Fifty Bales of Hay E-Book

Roger Evans

• Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 371

Beschreibung

Roger Evans faces each day on his dairy farm in Shropshire with a wonderful mixture of dry humour, sharp observation and a delight in the natural world and the animals around him.  This latest book of his popular diary entries takes his fans through the weeks of the past two years and covers his beloved farm dogs, his cattle, his friends at the pub.  He struggles through all weather, survives the ups and (mainly) downs facing everyone in the dairy industry and he encounters several unexpected events along the way. Very funny, uplifting and a joy to read.

Leseprobe

To my grandchildren

Rhys, Tomos, Katie,

David and Hannah

Contents

Title PageDedicationFifty Bales of HayAlso published by Merlin Unwin Books Copyright

23 MARCH 2014

A few weeks ago I was looking for harbingers of spring. I’m still looking. It’s not that cold but nothing seems to be happening. The grass fields and the winter corn are not moving. It’s true that nowhere around here has anyone put any fertiliser on yet, it’s too wet, but the beginning of March, surely something should be on the move. But it’s not, I’m sure that it’s because the ground is saturated and cold. There are no daffodils out around here yet. I’ve scanned the hedgerows in known sheltered places and there’s not a green leaf to be seen. Then yesterday, a Sunday afternoon, all that changed, spring is on its way. I heard my first pack of motorbikes tearing their way through the countryside.

***

There was a time when if you saw a fox about in the daytime, it was such a noteworthy event that you would introduce the fact into your conversation. ‘Saw a fox this morning.’ ‘Where was that?’ It’s not that big a deal any more. Mert my dog has never been shut up at night since I’ve had him and you can hear him barking about the yard every night, I assume at foxes. I can’t think of anything else that would make him bark, he doesn’t bark at all in the daytime. In fact he’s mostly asleep in the daytime, probably tired out from barking at foxes all night! But we do see foxes about the yard in the daytime and we know that they are about at night, because David has cows calving at the moment and he goes around these cows late at night, and he sees foxes all the time. So it seems reasonable to conclude that that is what Mert is barking at.

The daytime foxes take more understanding. They will stroll by at about 30 yards distance, seemingly unconcerned about the human activity all around them. They don’t look that fit, they look mangy and diseased, and that is, I suppose, what draws them to our yard. They are probably struggling to survive out in the wild and are drawn to our yard where they probably eat calf food and the like from out of food troughs. They may well be urban foxes that haven’t adjusted to the challenges of living in the wild, and maybe never will.

29 MARCH 2014

My eldest granddaughter is 13. At school, in an English lesson, they are discussing writing. She tells the teacher ‘My Pop is a writer.’ (They all call me Pop, at least the grandchildren do.) The teacher is really interested in this information so Katie tells her that I write articles for magazines and newspapers and that three books have been published. ‘I wonder if your Pop would come to talk to us about writing?’ ‘Yes he would,’ says Katie. ‘Perhaps you’ll ask him.’ ‘No need to, he’ll come.’ ‘Yes, but you have to ask him first.’ ‘No need to, he’ll come.’ ‘How can you be so sure he will come?’ ‘’Cus he loves me.’ Quite made my day.

***

I’ve got this friend, he’s a Scot, but he can’t help that. He goes on endlessly about Scottish rugby every season and the ‘new dawn’ due to arrive every year. He tells me that he has this ambition to go to see Scotland play Wales at the Millennium stadium but he can never get a ticket. I didn’t get where I am today without being able to put my hand on tickets for Wales’ matches but I kept this quiet. We have an established carload that go to all Wales matches in Cardiff and always go to one away game as well. But friends had weddings and holidays and I had room in the car so I told him a couple of months ago that I would take him to the Scotland game. Fortuitously as it turns out. So he’s getting very excited and goes on endlessly about it and after we lose to England at Twickenham he senses victory. Because he’s on such a high I tell him that there are conditions to coming with me. ‘What conditions?’ ‘No kilts, no guitar (he’s always playing his guitar), and no Saltire draped in the back window of the car.’ I’ve seen sad faces in my time but rarely one as sad as his, which told me that a kilt and a flag were definitely part of his plan. I was actually very surprised that when I picked him up, neither were evident. Despite my warning I expected him to do his own thing, and I wouldn’t really have been worried if he had, but he wasn’t taking a chance on being left behind. As it turned out Wales won 51-3 which kept him quiet on the way home and will probably keep him quiet about Scot’s rugby for 12 months. By which time they will have had the vote on Scottish independence and if it’s a ‘Yes’ vote we will send him back anyway.

