to this winter’s colder weather it has turned out to be absolutely invaluable.
For us people the ‘going’ is harder too, but the work out our muscles get is fantastic. Fit flops are increasingly popular and good for all sorts of toning and orthapaedic quirks [my arthritic knees improved no end by wearing them in the summer] but I can vouch for the fact that walking through this deep crisp snow, day after day, is most excellent for toning too. However our appetites for warm and comforting food are also increased!
We have managed to buy some extra hay, 550 small bales which will be very useful for the cattle and the sheep. Forage requirements [hay and silage] after many mild winters, like tons of road grit, are hard to predict and we need a lot more this year to keep the animals satisfied. The bought in hay should last us an extra 50 days for the cattle, we will use our existing big bale hay for the sheep.
Ruby has finally calved, well to be exact we have just calved her as after a disturbed night she presented us with one hind foot at 8am. I could see a hoof sticking out from the birth passage and had just broken the membrane so that if the calf came naturally it would not drown in constraints of the birth sack. Once the sack was popped I could see immediately that it was a hind leg which signals DANGER to both the heifer and calf.
However breech births are fairly common in cattle and sheep and fairly routine to deal with. As Jethro’s pet cow [she was hand reared before we got her] she is a easier to handle than say a heifer from our big herd out in the fields.
Anyway Jethro located the other hind leg and pulled it out until we had two hind legs presenting and the hips would be next to deliver. Then it was matter of easing the calf out gently, as Ruby pushed with each contraction, Jethro and one of the men kept an even pressure on the calf by gently pulling on the legs so that in between contractions the calf eases forwards inch by inch.
In this situation it is vitally important to be as speedy as possible, while taking every care not to damage the cow’s birth passage and pelvis, because calves and lambs in the breech position often take in amniotic fluid through their mouths and noses on their journey out of the uterus.
The deep red calf was delivered safely and then had to be hung up by his hind legs to clear all the gunk from its mouth and nose. This took some considerable time, and all the time the calf was being rubbed and its heart massaged. I gave the calf a couple of rescue breaths too and the colour of the mucous membranes reamined good and the eye reflex was also good. Sometimes calves or lambs born via breech births never breath.
When we thought we had held the calf upside down for long enough we laid it down and Ruby joined with the resucitation with her tongue. Little by little the calf started to come around and take the occasional breath. Only at this point did we think to look to see what gender the calf was, it was a boy.
I’d really have liked a heifer to breed from however this will provide us with plenty of meat in 30 months time. He sounds rather like an old man with pneumonia with a deep throaty rattle and cough but we will monitor him carefully and once he is up on his feet it will ease his chest.
The calf is deep red like his mother, and the white snow continues to fall, heavily. For yet another day all our earlier tracks have been obliterated and the feeding of extra rations in the fields goes on.
Well, we awoke early to find yet more snow and now we have very gentle drizzle resulting in thick fog so all we can see is white. White on the ground, white in the sky and everything else in between is white too. Weird!
The transport system around here is in a terrible state. Busses and trains are all affected and roads only passable with 4wd. Last night Jethro went to the train station to collect a family member 5 miles away. He left at 4.45pm and they returned at 6.35pm! Today they cannot even contemplate travelling and even more snow is forecast for tomorrow.
All the grazing animals are still receiving extra hay, and the latest possible problem is Ruby.
Ruby is Jethro’s naughty heifer and she does looks very uncomfortable and not like her usual cheery self, although an hour ago she was standing and chewing her cud. The birth of her first calf is imminent and we hope there will be no complications as getting a vet here could be a challenge. She has grown so huge we have bets on as to if it is twins… but we hope not.
I learnt a new word on the HACCP course yesterday - organoleptic.
I also felt that within the world of food safety, training and consultants there is still a huge lack of understanding about the actual farming processes.
Example: In a room full of mainly arable farmers the following statement was made : “Certain arable crops which will be entering the food chain MUST be harvested in dry weather.”
Yeah right!
In a summer like the one we just had in 2008.
Dream on!
So all those who attended the course will be getting a certificate to say we have been HACCP trained and so now are legally allowed to write our HACCP reports for what we produce.
Apparently, despite being accredited members of an assurance scheme we all have to have even more pieces of paper.
OK today’s rant over.
Snow melting well through the day and the animals starting to graze again. Will there be more snow tonight?
Why is there all this nonsense about the ‘cost’ of the bad weather, how about all the savings in all the mild winters we’ve had.
This is not a severe winter – it is just a normal winter.
