by Roger Evans
Yesterday, as I drove along our road, in 200 yards I passed two empty sandwich containers, two polystyrene containers that had probably contained chips, two plastic drink bottles and then, to finish, two paper napkins. It marked the clear sequence of two people’s meals as they drove along, and then the sequence with which they had thrown the debris from the car.
THIS STORY has a sadness to it. I haven’t kept sheep for several years now but still have a ‘shepherd’s eye’, which I run over my neighbour’s sheep (or anyone else’s) as I pass by on my daily travels.
I’ve had some of my heifers over-wintered at a farm a couple of miles away and on one of my recent visits to see the heifers I was surprised to see them preparing a lambing pen.
I was surprised because they keep about 200 Beulah ewes – a hardy ewe, excellent mothers – and in the first week of April I had thought they would have been well able to look after themselves lambing outside.
I just love the word Beulah, it’s a beautiful word, I could almost write a novel just so I could include it in the last line, ‘and behold, they came over the hills and into Beulah’.
That was what they call a digression, almost a biblical type of digression. Beulah is a village in mid-Wales. Beulah ewes fill the fields for miles around, easily identifiable with their black and white, speckled faces. I expressed my surprise to those preparing the lambing pen, but to them lambing outside wasn’t an option – because of the ravens.
Ravens are quite difficult to distinguish from carrion crows apart from being bigger and having a very different call.
As you know, I concern myself with the need for balance. Years ago, ravens would have been comparatively rare. The damage they would do to livestock would be occasional and not a big issue. Quite clearly the balance in this area has swung the other way and as I was finding out at first hand, it is starting to affect the way that people can farm. It is not uncommon for ewes to suffer a prolapse at lambing. Too much straining, lambs lying in the wrong position, and the odd ewe will eject her uterus. A skilled shepherd or the vet will soon put this right, administer some antibiotic and the ewe will fully recover.
In the trailer behind the quad-bike, parked alongside the lambing shed in question was a dead ewe; she had suffered a prolapse that morning, the ravens had eaten it away and she bled to death.
Lambs born outside are particularly vulnerable. While the ewe is down lambing, eyes are quickly removed from a lamb only half born. If the ewe has to leave the lamb unattended for a few minutes while she gives birth to a second, the first lamb will soon be dead because it would be attacked by the ravens. It’s a sorry tale, one that I thought of quite a lot that day.
In early evening, taking a drive around, I met another neighbour who keeps sheep, driving down the lane towards me.
People who keep a lot of sheep have to be approached with caution at this time of year; they’ve usually got their eyes held open with matchsticks.
I pulled on to the grass verge in case he hadn’t seen me, but he had, and he stopped. I told him about the ravens on the other farm and asked if he was affected. He told me that every year he has his ewes scanned to find out how many lambs a pregnant ewe is carrying. It was, therefore, his practice to lamb those ewes carrying a single lamb outside where they were able to tend to it properly and the ewes carrying two or more lambs would lamb inside where he could help them if it were needed.
Last year, several of the ‘single’ lambs had lost eyes to ravens but, what had particularly upset him, 20 lost their tongues while being born. These had to be put down as they were unable to suckle. This begs the question, why are there so many ravens about?
Local opinion is that they have proliferated because of the advent, locally, of large commercial shoots. These shoots provide an ample year-round supply of food; animal and vegetable. More food, more eggs, bigger hatches, fewer deaths, more ravens.
DRIVING HOME last night I saw a tiny baby rabbit on the road. It’s the first one I’ve seen this year but I’ve been looking out for them because you may remember that I had noted a lot of rabbit activity just a few weeks ago. It’s just another positive sign of the approach of spring.
There is another sign, actually less welcome. Around our yard there are fornicating cats everywhere. It’s a part of the dilemma of feral cats about a farmyard. Ignore them, don’t feed them, and they are a sickly emaciated bunch of cats that give you cause for concern. But feed them regularly, as I do, and you have a group of fit, glossy-coated cats that will breed lots and lots of kittens that will just compound the problem. Cat flu will eventually appear among the kittens, which will be a distressing sight.
I should qualify all this by saying that although I feed them all every day, there isn’t one cat that we can get closer to than a couple of yards.
The answer is to have them all spayed, or neutered, and a few years ago I did try this. I caught about 20 and took them to the vet. Some escaped while there and we had cats everywhere, over the furniture, under the furniture, climbing the walls, swinging from the lights. When we finally caught them all, the vet said: ‘Don’t you ever bring any more like that here again.’
It’s not the simple, one-off fix that people would have you believe. New cats, male and female, turn up here quite regularly, so the problem will always be there. In the meantime we have to endure all the caterwauling and all the spitting and fighting.
YESTERDAY I saw a pheasant with 13 chicks, oh dear. Today she was in roughly the same place with 10. They seem to be very poor mothers and the approach of my tractor sends them scattering in all directions, mother leading the flight. If I was a pheasant chick I think I’d be on the phone to ChildLine to complain about the care I was receiving. There were a pair of buzzards sitting on a fence not far away and I could almost sense them licking their lips. Thirteen yesterday, 10 today, it has something about it of a rhyme I know of which is definitely not politically correct any more. Past experience tells me that she’ll soon be down to one chick but that will be temporary.