***

The reign of terror inflicted on our local community by our turkeys continues undiminished. One near neighbour couldn’t get her children out of the house to take them to school and they appeared on her Facebook page, as ‘killer turkeys’. I’ve easily sorted that; I just let them out later in the morning. It’s all very funny, for spectators, but it’s getting very close to being a real issue and I might have to take measures of containment. At present they behave like dogs that might bite you, except that people are mostly wary of a strange dog whereas they approach the turkeys (well they do the first time anyway), completely unsuspecting of what lies in wait.

I don’t like being harassed by dogs. I’ve got a friend whose dogs are notorious, and I will not get out of the truck on his yard until I’m sure that there are no dogs loose, or if there are, that he’s about as well, to control them. There’s the story of an agricultural salesman who was terrified of farm dogs. The dogs for their part would sense this and give him a hard time. One farm he went to had a really nasty dog that lived in a kennel on a chain whenever it wasn’t working with sheep or cattle. To get to the farmhouse there was about a metre of safety between the length of the chain and an adjoining building. The salesman would apparently spreadeagle himself, back against the wall, and inch himself past the snapping dog. One day, business done, he came out of the house, ready to repeat the ordeal, to be confronted by an empty chain. I’m not sure if a chain can be empty but, whatever, it was dog-less. This wasn’t, from his point of view, a good thing. At least when the dog was on the chain he knew where it was. Now he didn’t. And if he didn’t know where it was, where was it? So he made his way back to his car with even more caution, his back still against the wall, thus reducing the possible area of attack. Inch by precarious inch he got back to his car, making the last yard or two in a panic-driven run. Into the car, slam the door and safe. Except that he was not safe. Sitting on the passenger seat, hackles up, teeth bared, was the dog. The lads who worked on the farm had put it in his car whilst he was in the farmhouse!

5 APRIL 2014

It’s Saturday night in the pub. The participants split into two different groups. In one group are the tractor drivers and farmers. Their conversation is quite animated: it’s all about tractors and implements and what they’ve been doing with them since they last met. I swear they use more red diesel in the pub on Saturday nights than they do all week. I don’t mean to mock them because they spend very long hours alone in a tractor cab at this time of year with just the radio for company, so what they are doing now is a sort of release for all the thoughts that have accumulated during the week.

One of them is telling the rest how his boss has turned the sprayer over and this is the dominant theme. They all have similar stories to tell and also of near misses. Their biggest problem is getting their own story in, and as far as I can tell there’s always two or three talking at the same time. The tractor drivers and farmers are all standing at the bar; the other group, their wives, girlfriends and partners, are all sitting around a table. That’s where I am. You wouldn’t believe what you can find out sitting down quietly with a group of women. Much of it is not for the faint-hearted. To start with they all have their phones out and are comparing stuff that’s on Facebook. There’s a bit of a local spat going on and I can’t believe what some people will write down for the rest of the world to read. I have a maxim in life that if you have something really blunt to say to someone, who has perhaps messed you about, it’s far better to tell them than writing it down. If they don’t like what you have said, which is after all, the main purpose of what you have to say, if it’s in writing they can keep it, put it away somewhere and get it out to look at again and again and thus nurture the disagreement for years and years to come. If some plain-speaking is needed, and it sometimes is, best to say it and move on. Can’t see that happening with some of the stuff I’m reading on Facebook, they might not keep it for years but they know that it has gone out to a very wide audience which all serves to compound the issue. But we move on.

Another lady turns up. They’ve all been to one of those sales parties and she’s brought what they’ve ordered. Of course they all have to open every jar and tube to revisit what they’ve bought. There’s beauty potions, oil and ointments everywhere and they are all trying them out. I get to try them out as well. Soon I’ve had a little bit of this and a little bit of that rubbed into the back of my hand and a squirt of different deodorants applied in different places ‘Try this one, Rog.’

