by Roger Evans
I’ve never had a combine, never grown enough corn to need one, but I have on occasion driven for other people in similar circumstances.
My son-in-law’s combine is fairly old and relatively small by modern standards but it is pristine in condition and when you are up there driving it you do feel just a bit important.
It’s a strange phenomenon but when you do drive someone else’s combine, parts of it become yours. For example, if a bearing should go while you are driving it, no one says ‘a bearing has just gone’, they say ‘Roger broke a bearing’.
Never mind that the bearing might be 20 years old, never mind that all you’ve actually done is put the mechanism into gear and made the bearing go round, which it’s supposed to do anyway.
And if the same bearing should seize up in five years’ time, they’ll say: ‘Roger broke that bearing a few years ago and it’s never been the same since.’
So while you are driving along, all nonchalant, you are listening for anything that sounds a bit different because you know that the name of the part that breaks and your name will be linked together forever.
This linking of names and parts will be relatively local. It will start off in the pub where the farmers are comparing notes after a day’s harvesting.
‘How did you get on today?’
‘OK. But we lost two hours when Roger broke that long shaft that goes down from the drum to the whatsit.’
But that story will only go around two or three other pubs and will soon run out of momentum because as sure as night follows day, someone else will break something much more interesting.
There is an ultimate sin to combine driving. When you transfer the grain from the combine to the trailer there’s a big auger that sticks out at the side, a bit like a phallic symbol, that unloads the grain. This folds back into the combine when not in use. You should never forget to fold it back when unloading is done because if you forget it is still sticking out, you are likely to wrap it around a tree and if you do that, the story will travel from pub to pub and from parish to parish.
A useful tip for would-be combine drivers, if something breaks, is always look hopeless and helpless with a spanner in your hand. If you get too involved you get covered in oil and grease and all the bits of chaff and straw that stick to it. Wouldn’t want that, would we? It’s far better for someone else to do all that.
ONE OF the most important parts of my role within our dairy co-operative is communicating with our members. Members own the co-operative, they are the co-operative, their milk is the lifeblood of the co-operative and without their milk, there is no co-operative.
There are all sorts of ways of communicating and one of the most important is on a one-to-one basis at stands at agricultural shows. There are about 2,500 members in total and I expect I’ve spoken to most of them.
When I go to a show like the Royal Welsh, for example, I spend four days talking to people and the only bit of the show I see is between our stand and the toilets.
On the first day a member I know well was sitting down opposite me with his wife. From past experience, I knew the time he would spend with me could be split into segments.
The first segment is always the price of milk, and he always gives me a hard time. The price of milk has come down 15 per cent since the beginning of the year, so why wouldn’t he give me a hard time?
He can be quite aggressive and I think he might have a speech impediment because most of the words he used began with the letter F.
He first told me he needed more money for his milk, which I agreed with. I told him the price is related, like it or not, to what goes on in the wider world, the price of milk powder in New Zealand, the price of cheese in Ireland, things like that. He didn’t agree with this but I know and he knows that this, unfortunately, is the case.
So we paused there, once he’d got that off his chest, and he asked for another cup of tea. I had one as well, which took my tea level up to somewhere around my eyes, (we serve a lot of tea, coffee and milk while communicating).
We were also serving toasted cheese sandwiches made with our own Pembrokeshire cheese (available in a supermarket near you) and he visibly relaxed as he ate his sandwich. Eventually he wiped a bit of melted cheese off his chin and leant forward to share a confidence and I knew we were moving on to segment two.
‘There’s a man in our village who is a contractor,’ he said. He went on to tell me that this man only has one tractor, (contractors these days usually have more tractors than they can count, so having one is to put his story into context).
Every month the man has a financial crisis when the HP payment is due on the tractor.
‘He comes to me to help him out now and again so at the moment he owes me three months’ work that I’ve not yet identified,’ said our co-operative member.
I asked how the hell did he manage with a crisis like that every month.
‘You just have to keep your head down and your arse up and work away and hope for the best.’
He paused again, so that I knew we were moving on to segment three. Segments two and three were not unrelated, as I found out.
‘There’s some people from London bought a bungalow with three acres of land in our village, they were going to live off this land – good-lifers.’
The tone was scornful; he’d seen it all before – three goats and a patch of cabbages are not a living for anyone.
‘Anyway, they have a septic tank for the bungalow which is about 200 yards down the field and the pipe between dwelling and tank gets blocked.
‘They spend a couple of days with draining rods to no avail, so the contractor said he would clear the pipe for them. When they asked him how much it would cost he told them £500 and they accepted the offer, lavatorial arrangements having become quite difficult by now.’