ONE OF THE advantages of living in a hilly border area is superb views in all directions almost wherever we are.
I am much given to elaborating on this theme by suggesting that it isn’t worth having a tidy garden because anyone visiting our garden tends to look at the views. This well-worn argument carries little credibility with my wife, who is self-appointed head gardener.
Over the years, we have settled into an uneasy truce whereby I am responsible for cutting the grass and she tends the flower beds. It’s a bit like all truces, it can break down at any time. So, inevitably, we reach the time of year when I have to make a start on my lawnmowing duties.
The lawn has, over the winter, acquired a bedraggled, unkempt look and seems to be looking at me and asking an unspoken question: ‘When are you going to cut me?’
For my part, I turn my attention to the lawnmower, and look at that as well. It has become inevitable in my life that, come the day I need it for the first time, the lawnmower will not start.
It is a phenomenon that has caused many a breakdown of the aforementioned truce, because, believe it or not, it can take two weeks to start a reluctant lawnmower and we all know how much a lawn will grow in two weeks in the spring.
The two weeks is readily explained. You take the mower to your local dealer and tell him that it won’t start.
But do they reach for a spanner? No they do not, they reach for a label, they write your name on it, tie it to the mower, and push it around the back where it joins a queue of other reluctant lawn mowers that is already as long as the queue at a fish and chip shop on a Friday night.
This year was going to be different, this year I was going to take the mower to the dealers just after Christmas for a check up, before the queue formed.
Inevitably, that didn’t happen, so here we are, mid-March, a lawn looking at me, me looking at the mower, and my wife rolling her eyes and sighing every time she looks out of the window.
I know I need a new battery,
so I get that anyway. There’s a conversation at the dealers between the man in the stores and the proprietor over whether the battery needs charging or not. They decide it doesn’t. I take the battery home and fit it on and I fill the tank up with petrol and determine to leave it for 24 hours – this is the lawnmower equivalent of poking a stick into a squirrel’s drey and telling it: ‘Spring is here’.
A day later, I return, make a big, slow deal of putting all the controls in the right places, turn the key and the battery is flat as a pancake. This is the sort of setback I’m well used to, so I put the battery on charge and go away and leave it.
I almost forget all about it the next day, but it’s Friday evening, the boys have nearly finished washing the parlour out. It’s time for tea but I decide to try the mower. I turn the key and it bursts into life first turn. This completely throws me. I sit there for a minute and it doesn’t stop. I’m now in shock – still, make hay while the sun shines, etc, and off I go, there’s nearly an hour of daylight yet and I cut most of the lawns. I leave the worst piece for another day.
If I am thrown, pity my wife. She can’t believe what’s happened – never had the grass cut so soon. Next day I tell her I will take her out for supper if Wales win the Triple Crown. Cut grass, an unexpected meal – she thinks I’m having an affair.
ABOUT EIGHT years ago a farmer at a show told me how he had gone to market in a brand new Land Rover, bought some cattle and duly backed his trailer up to the loading pens.
At market there are gates to put in place for loading and he’d dropped the ramp of his trailer and gone to get the cattle, putting various gates in place as he went. It is then a simple task to drive the cattle back to the trailer.
The first cattle went on to the trailer ramp and the trailer sat up in the air because in the few minutes he had been away (and never out of sight) someone had taken the Land Rover.
The worst bit was still to come; his insurance company wouldn’t pay out a penny because he had left the keys in the Land Rover.
At that time, we as a family never took a key out of any vehicle, day or night. I went home that night and established a new regime whereby all keys had to be taken out at all times.
At first it was a damn nuisance – so many time I walked up to the yard, got in the car and then had to go back in the house for the keys.
There was another new regime established here last night. I locked the kitchen door when I went to bed. It felt really strange; I would guess that it’s the first time the door has been locked in 45 years. In fact, we had no idea where the key was and had to buy a new lock just to get a key!
Last week my wife had some money stolen out of the drawer in the kitchen. It’s money she puts by for Christmas. If I’d known it was there I could have warned her someone would steal it – I’d have had some myself.
It’s left a really strange collection of feelings, the worst of which is the sort of witch-hunt that goes on in your mind as you search for culprits.
It’s not fair on us and it’s not fair on the people who work here. It was too much money not to involve the police, not that I think they will find anyone – there was little enough for them to work on and no forced entry.
What is a shame is that it has changed the way we live our lives. The shed where we keep all our tools is wide open and that’s next on our list of ‘to dos’.
Strangely, when we came to live here over 40 years ago, every shed, loose box, granary and cattle yard was locked every night with a padlock and the farm foreman had to take this huge bunch of keys to the house every night when he finished work.
The reason for that would almost certainly have been the fact that they were only just coming out of an era when farm workers lived (only just) on subsistence wages.
Most of them would have poultry, or if they were the lucky ones, they would have had a pig. There would be hardly any waste food in their lives and the bosses’ grain stores would be very attractive.