***

On Sunday night at the pub it’s all men, mostly the same men. So they start picking on me. ‘Used to be a hard rugby player and now he’s gone all girly. Sitting with the women all night and talking about creams and make-up.’ I let them get on with it; let them have their amusement. It will soon be my turn. My turn, when it comes, is an opportunity to ask questions. ‘Which of us, spent last night in the pub talking about tractors and farming? And which of us was sitting with a group of women, who took turns to hold his hand and rub various lotions into it?’ They all reflect on this. There’s no more talk of me being ‘girly’. In fact I’m fairly sure I’ve won the day.

Just had to take the man to read the meter which is deep in turkey territory. He tells me that dogs are the most scary part of his job; well they were until now anyway. He says he’s never been chased by a turkey before, he says he can’t wait to tell his mates. I notice that he kept very close to me when I took him up the garden.

13 APRIL 2014

I had to fly to Glasgow yesterday for an overnight stay. It’s a journey I used to do most weeks at one time in my life so it was a bit of a trip down memory lane. How things have changed! I’m heading for the check-in desk and am stopped in my tracks by a young man who shows me that if I put my passport into this machine, a ticket comes out, push another button and the ticket comes out for the next day. I didn’t have to check a bag in because I’d got what I needed in my laptop bag. Toothbrush, electric shaver, clean shirt and spare pair of knickers in case I had an accident. I’m a slightly reluctant user of this new technology. For years I steadfastly refused to use a cashpoint. I used to go into the bank and cash a cheque. The girls behind the counter used to say every time ‘You don’t need to come in here for cash, you can get it out of the machine.’ And every time I would point out that if we all did that there would be no need for pretty girls sitting at bank counters. And they would smile at me indulgently. Now the bank is a clothes shop. Airports are good for people watching. I always notice that people will push and jostle to get onto the plane. And when you arrive at your destination, they push and jostle to get off.

***

At long last I set off with the roller. I’ve been looking forward to this for some time, which some people might think a bit sad but I think that I am lucky to enjoy the job I have. If you enjoy your work, then it isn’t really work at all, is it? I’m off to roll two fields we rent a couple of miles away. Getting out with the roller is my chance to scrutinise, close up, all of my fields and the flora and fauna within them. Which is, in itself, a problem with these two particular fields. They are close to a busy road and a busy village so there’s no fauna about, and the flora is a bit of a problem. The two fields used to be part of a larger farm which, at one time, grew daffodils commercially.

One of the fields, the closest one to the buildings, has a huge number of daffodils growing in it; they are a picture in the spring sunshine. As you possibly also know, daffodils are my favourite flower, because they herald the arrival of spring and because they are a Welsh symbol. It grieves me to do it but I’m just about to roll them flat. There’s too many to dodge around them so a good rolling is what they get, though I do get off the tractor and pick a goodly bunch to take home for the missus. (Which completely throws her; in fact it makes her suspicious.)

When I’ve finished, there are nice dark and light green stripes up and down the fields, just how I like it. It’s a contentious issue on this farm, rolling. We’ve got a consultant who is driven by cutting costs. Which is OK up to a point. But he is given to walking about the yard and kicking things like the roller, and saying ‘you need to sell that.’ I tell him I don’t. He asks what I need it for and I say rolling, and he says land rarely needs rolling and I say I like the land to be rolled and he says it’s a cost in fuel and wages and I say but I don’t get any wages. And so it goes on. But the roller is still here and I continue to use it. And in due course I will have all my silage fields looking lovely with stripes everywhere and also in due course I will meet one or both of my landlords and I know, from previous experiences, that they will say ‘you’ve got the farm looking well this spring’ and I will say to them ‘thank you’, and I will say to the consultant ‘How do you put a value on that?’

