Pull the Other One! E-Book

Roger Evans

• Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 370

Beschreibung

Roger Evans, Britain's favourite dairy farmer, is back with his popular diary telling his fans about his farm, his dogs, his daily ups and downs and his views on everything from the characters in his local pub to the price of milk. This new volume is as witty and entertaining as ever. Roger Evans writes a popular farming column in the Western Daily Press every Saturday and well as being a regular contributor to The Diary Farmer, Cow Management and Veterinary Times. He's a past winner of the Dairy Ambassador of the Year Cream Awards and his books have sold over 30,000 copies.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title PagePull the Other One!Copyright

Pull the Other One!

9 JANUARY 2016

There have been times in my life when topics for me to write were queuing up, clamouring for attention. In some sort of chronological order, firstly there was Mert, my sheepdog. His exploits, terrorising ramblers, joggers and anyone else who was close at hand, became legendary. Then, by the simple expedient of wanting a few hens and a cockerel scratching about the yard, we got Neville the cockerel, who provided endless interest and who was so ferocious that he made Mert look like a pussycat. Neville went inside a fox about three years ago but I still get people coming on the yard and winding their windows down and asking if it safe to get out or whether that blankety cockerel is still about. Seamlessly, no sooner had Neville gone than we had the turkeys. They took the danger level on our yard up to terrorist degree until I had to get rid of them, for everyone’s safety, not least my own.

So what’s next? I cast my mind about for further challenges. I’ve got the Alpine bell on a cow, which delights and annoys people in equal measure, but is that enough? No, it’s not really, I have a reputation to keep up. Then news comes in that there is a possibility of acquiring two donkeys. It’s a longish story but it seems that someone put the donkeys in someone’s field 12 months ago and they couldn’t be contacted to fetch them back when the field was no longer available. So I was asked if I’d home them. They were two old Jack donkeys, 12 and 14, and I said yes. This was a good thing. Top of my wife’s wish list is a corgi puppy, but there’s no way we can afford one. I’ve tried to locate a rescue one without success. But second on her wish list is a donkey. Two donkeys are even better. One could be for her Christmas present and the other for her birthday next August.

But life can be a let-down. I said yes to the donkeys on Wednesday, got a nice dry shed ready for them on Thursday, but on Friday the real owner turned up out of the blue and took them away. So for two days I thought that I had two donkeys and I’d never even seen them! Have you ever seen a dead donkey? An old man who used to work for me often used to say, ‘Not many have seen a dead donkey.’ He clearly thought that seeing one was some sort of accolade. I have to admit I’ve never seen one. He had seen one when he was a boy and he thought that having seen one was an important milestone in his life. The one he’d seen was in a village a few miles away. He reckoned it had been left unburied for ten days, just so folks could have a chance to see it. And it was a chance that they took, in their hundreds. He reckoned that people came for miles around in pony traps and on their bikes. ‘Not many folks have seen a dead donkey,’ he said, ‘but I saw it twice.’ And he left to carry on with the hedge he was laying, and there was a swagger of pride about him, his body language was very positive. I never quite worked out why seeing a dead donkey was so important in people’s lives. I asked him once and he looked at me scornfully and did not dignify my question with a reply. Two old Jack donkeys would have been good. I bet they would have made one hell of a noise.

***

Christmas, long gone as it is, still leaves a feeling of disappointment. I had seriously thought that my grandchildren would have clubbed together and bought me an illuminated taxi sign to put on the roof of my car. A meter to cost journeys would have been nice as well.

16 JANUARY 2016

I’ve never considered myself to be an envious person. But today I find that I envy the keeper. Because the land is so wet, I have to confine my trips around the farm to where I can go by 4x4 on the tracks. The keeper has a quad bike that will take him everywhere. We’ve never had a quad bike, we buy old 4x4 trucks, so he tells me, the keeper, that there are a pair of curlews about. I’ve not seen any curlews taking to flight for years. A pair of curlews taking to flight at dawn and the plaintive cry the make, is one of the most beautiful sounds devised by nature. Twenty or thirty years ago, it was a sound I would hear most days as I called the cows for morning milking and my shouts had disturbed them. So let’s hope that the pair breed, let’s hope they stay around here and let’s hope that even if I don’t see them, I hear them. But the keeper isn’t finished yet. ‘I was on your side field above the wood at dusk one night and there were about 70 woodcock out there feeding.’ They were shooting last Saturday and I ask him, warily, if the woodcock were about then. Some shooters get very excited if there are woodcock about and see shooting one as some sort of accolade. I’ve never shot at one, why would you feel the need to shoot such a lovely small bird that has flown so far just to be here?