The snow fall levelled out at tea time yesterday at around 8 inches. We cleared the snow off the old Victorian conservatory roof just before dark in case more snow fell and the glass cracked from the strain. The roof may be covered by insurance but we simply couldn’t cope with any more house related problems. [We also had a burst radiator 2 weeks ago which nearly brought down the farm office ceiling.] On Sunday, Jethro planted some early potatoes in a barrel in the conservatory, but in truth that feels a wee bit optimistic right now.
Today everywhere is frozen hard again and the battle to feed and water all the outdoor stock continues. Since the last cold snap we have plumbed in and filled two 2250 litre troughs for the cattle, so keeping them watered will be easier even if the frost continues and we have to resume leading water out in the bowser. The outdoor pigs have had their rations increased slightly but with their warm straw filled wooden arks they seem absolutely fine. The 2o weaned piglets chase each other around in the deep snow and are not taking any hurt at all, which is marvellous.
I have finally found my camera charger [as always with 'lost' possessions it was found when I was not actually looking for it] and now I need to find or replace the lead to connect it to the computer so albeit slowly I am making progress towards illustrating this blog.
One Good Thing about yesterday’s ’snow day’ was that my desk and filing were finally cleared of piles of papers and a lot of outstanding admin dealt with. If only I could keep on top of it on a regular basis it would be so much easier however farm life and the frequent ‘ emergency situations’ that arise on an ever increasing basis seem to make this type of routine hard to keep up, however I will keep trying. Paper simply seems to multiply when I am not looking, [does anyone else have this problem?] although I discovered that Jethro has a horrid habit of just adding to the pile of papers on MY desk [while clearing his desk] which he thinks are my responsiblity. I have now positioned a special blue tray and specifically asked him to put all papers in their that he wishes me to deal with and I also have a very smart filing tray with 4 sections marked urgent, farm, house/housekeeping etc. I really hope it will work and I can do better, it was a wish of mine for 2009 to take better control of all this paper. There is still an hour’s worth of filing today to do on pig paperwork alone.
Mollie seems fine, the hay rations for her and the three rams she lives with have been increased, but until the thaw there is no chance of riding or anything else. Roll on spring.
Today, if it is not cancelled, we are attending a
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Hazard Analysis of Critical Control Points (HACCP)
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training course for farmers which is designed to cover the aspects of ‘farm to fork’, and will no doubt result in even wider knowledge on the legal aspects of what we do and how we do it and of course another certificate to put on the wall.
Heavy snow this morning and everything off the farm grinds to a halt. With our large tractors and other machines we are able to get around but all the animals need additional food and it is a slow task taking hay out to the fields in blinding snow.
Update later.
Well Mollie and I walked slowly and carefully around a few waterlogged fields today after the blacksmith replaced her lost shoe and we tried out our sheep gathering skills of a few lambs at walking pace. The lambs moved well into a corner of the field and Mollie seemed relaxed. All good, as I work to rebuild confidence in both of us after the shattering motor bike incident 10 days ago. The horse and I remained totally calm despite startling a muntjack deer in the hedge and the many pheasants were obviously loudly announcing that from Saturday they will be safe until next season.
Ruby, Jethro’s dairy heifer, gets bigger and bigger, and I begin to think she may have twins, although this is unusual for a heifer [first timer]. She ran with the bull from April 1st last year and was due anytime from 9th Jan, however it may have been during the second cycle that she conceived. We keep watching and waiting but she lies around more and continues to eat well. The phrase ‘a watched pot never boils’, certainly comes to mind.
It is often said out loud regarding the frequency of London busses [or even men when single] , when you need one there are none, and then all of a sudden three come at once. We have now had more Policeman than you can possibly imagine in the locality however I cannot go into all the details. Except to say that on the matter of the motor bikers everyone is working together from Parish to County level, the Police and the landowners. Gates, ditches and signs will all be tried in a combined effort to educate and restrict. I doubt they can be stopped but the frequency may be lessened. I will get off next time I meet scrambler bikes or else take off across the fields, Jethro’s potential wrath over his crops will be easier to take than another fall.
I have some more pigs to view asap as I’ve had a call to say two Gloucester Old Spots are looking for an outdoor home and are about ready for the boar at 11 months old. We seem to be developing a real mix of rare breeds now and as we only have one boar crossing them should be interesting and fun. I have just received a box load of Jamie Oliver recipes already to send out with my pork boxes from Jamie’s new series on pork.
We are so confident that what we do with our pigs is right. They live outdoors all year with wooden arks with wooden floors and a large patch of ground each except for when they farrow. Just as they are due to give birth they come back to the farm and are in large old stables near the house with a warming lamp for the piglets. After 3 – 4 weeks depending on the time of year the whole family is back outside. Weaning is at around 8 weeks [ in a commercial unit weaning is often at 3 weeks] and the piglets stay in their home and on the same food and we put the sow back with all her friends and the boar. We have one sow to wean on Friday.