***

Every spring the story of aggressive cock pheasants makes it into the national dailies and sometimes even on television. This always surprises me because it is such a common phenomenon in pheasant country. I’ve always assumed that these stories only make it to the top of the pile on slow news days and I’m probably right. I’ve reported on it often enough. Yesterday I got into the truck out on the yard and before I could start up, the mobile phone rang. So I’m sitting there in the truck answering the phone and this cock pheasant starts to cross the yard about 20 yards in front of me. There’s a real sense of purpose to its progress, it’s low to the ground, but it’s obviously on some sort of mission, there’s stealth there and menace. I can tell by its demeanour that it’s protecting its territory but as yet I can’t see from what. Also about 20 yards in front of me is the shed where we calve our cows and one of the cows has her head through the feed barrier and is eating some silage.

The pheasant takes the last ten yards at a sprint, races up to the cow and gives it a sharp peck on the nose. The startled cow jerks back out of sight. Satisfied with itself, the pheasant stand up on tiptoe and flaps its wings in triumph. But only for fractions of a second. It goes back down into its stealth position and positively sprints back the way it had come. So, I wonder, what’s going on here? I soon find out. Out of a bunch of nettles at the top of the yard bursts a much bigger cock pheasant. He races down the yard in pursuit, not in a direct line but in a diagonal run that will cut the first pheasant off from wherever he is heading. It’s several minutes before the dominant cock returns. That will teach a pheasant not to peck my cows.

19 APRIL 2014

Here are the headlines today: ‘Saturated fat isn’t bad for your heart.’ So what does that mean? Well saturated fats turn up naturally in dairy products, products like milk and butter. Before we go further, let’s remind ourselves that milk is nature’s most complete, natural food, and by some distance. And as we go further let’s just remind ourselves that for over 40 years the saturated fats in dairy products have been blamed for heart disease and, to a lesser extent, obesity. I used to be on something called the Dairy Council, which for years has been saying that the saturated fats in dairy products have been unfairly stigmatised and maligned by researchers whose research was funded by the industries that produce the spreads and oils that compete with natural dairy products. Here’s another quote from the article: ‘It is time to bust the myth of the role of saturated fat in heart disease, which was based on faulty interpretation of scientific studies.’ It’s possible that not many of you are still reading this, perhaps you’ve switched off and moved on, but this myth not only affected dairy farmers’ lives, it’s affected yours as well. For dairy farmers it has devalued what they produce by saying dairy products undermine health, and not saying it occasionally but on and on for 40 years. For you consumers it’s affected your lives, because when you walk past the milk section of your supermarket, there’s actually been no need for all those endless rows of skimmed and semi-skimmed and 1% fat milks, no need for low fat cheeses, no need for low fat dairy products of any sort.

The real culprits in dietary well-being seem to be sugar, salt and processed foods. And isn’t it just possible that if we all had cereal with proper milk on it for breakfast and toast with butter on, we wouldn’t be hungry again by 11 o’clock, and fill up on processed foods that are not so good for us? What beggars belief is that if saturated fat being responsible for heart disease is a myth, where were all the scientists at places like the Food Standards Agency who allowed all this misinformation to go out? And how can people vilify an industry for so long and get away with it? My breakfast most days is two pieces of toast and marmite, but I do trawl the fridge for scraps to eat, left by grazing grandchildren and for anything that’s past its sell-by-date. One of my favourites is fried tomatoes and I find some that are getting a bit soft. I cut them up and put them in the frying pan. I pick up the big bottle of sunflower oil that always stands next to the cooker. And I put it down again. I go back to the fridge and find some butter, cut off a lump and smack it in the frying pan. So there! And it tastes so much better. Milk that has the fat in it, and full fat is only 4%, by the way, tastes better. Try it.