The keeper tells me that it has been forbidden to shoot at woodcock on this shoot for years and years. That’s good news, let’s see if there’s any more. ‘What about hares?’ He tells me that he put a ‘stop’ at the top of one wood. (A stop is a beater placed to prevent pheasants escaping on foot in order to avoid being driven over guns.) That stop has seen 14 hares slip away through a gap in the fence. He himself had seen a similar number go out of a different wood. So it’s a good news day. Don’t feel quite so envious of the quad bike now.

***

Farm cats are an interesting phenomenon. I’m always talking about balance and balance is something we try to apply to our farm cats. All our cats are wild. When we have farm assurance visits we are always asked about farm cats and I always say that they are feral. When we have farm assurance visits, especially to the poultry, we have to produce invoice evidence that we have regular visits from a rodent control firm, ie rat catchers. That’s all very well but a resident population of healthy farm cats is the real answer. I call them feral because there’s always been cats here but they are cats that have just turned up. They are mostly very wild and you can’t touch them. Many years ago we would have visits from a big ferocious ginger tom cat. So for years we had all ginger cats, which I didn’t like, probably because I didn’t like the original tom cat. Now we seem to be into black cats and about once a year we have the most beautiful pure grey kittens born which are my favourites. Striking some sort of balance is the problem. We put milk out twice a day for the cats and we also feed them. But if you feed them too much they have more kittens and they in turn have more kittens and before you know where you are, cats are getting out of hand. Years ago I counted 50 cats, and that was just the ones I could see. So you try to minimise the feed you give them so that they catch some of the vermin! Kittens are mostly born in the spring. They are born in hidden places deep in the bowels of straw bays, so the first time that they come out into the world they are already spitting, explosive balls of fury. When there are too many they get cat flu and die so it is a sort of self-limiting population.

But in the autumn, well outside the new kitten season, there appeared in a cattle shed, four lovely little black kittens. Autumn usually heralds the start of what my old biology teacher used to call ‘the inclement season’. So I decided that if these kittens were to survive, they needed a bit of extra help. I bought a big bag of kitten food and I would go and feed them every day. And they flourished. It was a bit of a chore taking their food every day, and you had to be devious because the dogs were watching you carry the food and as soon as you turned your back they would drive the kittens off and scoff it themselves. But it isn’t a chore anymore. Cats are clever and as they grew they started to come to meet me, a bit further every day, so within a couple of weeks they had worked their way down to the kitchen door. And they live around the door, out of sight of the dogs, but stay in the vicinity until I’ve fed them.

As far as the family are concerned, they are my cats. They are all jet black and identical. I’ve told the family that one of them is called ‘Blackie’. They reply that the cats are so alike I don’t know which is which. (This is very true, but I don’t admit it.) So I go to the kitchen door and call ‘Blackie’, and in no time at all, a Blackie appears soon to be followed by three more. For some reason this really winds the family up, which is why I persist in doing it.

23 JANUARY 2016

Time for a good catch-up with the keeper, time always well spent. He reminds of when he came across two vehicles in my fields in late summer, vehicles that contained eight hare coursers and 11 dogs. Naturally he asked them what they were doing there and they told him they had taken a wrong turning and were just turning around in order to get back on the lane. Quite bold and brazen, your hare courser, when challenged. So he watches them go and notes down the make and registration numbers of the vehicles, which details he gives to the police, and to me. One vehicle is a silver Subaru estate car. Moving on to the present day, the coursers have disappeared. What they like are large fields of stubble that they can drive their cars on and ‘work’ their dogs. Almost all fields are ploughed now and sown down to new crops.