Weather forecasters are predicting another very cold spell soon in from the East but at least we may be able to stop swimming. Time will tell if they are right, one of my best friends in America always made me laugh by calling the forecasters ‘the weather guessers’.
Well I went to get the horse in for a bit of a spruce up as I was fed up with office work and when I got out in the yard I had to change my mind. The noise in the farm yard was deafening. The steam cleaner and other noisy equipment including a heavy duty drill are in use all around the yard and right beside Mollie’s stable. The sound was far too reminiscent of the recent episode of the roaring bikes to risk another incident just as she is recovering.
The old brick range of horse boxes are being steam cleaned and disinfected ready for the next 2 pigs to farrow, one due from this week and another in 2 weeks, and also the new cattle crush is being cemented in to its permanent position and new access gates have been put in the race for the safety of the vet and everyone who works with these large animals. This race has been specifically designed for our horned cattle and has just come back from the galvanising works. A cattle crush is not the feeling you get when you really like cows, it is the means of holding them still and preventing them from crushing you while weighing or administering routine veterinary treatments for worms and parasites.
The saddler is coming at 4pm to check the fitting of an almost new saddle I have got on sale or return. If it turns out not to be right [ but I think it will be] I must send it back this week for a refund.
The blacksmith is returning on Wednesday after shoeing the horse with a full new set of shoes on Friday and she lost one immediately… luckily I’ve never had that happen before but the loss of the shoe and the ever present threat of the bikers does rather curtail what and where we can go. However support is increasing in an attempt to keep the countryside safe with many locals and various parish councils now joining together to try to stop this menace.
In the meantime I have been selling very rare gilts for breeding and possibly a few sheep too, to some smallholders who are just starting out. It is good fun and quite the opposite to selling thousands of tons of grain which of course Jethro does all the time.
I simply don’t know where the days go!
Christmas came and went and the daily work on the farm simply carried on. We had a pig with mastitis on Christmas Eve [now cured], and a shortage of electricity causing the bore hole to stop working.
16 days of hard frost followed on Boxing Day leading to huge water problems with the outdoor livestock. Thousands of gallons of water have been carried out to cattle, pigs and sheep.
The frost thawed and then the rains came [ still falling] and the pond and the fields are now almost overflowing with excess water..
The younger generation are returned to their seats of learning and even Jethro has had a week away this month studying for his MSC. While he was away we had a burst radiator in a bedroom which nearly brought down the ceiling of the farm office, thanks to the NFU insurance for their swift response in drying us out [ the fans are still whirring] and a very poorly pig who was sadly and swiftly put down. This pig was one of our absolute favourites owing to her lovely nature, she was 18 months old and had just been weaned from her litter of 10 at 8 weeks old. Customers are queuing to buy our breeding stock and I have already pre-sold 4 out of the 5 gilts, we will keep the best one to be her replacement, in due course.
The horse has come and is settling slowly, our progress has not been helped by either the terrible weather nor a terrifying experience for both of us with some trespassing motor-cross riders who all revved their engines at once causing her to frantically rear again and again and me to be thrown. Steps are being taken to restrict access on the bridle paths to those who are entitled. I am the third serious accident that I know of in this locality and sadly I fear a tragedy if nothing is done.
I missed blogging but the days were not long enough. However the nights are lighter now and we have Spring to look forward to.
I am back and will do my best to post often. Camera still not sorted.
Yesterday, we checked the fences in preparation for the coming of THE HORSE on Monday. This link shows a picture of her, she is the beautiful mare on the left at the top of the page.
All seems well, the field is nothing like as wet as we thought it might be, and there is only a small task to do. We need to remove the old and rather manky round bale of hay [ the cattle in the shed will pick over that if we put in in as bedding ] and we need to also also remove the ring feeder. This year’s group of ram lambs are about to be moved across from another field to graze with her and keep her company. Eventually she will live most of the time with the house cow, Ruby, but she is indoors at the moment and due to calve at the end of January. The horse is used to living outdoors, and is coming with her thick rug. There is also an older ‘pet’ wether sheep [castrated male] who can join this little band of special animals, but he is also elsewhere at the moment and it is too complicated to get him back on his own. Other livestock will join this happy little band from time to time as they will always be in the field nearest the house and we always have a procession fo special care animals throughout the year either needing extra food, observation, veterinary care or just plain old TLC.