***

I’ve just been rolling our largest field, 42 acres, which is a slow long job. I suppose I was born of an age when we had to do mental arithmetic. My grandchildren are amazed sometimes at what I can work out. They reach for the calculators on their phones – a few years ago it would have been calculators – we didn’t have any of that. The nearest we had to that would have been a slide rule, I could see how they worked but never owned one, only smart arses owned one. But I can often work something out in my head quicker than they can fire up their calculators. I also have a sort of shorthand way of doing it. If I wanted to multiply 17 x 19 for example, I would multiply 17 by 20 and then knock off 17, easy peasy. Anyway I’m back on the roller, slowly going up and down the field and I work out, all in my head, how many square yards there are in the field and from there how many square feet so I divide the square feet by the width of the roller which is 10ft and convert back the feet to miles with the result that to roll this field I cover 34 miles. Plus the distance I travel at the ends of the fields where I turn around to go back down again, which distance is not inconsiderable. I’m travelling at about ten kilometres an hour. I expect you are amazed at how effortlessly I have switched from imperial measure to metric but the tractor is French and I can read the speed on the dashboard. So that’s around six miles an hour which if you are on overtime rates is too quick but if you don’t get paid, like me, is not quick enough.

But we mustn’t forget the wildlife, and today the wildlife is very quiet. I’ve not seen a hare all day but apart from pheasants the most numerous bird is the skylark. I reckon there’s twice as many as when I rolled the same field last year. I don’t pretend to claim any credit for that. But then again, it’s obvious that I’m not doing anything that is detrimental to nature. I take pleasure from that. And pride.

26 APRIL 2014

I’ve been to Northern Ireland for 24 hours this week, to a dinner. It’s such a nice place and such nice people. Some of the people actually do say things like Jim McDonald used to say on Coronation Street, which always seemed to be a bit over the top. Things like, ‘You need to get a taxi to go to the airport at nine o’clock, so you do.’ It’s quite a strange phenomenon when complete strangers come up to you, introduce themselves, and then ask of you, ‘How’s Mert?’ He, Mert the dog, is completely unaware of how famous he is. So how is he? Well he’s getting on a bit now and he’s put on a bit of weight since I had him castrated, something I will always regret. But then he doesn’t roam the roads any more on romantic walkabouts, so it might have saved his life. I don’t take him for long days on the tractor any more because I can see that after a couple of hours, he’s not that comfortable, but I do take him if it’s a short outing. When I don’t take him he stands on the yard watching me go and gives me a look that breaks my heart, and if he was a dog in a cartoon, there would be a bubble coming out from his mouth that said, ‘Bastard.’

He never ceases to amaze me with how he reacts to what I say to him. We were going around the cattle the other day and came across a husband and wife out jogging. They were all expensive matching jogging outfits and not much jog. I’m sure you get the picture. I’m not sure where they lived but you could easily tell that it was no longer such a good an idea as they thought it was when they had set out. In fact it was clearly more of a walk than a jog, it was only a jog when someone like me came along who was watching. I slowed down to pass them in the narrow lane. Mert wasn’t even looking out of the window, he was curled up in the back of the truck. I just said quietly, half to myself in fact, ‘Just look at the state of these two.’ Mert leaped to his feet, put his head out of the window, and frightened the life out of them, in fact, because the lane was narrow I don’t think he was far off biting them, which is what joggers are for. They tried to jog on, nonchalantly, but I could see in the mirror that they only jogged for about 50 yards and then they were walking again.

When I say we are out in the truck, I actually mean an old four-wheel drive vehicle. Most of my neighbours spend thousands of pounds on quad bikes and mules, we buy old 4x4s, we’re into collecting old Shoguns at the moment, a really battered one to fetch the cows and carry the electric fencing paraphernalia and a less battered one to use on the roads. So Mert travels in the bit at the very back.

Now here’s a strange thing. Most of our journeys are on minor roads and tracks and fields but when we are returning home, the last half a mile of our journey is on a B-road that runs past the farm. As soon as we get to the junction where we join the B-road, Mert always clambers over the seats and stands with his head on my shoulder. In fact, it’s not so much his head, it’s his neck and his head is pressed down onto my chest, so I can easily stroke him. It’s not done occasionally or anywhere else, just when we go through that junction. For many years I had a role in the dairy industry that would take me away from the farm every week. Sometimes for a couple of days, sometimes for the whole week. I can never remember a single occasion when I didn’t arrive home, open the car door and his head would come through the gap onto my knee. He still does that whenever I come home now, if I’ve been away for ten minutes or a couple of days. Animals can give us a clear lead when it comes to loyalty and devotion.