The keeper is only part-time. He has a full-time job on a farm and does gamekeeping at each end of the day and at weekends. Part of his role on the farm is to do the spraying and to do spraying you have to go on courses that teach you how to do it properly and safely and you have to pass appropriate tests in order to carry on spraying and in order to keep your job. So it’s all very important stuff. He tells me that there is a Facebook page dedicated to people who are qualified sprayers where they can all keep in touch with each other and where they can pass on tips. At least I think that’s what he told me, I don’t know how Facebook works and have no intention of finding out. Last week he went onto the Facebook sprayer site (which I thought was a bit sad, but each to his own), and a contributor had written there that he had a lot of trouble with hare coursers and people with dogs killing deer. Some of his fields were still in stubble awaiting spring sown crops and in order to keep these unwelcome people off these fields, he had found it very effective to plough all the way around the outside of a field, thus creating a five or six furrow barrier of loose soil that it was difficult to drive a vehicle over. I suppose it is a variation of the old fashioned sticky fly papers we use in our kitchen in the summer. If you get on there, it’s difficult to get off. To illustrate the point, the contributor had included a photograph of a silver Subaru estate car firmly stuck on this ploughing and abandoned. My keeper says to his wife, ‘That looks a lot like the Subaru that was about here in the autumn.’ He goes out to his truck, fetches his diary, and behold, it is the very same vehicle. I’ve saved the best bit until last. Where do you think it was abandoned? Only in Kent, which is about 200 miles from here! The police were called and the Subaru hadn’t been insured, taxed or MOT’d for 12 months. The farmer picked it up with his loader and took it to a scrap yard. It’s quite difficult to catch hare coursers in the act. Seems that their vehicles should be the target.

***

I’m not Welsh speaking but there is a welsh word that I’ve always used. Cwtch. It means a sort of cuddle. It’s a good word, it sounds like it means. You give a child some cwtch when it’s fallen and hurt its knee. You can give a loved one some cwtch, though this can often lead to naughtiness. I was driving up the track the other day and there was a hare cwtched in some long grass, so I stopped for a chat. The hare tells me that most of her species have survived the hare coursers. That there’s probably about 40 hares left. That the dogs the coursers use greyhound-cross sort of dogs, lurchers or long dogs, hunt by sight alone and can only catch a hare in a big open field. If it’s a small field, a hare can get through a hole in a fence or a hedge so much quicker than a large dog. They can rarely catch a hare in the woods for similar reasons. Best of all is the 40 acres of fodder beet. A hare can escape down the rows and the large green leaves provide a canopy that keeps the hare out of sight. I like to think that I always put the needs of the farm first, I have to, but I never do anything that is negative to the wildlife. Turns out my 40 acres of fodder beet, which is grown for good farming reasons, is also an ideal sanctuary for persecuted hares. (By the way, the hare didn’t tell me all this, it’s my own appraisal – I thought that if I said the hare had told me, the story would have more credibility.)

30 JANUARY 2016

Don’t think me to be a whinging farmer. But my bank manager was here last week and though he promised continued support in difficult circumstances, he had no idea why we bothered. When you are a farmer you spend a lot of time on your own, and you spend a lot of that time thinking about your farming. Because you are challenged every day by things that can go wrong, you aim all the time to do things better. It’s a sort of, ‘I got caught out by the weather this year, if I do it differently next year, I should be able to do it better.’ Doing things better is what drives us along, and for generations, being a better farmer has been enough to make you a living. I’ve never made a lot of money but I’ve never been driven by making money. I’ve always enjoyed my way of life. But that is all under threat because of the fall in milk prices. We are told that there is too much milk in the world; we produce very slightly less than we did three years ago so I don’t feel responsible for that. I can foresee nothing that will improve milk prices for 12 months so I thought I would try to cut some of my costs.

Cutting costs is usually the opposite of trying to do things better, but there is no choice. We sell about a million litres of milk a year, that’s around average. A penny a litre is £10,000, so I thought that if I could find £10,000 of savings I would be a penny a litre better off. There’s nowhere in my costs that I can save £10,000 in one big hit, but I might get there with a little bit here and there.

Then last week our milk price went down another penny, so the £10,000 disappeared before I’d saved it!