The place where the corn grinder was kept was built with 2in-thick boards and was as impenetrable as Fort Knox.
Life always goes in cycles, and here we are locking things up again. It makes me a bit sad.
WE HAVE three fields of maize this year, which is more than usual. One of the fields should have gone into winter wheat last autumn but the ground was too wet to do a tidy job of working and sowing, so we decided it was better to leave it.
With modern kit and powerful four-wheel drive tractors it is possible to sow a crop into soil conditions that you just would not have contemplated years ago. But if the soil is not right you will see the results come spring, with lots of bare patches where the crop has simply not grown.
Two of our maize crops were sown by 7 May, which is the date I always have in my mind as a deadline. We’re in borderline maize-growing country here because of our height above sea level and if we sow it any earlier, it can suffer damage from late frosts.
Our worst growing years are hot, dry ones, because we have a low depth of soil and the grass will die off (we call it burning). Maize will thrive in those conditions and keep on growing and bulk up.
You can concentrate on producing top quality forage as much as you like but if you run out of forage at the end of January you are, to put it mildly, in a bit of a mess. Maize is a good banker for a dry year.
Our third field of maize was sown about 10 days later. This was because it was being planted into a grass field from which we wanted to firstly take some silage.
So we took a crop of grass and then there followed a frantic week, spreading manure, ploughing and working it down and, of course, drilling the maize.
We have a good young lad who works here part time but he also has his own tractor and he soon gets tempted away to join silage gangs for large contractors, so the week turned out to be more frantic than we thought.
Anyway, the maize went in in good order and because it was later going in we drilled it at a lower seed rate, 40,000 an acre, so that the plants mature a bit quicker in the slightly shorter time they will have.
The dog and I, driving past the field a couple of days later, reckoned between us that there were 200-300 rooks on there. This might have been OK but then again, it might not. There was a fair chance they were eating grubs, which was good. But while they stab away in the soil looking for grubs they could turn up a bright yellow thing and think: ‘Look everybody, corn on the cob.’
The dog, who is a lot brighter than me, reckoned that 250 rooks eating 10 seeds a day for a week would make a fair inroad into the 40,000 we drilled.
I reckoned it was much worse than that because they cart a lot more than that back to their nests.
Clearly, we needed to monitor the situation closely. It can, if you let it, drive you to distraction. They would be there just after 4am until late at night. I could get up early and fire a shotgun at them but I doubt if I’d ever hit one; it would just make me feel better.
My neighbours, on the other hand, wouldn’t like it at all. Nor would they like bird-scarer guns going all day.
There had to be a better way. A quick phone call to the keeper and within an hour he had shot one rook and examined the contents of its crop, which was full of grubs, so I had nothing to worry about.
He said he would shoot another in three or four days time to see if their diet had changed. But in three or four days time there wasn’t a rook to be seen and the maize was coming up fine.
WE’VE BEEN doing our silage these last two days. It’s a contractor who does the work, and he can clear 60 or 70 acres a day if everything goes OK. He has a huge machine that picks the crop up, chops it up and blows it into trailers. Today, there are four tractors and trailers carting the cut grass and they are struggling to keep him going. It’s a bit ‘rip and tear’, or would ‘frenetic’ be a better way to describe it?
Our farm adjoins a B-road, and where you join it as you come out of our farm, it is not that easy to see oncoming traffic. We have a couple of young lads driving tractors so I thought
a bit of safety wouldn’t go amiss. I bought two big red triangles with pictures of tractors in the middle and I nailed these signs on to pallets. I put one either side of the junction, giving about 100 yards warning of the hazard. I thought I was doing something that would make young lives safer. I didn’t realise my own would be at risk. You’d think someone carrying a pallet across the road with a big red triangle fixed to it would attract attention. I was glad to get back into the Discovery. I certainly wasn’t safe putting the signs up. So I’ve done my bit. Does anyone pay any attention? Not that I’ve seen. If it wasn’t so serious, it would almost be funny. Going to work in the morning is the most dangerous time, with builders in vans, late for work and eating bacon sandwiches, and women doing 70mph while they put their make-up on.
IT CAN be very exciting, going on holiday, but I always look forward to the first ride around the farm when I get back. I like to look at the stock and the fields and mentally note the changes that have taken place. I set off this morning also quite excited, which may seem a bit sad but to me it means that I find my everyday life fulfilling. I was looking particularly to see some improvement in the maize, and there was. The weedkiller has worked well and the plants have grown — a bit. I don’t know how many times I was told in France that the French maize looks better than mine — and it did.
THERE’S A LANE I travel every day to get to our other land. A kestrel lives somewhere near the lane, he or she has been there for years. I tend to drive along the lane slowly as I look over the hedges (being nosey) and the kestrel has taken to flying along in front of whatever vehicle, tractor or Discovery that I’m driving. At this time of year, the sound of an approaching vehicle can make fledglings cross the road from one hedgerow to the other. We don’t have to travel very far, the kestrel and I, before he has a meal. It leaves me feeling as if I were being used, which of course I am.