***

Just as an aside. It’s 9pm and I’m thinking of bed and book, and my wife says ‘You’d better get your evening suit out and see what state you left it in.’ This is the evening before I go to Belfast to a black tie dinner. I don’t wear this sort of outfit very often, not sure why but I don’t enjoy wearing one. It sounds a bit unkind, asking what state I left it in, but there is a reality to it. After a night out, it is always possible that there is food left on your suit but it is always a possibility that on arriving home from a late night out, there are calving cows to visit and for the tired dairy farmer, to go upstairs and get changed is quite a big job: far easier to slip your wellies on and go out in your suit. It is the mission of all cows to try to cover everything with what they excrete at their rear end and some of this ends up on your suit. Anyway, to return to our story, by 9.15pm I cannot find the dress suit so my wife has to come and have a look. She’s not best pleased because she’s watching a series on TV. I could pause it for her but by this time, sharp words have been exchanged, so serve her right.

By 10.15pm, by which time we have scoured every wardrobe, cupboard and every coat hook in the house, we come to the conclusion that I no longer have a dress suit. Those of you who are married will understand that by this time some quite animated conversations have taken place. Most of the conversations centre on my opinion that it is a wifely duty to care for and clean her husband’s clothes. I lose this argument but deep down I know that my mother would have done it. Exhausted by our search, we decide that I have either left it somewhere or someone has borrowed it and we can’t remember who. I try to press the latter scenario, mainly because I suspect it’s the former. So I have to go out in a rush the next day and buy a new one. I’m not best pleased, my inclination would be to scour the charity shops for one, but there’s no time for that. The man in the shop thinks it’s hilarious and my reply, when he suggests I go the whole way and buy a new shirt as well, is unprintable.

3 MAY 2014

I had a reader from Wiltshire contact me to commend me on the piece I wrote about the pundits finally admitting that the fat content in milk is actually a health benefit. He went on to say that I had missed out an important part of the message. And my omission was an important one. Osteoporosis is a serious condition of the weakening of the bones. Surveys predict that in an ageing population it will be of epidemic proportions. Now I’m no scientist but it seems common sense to me that when you remove the fat content, you take with it a lot of the important mineral content as well. And within that mineral content is a lot of the calcium you need for stronger bones. So we are about to see the first generation reaching retirement age that have possibly spent a goodly percentage of their lives drinking skimmed milk. There is no upside to all that unless perhaps that the first people to fall down and break some bones, are the ones who have advocated removing all the fat for the last 40 years. Shame that.

***

It’s Sunday morning and we, Mert and I, are off around the dry cows and in-calf heifers which are on their last week on the kale and turnips. There’s about 50 of them in this group. I should know how many, but there’s cows going home to calve most days and newly dry cows joining every week so the numbers are constantly changing. It doesn’t matter really how many there are because they are almost impossible to count. The dry cows ignore me and continue what they are doing, be it grazing or lying down. The in-calf heifers are a different matter, they are well full of themselves and swarm around the truck looking for mischief. A chew of a wing mirror here, a chew of the wiper on the back door, a good rub on the headlights, it’s all good fun.

Mert is busy in the back biting, the glass and barking at them. I can count the dry cows but the heifers don’t keep still long enough. So my husbandry duties involve a good look around all corners of the field and a good look at all the stock, to see if anything is amiss. A blob of white under a hedge catches my eye and I drive across to it. As I get nearer I can see it is a calf. (Some dry cows don’t make it home before they calve!) The calf has tucked itself into some briars as a sort of hiding place. These calves will secrete themselves away when born outside, in long grass or nettles, as an instinctive ploy to keep them away from predators. It’s the bovine equivalent of keeping your head down. I pull up alongside the calf. It doesn’t move but I can see it is fine. It’s tight against the fence and on the fence is a raven. Like the calf, the raven doesn’t move. If my arm was a foot longer I could almost touch it. The raven has spotted the calf and it is obvious it thinks it will claim it as a prize. It dwells there for quite a time, as if challenging me. Eventually it flaps lazily away and I get out and rouse the calf and push it back towards its mother. A raven can’t kill a big calf but I’ve probably saved its eyes.