6 FEBRUARY 2016

I’ve been reading about an old theatre in Bristol that invented a thunder sound-effect by rolling wooden balls down a shuttering of planks and it was incredibly realistic. There is a connection. Lately we’ve been harvesting fodder beet. Fodder beet is normally harvested in November and occasionally in December. We all know what the weather has been like, no need for me to remind you. Inevitably the land is very wet and on rare frosty days it’s very sticky. I’ve got a lot of fodder beet still in the ground, fodder beet that I hoped, and needed, to sell. Selling it is the difference between a cashflow that really struggles and a phone call from the bank manager! Not that it’s hugely valuable, there’s plenty of fodder beet about, so it’s best not to be too clever about price, because it’s got a shelf life and is perishable.

Sheep everywhere, those that are outside, have had a hard time in the wet, they’ve made a mess of root crops and grassland and it is farmers with sheep that are showing an interest in the beet. The other market place could be to digesters to turn beet into power. So what have beet to do with wooden balls rolling down a chute? Well, the beet harvester has a hopper on it that accumulates 3-4 tons of beet and then it stops and tips the hopperful into my trailer. As the first beet hit the metal floor of the trailer, they do so with a rumbling noise like theatrical sound-effect ‘thunder’. In fact I would defy anyone to differentiate which is which. Strange the things you think of when you are sitting on a tractor.

***

When you are carting fodder beet, you take one hopperful off the harvester and you sit waiting for it to accumulate the next hopperful. Two of these hoppers make up a load on your trailer and away you go to tip it on the concrete, back at the buildings. There are two strips of beet left in the field and the harvester is working up and down the strips. I’m just sitting there on my tractor waiting and I see a group of pheasants making their way along the one strip. There are four cocks and about a dozen hens. They are totally unhurried in their progress towards me. I find this quite surprising as today has been a shooting day and pheasants get ‘moved’ about and disorientated. It’s late afternoon, a time when a clean living pheasant is thinking of going to bed. And I look around me to see just where they are heading.

There is no obvious roosting place near me but soon they are all around me. I’m at the end of the field and they pop over the hedge into a grass field. They strut about a bit, do a bit of preening, get some soil off their feet and then they all take off and glide down the valley to a small group of trees at least half a mile away. It’s all quite relaxed and gives me the impression that they knew exactly where they were going to roost all the time. Sometime during the day they have probably been shot at, they could have been shot at twice, but there’s a sort of pragmatism to their demeanour: ‘Shame about the three that got shot, but life goes on.’

12 FEBRUARY 2016

Because we farm land at different sites, most days finds me travelling with tractor and trailer on the roads. This week there have been chicken sheds to clear out and I’ve also been carting ordinary farm-yard manure from the cattle sheds. Both sorts of manure take the journey to our high fields where it will be ploughed in, come the spring, and where it will do untold good.

Anything to do with intensive poultry seems to be emotive, which I find very strange. ‘They’ reckon that over 2 million chicken are eaten in the UK every day. Chicken are popular because they are cheap, nutritious and good to eat. I’ve no idea how many eggs are eaten, it must be several dozen. Lots and lots of people find the production of chicken and eggs objectionable and yet lots and lots of people think eating them is OK! How do you balance that out?

Even poultry manure is stigmatised, yet it is the most wonderful manure. If it is ploughed in on a regular basis, earthworm populations double and treble. A high earthworm population is an important yardstick that tells you that all is well with the world, or in this case, all is well with your soil. And because a chicken’s digestive system needs grit to grind their food in the crop, and laying hens need calcium to make eggshells, when you put on poultry manure, you are putting calcium into the soil at the same time. You would have thought that the poultry story in this country was a good story but there is a minority that would like to stop it. If you ask them what they would give people to eat instead, they don’t have an answer. The silent majority just keep on buying, quite happy that they can buy a chicken for the very low price it is.