For the contractor, these were riches beyond belief and would settle a couple of HP payments. So he hired a mini digger and assumed he would find the blockage, dig out a bit of pipe, replace it and be away. A day later he’d still not found the blockage and he could see his £500 ending up in the hands of the owner of the mini digger.
So he went to a farmer in the village and asked him to fill his slurry tanker with a load of water out of the river and bring it up to see if they could ‘ease’ the blockage. Slurry tankers usually fill themselves with vacuum, but what can suck can also blow.
So they took 1,500 gallons of river water up to the bungalow and fitted the discharge pipe to the blocked pipe down the field by the septic tank. The plan was for the contractor to go into the bathroom and for the farmer to send some water up the pipe. As soon as there was some clearance, the contractor was to phone the farmer on his mobile phone to tell him to stop.
So that’s what they did.
Just to give you a better feel for this story but without going into too much detail, the water would have been pushing against what was in the blocked pipe already.
The first visible movement of liquid in the bathroom came up through the toilet with such force that it hit the ceiling and removed the polystyrene tiles. The contractor frantically tried to phone the farmer to stop him pumping but he couldn’t get a signal on his mobile.
Not without some resource he put the toilet seat down and stood on it, only to be thrown across the bathroom.
He beat a retreat and ran outside to stop the farmer but it was too late – the contents of the pipe and 1,500 gallons of dirty river water went right through the bungalow and were coming out of the kitchen door.
To be fair to them both, they had cleared the blockage pipe.
That seemed like the end of that particular story, but it wasn’t. The farmer’s wife, who had probably heard the story countless times before, said: ‘But you haven’t told him who the farmer on the tanker was…’
And our member grinned sheepishly and beat a retreat out into the mud and the rain of the Royal Welsh show. The people in the bungalow went back to London a month later.
THERE’S a part of
my life that takes me away from the farm for a few days most weeks. At this time of year I spend quite a lot of time at agricultural shows. I’m usually very busy but I do have the opportunity to indulge in one of my favourite occupations: watching the world go by. Human beings as a species come in all shapes and sizes and most of us are amazed at the variety we see. And I am always amazed at what people will buy at a show and then carry around with them for the rest of the day. Countless times I’ve seen husband and wife, often the large wife and small henpecked husband of the stereotypes we see in seaside postcards, wife leading the way, husband dutifully following, carrying something large and cumbersome like a loft ladder or an ironing board.
Yesterday, at the Royal Welsh, a man came past at 9.30am proudly carrying a new chainsaw. He walked past five times during the day, each time looking more weary. I was left with the thought that in more than 30° heat, if I was going to buy a chainsaw, I would buy it at about 5 o’clock, just before I went home.
At the show I heard the story of a lady farmer who had the misfortune to have a large travellers’ camp next to her farm. She’d seen youths about with a crossbow and was fairly sure that they’d had two of her lambs, but was fairly pragmatic about it because she couldn’t prove it and the police didn’t seem very interested anyway, but she had smelt barbecued lamb on the wind one evening. When she found a foal with a crossbow bolt lodged in its leg, that was a different matter.
At first light next morning she was in the camp with an ornate bowl filled with water, sprinkling water around each caravan in turn and making weird chants. The occupants came tumbling out of their caravans to see what was going on but she continued her progress undeterred. The travellers phoned the police who carted our heroine away for disturbing the peace. (The irony of this will not be lost on any of us.) After a three-hour ‘cooling off’ period she was released and returned home to find the camp deserted. The occupants had fled because they thought she’d put a spell on them. What a brave lady, and clever with it.
IT’S A BIG day on the farm today. Today’s the day I take Bill, our bearded collie to be clipped. A bearded collie in full coat looks a bit like a Herdwick sheep and ours is just about as much use as a Herdwick sheep at fetching the cows.
The best working dog I ever had was a bearded collie bitch. She was so clever and so good at what she did, she was a once-in-a-lifetime dog. I always used to clip her myself. She wouldn’t allow me to use electric clippers, but she would lie flat out on her side for about 10 minutes once a day for me to snip away with Ann’s best dressmaking scissors. After 10 minutes she’d had enough, would open her eyes and be away. You wouldn’t be able to catch her again until the next day and as the actual clipping took many, many sessions, it was a very strange dog that would be about the yard for a couple of weeks.
I always used to leave her head and neck until last, which made her look like a lion. I think she quite liked that. One of the problems for a long-haired dog that spends its day around cows and cow muck is that quite a bit of the latter sticks to your coat, so that, come the dry weather, all these little bits of coat have what I call clinkers on them that rattle as you go about your daily routine.