***

I’m a great reader. I was brought up to respect books. I never throw a book away. There’s two stacks of books in my bedroom that would comfortably make a cubic metre if you were to put them on a pallet. I don’t throw them away in case I want to revisit them. And the books I revisit the most often are the works of Dylan Thomas. Now I would be the first to say that I find some of his poetry difficult. I came to the conclusion some time ago that when he wrote some of it he was either drunk or mad, or possibly both and you yourself would probably understand it better if you were drunk or mad as well. Then there’s Under Milk Wood. I’ve read it so many times. It’s the centenary of Dylan Thomas and there’s a production of Under Milk Wood on tour at present.

We went to see it last week. We took my eldest granddaughter and she loved it. He describes things using words that you would never dream of using, yet having read them they seem so apt and appropriate I’d love to be able to write just a few lines like he has. I’ve tried a few times: ‘The cock pheasant, rampant red of comb, struts lordily amongst his hens, he stands on tiptoe, golden plumed and barrel chested and waves his defiance to the world.’ ‘The moo-licked calf, fat and sleek, nestles warm and safe into the deep grass, turns its lidded face to the warm caress of the sun and dreams of frothy milk around its muzzle and the creamy life that is to come.’ Nah, can’t do it.

Just as an aside, the same granddaughter who was moved by Under Milk Wood has told me that when she leaves school she wants to be a slaughterman in an abattoir. Well someone has to do it.

10 MAY 2014

I’m driving up the track at our other buildings and two walkers appear in front of me having just negotiated the stile out of the fields. They have two dogs with them, a spaniel and a collie. Seeing me approach on the tractor, they put them back on their leads. The dogs are panting excessively, mud up their sides, exhausted. By the look of the couple who own them they, the dogs, didn’t get into that state on their leads, because the couple don’t look as if they have broken sweat for years. They’ve been through over a mile on ‘my’ fields, so what have they chasing? For certain they have been chasing hares, terrorising leverets and eating skylarks’ young and eggs. They’ve probably done more damage to wildlife in half an hour than I could do in a year. I don’t say anything, I’m so angry, and you never know where anger will lead. There’s been three lapwings up there for two days: wonder if they are still there.

***

There’s been a lot of wildlife about in the night. When our last lot of point-of-lay pullets went off, some of them staged a breakout and eluded the catching gang. This was a heroic tale, a bit like The Great Escape. Over the next few days we managed to gather them up and erected a temporary house for them, the poultry sheds not being available because of cleaning them out for the next lot. It may have been a temporary house but they’d been there a week and none had escaped. Last night Mr Fox paid them a visit, or was it Mrs Fox and all the little foxes? Whatever, there were feathers all over the yard, several missing and 20 dead in their pen.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, our cows are grazed on a very disciplined paddock system that is managed by electric fences. It sounds a bit draconian but it isn’t, it’s all designed to give them as much grass as they can possibly eat every day, with the advantage that the grass is at the very best of nutritional value. A herd of deer has been through in the night and now there’s electric fence wire everywhere. What a shambles.

***

I wasn’t born into a farming family and my first venture into farming on my own account was to buy 12 white day-old chicks that would become layers for me to sell the eggs. I kept them in a shed and run that I built at the bottom of our garden. I was about 12 at the time, so it was not recent, but it was at a time when hybrid strains of poultry were beginning to emerge. The traditional breeds had names like Rhode Island Red and Brown Leghorn and Light Sussex, the new hybrids I remember were called romantic names like 101, which was a very flighty white bird that laid white eggs and 404s which were a more middle-of-the-road bird, a brown bird that laid brown eggs. None of these should be confused with 303s which were army rifles. My little white chicks were Light Sussex crossed with Brown Leghorns which was a very popular cross for laying birds.