Anyway, I was really on the road with tractor and trailer, before that digression (sometimes digression is another word for a whinge). Nearly every journey turns into an adventure. My most usual journey takes in half a mile of B-road and about a mile and a half of narrow lanes. Take the bit on the B-road first. At this time of year, I’m in no rush. I quite enjoy the job, it’s warm and dry in the cab, the radio works, so I’m in a good mood and what I don’t cart today, I’ll cart tomorrow. There are no lay-bys on this section of road but there are two straight stretches where the visibility is good. As soon as I get two vehicles behind me I pull over as often as I can, so that they can overtake me. And nine times out of ten, what do they do? They just sit there. I usually give them a couple of minutes, and when there is no reaction, I drive on. So they end up being stuck behind me for long enough.

The narrow lane bit calls for a different set of driving skills. There’s hardly a place where two cars can pass, let alone a car pass a tractor and trailer. The only opportunities to pass me are where there are gateways. I always have the beacons flashing on top of the cab so people can see me at a distance but invariably they ignore that and drive right up to me. So we sit there staring at each other. They have a gateway perhaps 20 yards behind them: they won’t back up, but they expect me to back tractor and trailer 50 or 60 yards to the gateway behind me. Sometimes we end up facing each other at a gateway. I gesture, in friendly manner, for them to pull in to the gateway. Less friendly, they gesture for me to pull into the gateway. There is no way a 12 foot gateway will contain my tractor and trailer but there’s plenty of room for a car!

The ones that really amuse me are the ones that get stuck behind me on the narrow lanes. I know that there is nowhere that I can let them by until we get to the B-road, so best to press on. In theory I could go just past a gateway, they could pull into the space, I could reverse and they could pull out in front. This is much how trains pass each other using a siding. This is a complicated manoeuvre and a sure recipe for disaster. It could end in a broken wing mirror and the kiss that a trailer could give a nice new car is to be avoided. So it’s best to press on, a mile isn’t far in the grand scheme of things.

So cars appear in my mirrors behind me. Firstly they put their lights on to make sure that I know they are there. Then, in my wing mirrors, I see that they have got a wheel on the grass, just to see if they can squeeze by. But there’s not room so they try the same tactic on the other side as they try to pass me on the inside. My last load today and a car does all this, plus a bit of headlight flashing. There’s 24 gears on this tractor and the digital display tells me that I’m apparently in D2 which is gear 22. There’s a little stubby lever that changes gear electronically so I give it a couple of flicks and drop back to C6. Patience is a virtue and it’s fortunate for the car driver that I am prepared to slow down a bit to teach them that. When we get to the B-road, the last 20 yards widens into room for two cars, so this car pulls alongside me at the white line although it is technically on the wrong side of the road. We both wait because there’s two cars coming down the road. They both want to turn in to the lane but can’t because this car is blocking their way. So he has to reverse back behind my trailer in order for them to exit the B-road. Me, I’m clear to go, and I do. And the ‘naughty’ car is going the same way, so once again he is stuck behind me. When I go in to the house for my tea, Ann asks what I’ve been doing all day, and I answer, ‘Just carting muck’. But that’s only the half of it.

20 FEBRUARY 2016

The shooting season has been and gone, thank goodness, in that life, and Saturday nights in particular, should return to some sort of normality. Whether ‘the shooters’ will be about on Saturday nights or if they are sent to a clinic to dry out, remains to be seen. Although the shooting season draws to a close every year on the same date, the actual shooters seem to drag it out as long as they can. I used to love shooting, but I don’t remember being like that. Shooting should finish at the end of January, so how does that include the 1st February? Some shoots I know of went out on three occasions in the last six days of the season. It’s always annoying to me, that the pheasants seem to know when it’s finished. On 2nd February I came across three cocks on the lane, who all stood their ground. The day before they would have dived for cover as soon as they heard the truck approach.

I always devote space at this time of year to the harbingers of spring. But, however do you do that in a crazy year like this? I’ve lived here over 50 years and never before seen a daffodil in flower in January. We are quite high up where we live, about 650 feet, and you don’t have to go very far to get to a lower level, six miles away, and spring flowers are out a month earlier than around here.

In the past I’ve struggled to find a daffodil for St David’s day, 1st March. I’ve often said that the best I could find is a bud with just a bit of yellow visible and I’ve given it ten minutes in the microwave to bring it into flower. Some people have believed me!

A mile away from here, across the fields, are two large lakes. They reckon there are 70 to 80 swans on these lakes. Every day you can see pairs of swans searching the neighbourhood for a nesting site that affords more privacy. There’s some low lying fields between us and the lakes and in the winter there are patches of water lying here and there. Every year you can see swans setting up home next to these small depressions. By the time their eggs hatch the water has long dried up. We’ve got a pond in our front field, it’s about as big as a tennis court. Every day, pairs of swans check it out, but they never land. So what’s wrong with it? Canada geese nest there every year. I don’t mind Canada geese but I would rather some swans. My wife dreams of having swans. I’ve put ‘rescue’ swans there twice but they’ve never stayed long. They probably lie with all the others on those lakes.

My favourite armchair is opposite the window in our sitting room and through that I can see right across the valley. And 90% of the time there are a pair of red kites to be seen, as they tirelessly cover the valley looking for food. They must have found a good food source because they are back and forth over the same fields all day long. I suspect that the food is worms and grubs. It’s the time of year when they have decided where to nest. I’ve looked for a suitable isolated tree for them and can’t locate one but that doesn’t mean that they can’t. Their effortless high speed flight takes them in very short time to several woods. Their preferred option is a conifer, one with a spread to its branches that allows easy access for when they return home. A Scots pine is their ideal choice, it has an openness that allows them to come and go without damaging their flight feathers and they can usually find a place for the nest on a limb that is under the canopy of another, thus providing shelter for eggs and chicks.

5 MARCH 2016

If I go out at night, which I do, I can turn either left or right and within a mile I nearly always see a barn owl. One of nature’s finest sights, one of nature’s most beautiful birds. Two birds are hunting the verges at the side of the road. Not an ideal place to hunt, because their flight often takes them onto the road itself and they hunt at car height. You usually see them well in advance in your headlights, plenty of time to react. But I’ve several times seen a barn owl in the lights of a car in front of me, and that car has driven right through the owl. It seems deliberate and it makes me so angry.

***

New evidence has in recent months proved that the animal fats contained in dairy products are in fact good for you. This new evidence came after 30 to 40 years of advice to the contrary. Advice that was paid for by the people who made margarines and spreads! Now we are told that not only was that advice wrong, completely wrong, but that artificial spreads are not without their negatives, because they are high in damaging trans-fatty acids. And also cooking in vegetable-based oils gives off chemicals! So having said all that, why have the yellow tubs of spread continued to turn up on our kitchen table, just as they have for 30 or 40 years? Habit, that’s why. They have continued to find their way into the supermarket trolley because they always have. So I passed a remark one day at breakfast that we should stop buying these spreads, that we should buy butter, that we support our own dairy industry. And lo and behold, a week later the last of the spread was gone and a butter dish took its place. Now, I would be the first to admit that butter takes more managing. It won’t spread straight from the fridge. If it comes straight from the fridge you have to put it on your toast in thick slabs. So our butter dish started out on the worktop next to the fridge but now I see that it lives on the worktop near to the Rayburn. As I will explain later, I was very surprised that my ‘move to butter’ advice was heeded.

But this job is nowhere near finished. About ten years ago we had TB in our herd so while that was going on we thought it sensible to buy the milk for the house from a shop, pasteurised milk. Pasteurisation removes any danger of TB from milk. For 40 years we had used unpasteurised milk, straight from the tank, in our house. My two children were reared on unpasteurised milk with no apparent ill effects. Apart that is, that they now seem to go to the pub more often than even I do. Anyway, continuing on with the same theme as that I used with the butter, I noticed the milk that we are still buying is skimmed. No need for that, I tell the assembled family: all the best bits, the bits that contain nutrition, the minerals and the calcium, many of those are taken out in the process of removing some fat, much better to buy milk with it ‘all’ still in there. Better to buy whole milk I tell them. Whole milk is only 3.6% fat anyway, so we are hardly talking double cream, are we? And next time I go to make some tea, there it is, whole milk. So I’ve had my way with the butter and the milk. Surprise on surprise!