Looking back, the only negative to this cross was that they would go broody in the spring and peck lumps out of your hands when you collected the eggs. It was what they called a sex link cross in that the colour of the cockerel, the white Light Sussex, turned up in his female offspring which were all white. Most commercial poultry today are hybrids but genetics are genetics and the sex link still exists. That’s why the pullets we rear these days are brown but if we are to find replacements for the departed cockerel Neville, it will be a white cockerel that has slipped through the system. It was not until our last crop of pullets were due to go that we did indeed spot a white cockerel. This may seem strange but in a shed that contains say 20,000 birds, it is not easy to identify individual birds and establish a relationship with them. Once, when we produced broilers, which were white, and 28,000 of them in each shed, I discovered a black chick amongst them. I used to make a point of finding it every day and picking it up and stroking it. One day the chick was in my hands and I was making a fuss of it when I looked down at the floor and there was another black chick looking up at me as if to say, ‘Why are you ignoring me today?’ So you never know where you are with a lot of poultry. The black chicks didn’t make it to anybody’s table because the white ones gang up on them and kill them. No comment. So to go back to this cockerel, we’ve removed him from the sheds and put him with a couple of pullets for company, into the turkey garden so that he can develop into another Neville and eventually terrorise the yard. I’ve got my doubts about him, thus far there’s no aggression. In fact, truth be told, I’m not sure if he knows if he’s a Neville or a Nora.

17 MAY 2014

We’ve just emptied our chicken sheds and the point-of-lay pullets that they contained have gone onto pastures new. Which statement is literally quite true as they have moved on to free range layer units and will soon be laying lots of nice brown eggs. They were all brown pullets but within that there were different strains. I don’t think they were different breeds because I am assuming they were all hybrids of some sort. What I do know is that some of them were called Columbian Black Tails, which name has a sort of mystery about it. The main purpose of this story is to tell you that when the poultry go out of the sheds, all the manure has to go out as well. It comes out as a very dusty product (providing there hasn’t been a burst with the drinking system!) and it is just a wonderful manure to put back on the land. The balance of it is roughly two parts nitrogen to one each of phosphate and potash. We take the poultry manure around the farm so that all fields get some in turn. Most of the land we rent used to lie in continuous cereal crops which did not benefit from any animal by-products at all.

Ten years on, my neighbours tell me how much the land has improved with the influence of poultry manure, manure from the cattle and the presence of the cattle themselves. We use a lot less artificial fertiliser than we did ten years ago because we’ve increased the organic matter in the soil, we’ve put some ‘heart’ into it. Poultry manure contains some calcium because the birds have to have grit in their diet as part of their digestion and this all helps with the pH of the soil. This organic matter increases the worm population, so it’s all win-win. In fact it’s win-win as far as the eye can see.

What’s poultry manure got to do with hares? Well I’ve been carting manure for about two days and at one place I travel past on the track to where we tip it is a low bank out of the adjoining field. It’s only a couple of feet high, this bank, but at some time a cow has come down it and her rear hoof had slipped and made a gouge-mark in the turf. It’s not a cowslip, which is a wild flower, and it’s not a skid mark, which can mean something entirely different, it’s just a shallow mark in the turf. But tucked into this depression is a hare. She lies there, ears flattened to her body and she’s there every time I pass over those two days, carting manure. The tractor wheels pass within a foot of her nose each time I pass but she doesn’t move a muscle. On the third day, I go up the same track to see the cattle and she’s not there, but there is a tiny leveret there, pressing itself down into the depression very much as its mother has done. Next day there’s no sign of either of them, I just hope that they have moved into the cover of the adjoining winter barley field.

***

I’m off with the topper to chop off what is left of the kale stalks. The cattle are running on the whole piece now and there’s about five or six acres that they went on last, which is about 3ft high with thick hard stalks. The cattle have eaten all the leaves off and they would eat the stalks as well but the kale has had its time, it’s time to move onto the next crop. So I’m chopping off the stalks so they will plough in better. At first sight it’s just a mess of green tough stalks, but as I move into it with the tractor I find it’s full of cock pheasants. It’s a sort of sanctuary for bachelor cock pheasants, those that haven’t been able to establish a territory around the hedgerow and attract some hens. The cocks are distributed evenly throughout the cover that the kale stalks afford them, and they have a disconsolate air about them. There’s surely 50 of them and they are here as losers, losers of fights. They’ve had enough of fighting which is why they are all spread out.