And why am I surprised? Because of cereals, that’s why. I usually have a bowl of cereal at midday, in fact my preferred lunch is a bowl of cereal and a sleep in the chair. Twenty years ago a new sort of breakfast cereal turned up here. I won’t name it, but it’s got fibre and fruit in it, it’s supposed to be healthier. And I made the mistake of saying how much I liked it. Why was it a mistake? Because we’ve had no other cereal through the door for twenty years. Other people seem to have a cereal mix. If you stay at my brother’s, for example, they put four or five different cereals on the breakfast table. And they have a choice of yoghurts (one has honey in it!) but we have just the same cereal every time.

To be fair to our actual farmhouse kitchen table, it has more character than my brother’s. Mine has a pile on it. The pile begins life with last week’s magazines, newspapers and unopened post. It is given new life with the addition of more of the same plus all manner of stuff which includes grandson’s clothes. This pile grows and grows until it either falls off or there is not room for us to sit down. Whatever, the back of it is removed by wheelbarrow and recycled with a match. The question I now have in my mind is this: if I managed to get butter and a change of milk, should I take a chance and try to get a change of cereal? I’ve been pondering this for two weeks now and have not yet reached a conclusion. I’m thinking at the moment to bank my two victories and leave it at that. Sometimes you should quit while you’re ahead.

12 MARCH 2016

Now here’s a strange thing. There’s a crossroad on the lane I use every day, to get to our other land. It’s a different sort of crossroad to the ones you get normally because it’s a crossroad that gives you five options. That’s probably why it’s called ‘The Five Turnings’. We are very imaginative around here. For more years that I care to remember a kestrel lived near this crossroad. It had perfected a technique whereby it popped out in front of you, especially if you were on a tractor. It would fly, at tractor bonnet height about five yards in front of you for half a mile. Small birds would come out of the hedge as they heard the noise of the approaching tractor. Often they would try to cross over to the other hedge. And the kestrel would catch them. There are rich pickings to be had when small birds are fledging. Then for three years the kestrel disappeared. But now there is a kestrel back, once again using the tractor to flush out a meal. If it’s the same kestrel, where has it been? If it’s a ‘new’ one, which I suspect it is, where did it learn this trick? From its mother?

***

I really love watching people. One of the best places is at those Sunday lunch carveries. We went to one last Sunday, to mark a family birthday. It’s one of the best locally, they get over 100 people every Sunday. The body language on show is wonderful. Most people affect a sort of nonchalance as they arrive and find a seat, trying to hide their eager anticipation of the feast that is yet to come. Then the carvery opens and most people hang back, reluctant to be seen as the first to go. Others have no such inhibitions and are away as soon as they can. This is all the stimulus the second wave needs. They don’t want to be seen to be too eager (greedy), so they affect the laid-back walk, it’s as if they are out for a stroll, not bothered if they get there. But they know exactly where they are going. They are going towards the delicious smells of that food and all their instincts tell them to break into a trot. If you think I’ve made all this up, have a look yourself next time you go out for Sunday lunch.

But all this is nothing in comparison with the triumphant ‘return’ journey. The plate of food is carried carefully before them at chest height. Eyes are darting right and left, to make sure everyone can see. ‘Look what I’ve got’ – no king from the East bore gifts more proudly. And only Egyptian pharoahs built greater pyramids. The pile of food defies gravity. I’ve always thought that buffet means wastage and so it proves. When you go to one of those rare functions where drinks are free, people abandon half-consumed drinks and go for a fresh one. Lifelong beer drinkers move to spirits. I reckon that when the staff start to move in to collect used plates, 20-30% of food is carried back again. Not that this bothers the ‘wasters’ because they are moving in on the puddings. I ask a staff member what happens to all the food that is wasted. ‘It goes in the bin.’ So in a corner of my mind I’m telling myself that I wish I owned a business like this that turned over so much money in just a few hours. And my mind adds that if I did own this business, there would be a couple of pig-sties out at the back where I could feed all that food waste. I know that you are not allowed to feed food waste to pigs but doing things you are not supposed to has never been a big issue for me. The waitress is back and she tells me that all the kitchen food that is not used goes in the bin as well, so I make a mental note to build three pig-sties not two. To see so much money changing hands so quickly is another reminder that I have spent my life at the wrong end of the food chain. And if there are other people watchers present, do they see me displaying the same sort of eager mannerisms? I send someone to fetch mine. Very good it was too: I ate it all. Except the Yorkshire pudding.

19 MARCH 2016

We need a new bull. We’ve sold our old bull and we need a ‘new’ young one. The breed of bull we want is a Limousin. It’s a French breed (bet you’d guessed that); it will breed useful beef-cross calves when mated with our cows and it will be quiet enough, from a public safety point of view, to turn out in the fields with our heifers. And just to round off its suitability as a breed, it is an easy calving breed so it’s fine to use with those heifers.

We will buy this young bull at the same place we bought his predecessor. I’ve a friend who runs a herd of about 120 beef suckler cows. Amongst that herd he has a few pedigree Limousin cows. These cows are mated with a pedigree Limousin bull. So to all intents they are pedigree offspring. They are not registered, they don’t have any ‘papers’, but then neither do I.

So how it works is this. I go down to where he has a pen of 12-month-old bulls that he is fattening and within that group are half a dozen of these pure bred Limousins, and of these there are three real beauties that are just what we need. We will make a final decision in a month’s time, because he needs one more clear TB test before he can sell anything.

TB casts its cloud over everything you do with cattle. I went down yesterday to have a look at them, and very good they looked too. It’s one of the pleasures of farming: you buy a new bull, you use your best judgement, and at a future date, when his calves are on the ground, you see if your judgement is any good.

I prefer buying bulls to the days when I used to buy tups (rams.) A pedigree tup that is presented clipped at the autumn sales is really a sculpture in wool and you don’t get a real look at what you have bought until you let him go after you’ve taken the wool off him at shearing time.

Buying a new bull is a marker of the passage of your time as a farmer. You are always planning for the future and in this case for the calves you may have in 12 months’ time. But farming is such a long-term project, that most of what you plan is on a longer timescale. For example you put a cow to a dairy bull today, hoping to breed a dairy heifer that will start milking in three years’ time and you hope that you will still be milking her in ten years.

But this year has a very different feel to it. We are going through the motions of a long-term vision. Just as we always have. But there is a very real chance that we won’t be dairy farming in 12 months’ time. This year’s budget shows a loss so we have to borrow money to cover that loss. On 1st April our milk price goes down a further 1.3p which is about £1000 a month to us. We haven’t put that reduction in the budget yet. There’s no way we intend to carry on like that. What’s the point? Too much milk they say, but we are producing the same amount that we produced three years ago. I know that we haven’t contributed to the surplus but we have, for some reason, to share the pain. I am looking ahead buying this bull, yet at the same time, at the back of my mind, the possibility that in 12 months’ time I won’t be a milk producer any more and it has a strange feel about it. It isn’t a comfortable feeling.

***

I know a man who lives in an isolated cottage in a clearing in a wood. It sounds idyllic and, come the spring and summer, it is. But there’s snow on the tops around here today, and that’s where his cottage is, high up in a wood. It’s a very small cottage. It started life as one room down and one up. By the standards of today it is very, very basic. There’s a tin shed, cum-lean-to, at the back that houses his diesel generator so he has electricity, of a sort. His toilet came indoors about twenty years ago into a corner of his downstairs room and this created what he calls his ‘bathroom’. This ‘bathroom’ is very small, it contains neither bath nor shower, and should you so wish, you could sit on the toilet and use the washbasin at the same time. What’s that? How does he bathe? I’ve no idea, but he’s always very clean and tidy. Two years ago, he bought one of these very efficient wood burning stoves. There is a problem with it. His house is very small and the stove he chose is top of the range, a very large one. One that is designed to heat quite a large house. He was telling me about it the other day. ‘It’s a really good stove, in fact it’s too good, the house isn’t just warm, it’s too hot. I have to keep the door open 24 hours a day to make it bearable. Trouble is, the door being open attracts a lot of vermin in.’ He’s a very polite man, and when he uses the word, vermin, you can safely assume that we are talking rats. But that’s not the half of it. ‘A squirrel came in last week and it was under my bed for two days before I could catch it.’

26 MARCH 2016