To digress, I’ve always had a bit of a weakness for different animals, that’s why, in a herd of about 190 dairy cows there are some Ayrshires, some Jerseys, some Dairy Shorthorns and some Brown Swiss. There are about 175 conventional black and white cows but I do like to see a few different sorts as well.
When I kept sheep, I occasionally had some Herdwick. They are a native breed of the Lake District and, when I say I had them occasionally, it was because I owned them but I couldn’t keep them in. One day I was driving to a speaking engagement in the Lake District and, three miles from home, I passed three Herdwick ewes marching down the road in single file. ‘There’s a coincidence,’ I thought, ‘Me driving to the Lake District and seeing Herdwick sheep on the road.’ I ignored the fact that they were mine and kept on driving. They were back at home when I returned next day.
Anyway, I arrive at the vet’s where the dog trimmer sets up shop twice a week. The lady groomer rolls her eyes when she sees Bill (funny how women do that) but she likes him really, and apparently he stands on the table as good as gold for the two or three hours this all takes. I think he actually enjoys the fuss, and the freedom from a hot coat. The coat is so dense that the piece that comes off his back hangs together like a fleece. I ask the lady to leave a tuft of hair at the end of his tail, Bill would like to look like a lion as well, but we get a bit more eye-rolling, and when I fetch him there’s no tuft.
The dog I take home has been transformed. Everyone who comes on the yard for the next week thinks we’ve got a new dog, he bears absolutely no resemblance to the dog of the day before. I think he misses his warm coat at nights; no more sleeping on the doorstep, he’s under a bush in Ann’s shrubbery, but no need for you to tell her that.
It’s not all positives for Bill. The other dogs don’t recognise him so they want to fight him to establish where everyone sits in the pecking order. This doesn’t take long as he was always at the bottom anyway. Next morning he comes with me to fetch the cows, which is unusual. They don’t recognise him either so they all want to chase him.
While my border collie Mert is away around the boundaries of the field getting the furthest away cows into motion Bill decides he will help as well. It’s quite strange how he behaves; he fixes a stare on the nearest cow, goes down on his belly, and stalks her. To use the lion analogy again, that’s exactly how he does it. He stalks the cow until she, or he for that matter, bottles out. It’s usually the cow, then he chases her for a few yards before he moves on to stalk the next one. If I were to rely on this process to collect 190 cows it would take all day, so I’m not sorry when he loses interest after a couple of days and Mert and I don’t have to witness this morning pantomime. Bill? He stays on the yard and goes back to being fat and lazy which he does really well.
While I’ve been writing this, I’ve had one eye on the pond in the field in front of our house. A few days ago, a mallard came out with six ducklings and I find myself counting them all the time. When mother duck takes her brood out on to the field they are always accompanied by a pair of carrion crows or a pair of ravens. These birds busy themselves at a safe distance, affecting nonchalance as you’ve never seen it affected before. But I know what they are really there for and so does mother duck.
When the brood are on the pond they are much more mobile and I can see them now darting about like so many little jet-ski riders. But they’re not safe here either. Also busy in the background are a pair of coots who will go under water and take a duckling from below the surface. This is how most of the ducklings will disappear because mother can’t see the attack coming. It’s all dramatic stuff, a bit like an avian version of Jaws.
THE BIG JOB lately is getting our maize crop planted. There’s just a bit more to it than that. Maize is a crop that thrives on plenty of manure.
Ours gets plenty of that but that, in itself, is a big job. Carting muck to the chosen field and then spreading it all is very time-consuming, but well worth it.
Over the years I have come to learn that carrot is usually better than stick, so I try to generate some enthusiasm to get the job done. Suggestions that ‘Bank holidays are so busy you’re all better off working,’ get a mixed reception. ‘If you work late tonight I’ll go and fetch us some chips,’ is better received. No-one who works here is ever asked to do anything that David and I wouldn’t do, so yesterday I spent all day with our youngest worker spreading chicken muck.
Things had gone well all day, so that at 7 o’clock I said I’d pop for 10 minutes into our local town to fetch fish and chips and something to drink. Standing in the queue in the chip shop, thinking about the tons of chicken muck we’d spread that day, and what good it would transmit to the subsequent maize crop, I realised it had gone quiet and everyone was staring at me, except for the proprietor.
He was scowling – but i
t was probably him that has got to clear up the mucky footprints in his shop. He was probably hoping the smell would disappear when I did.
DOGS ARE clever, my dog Mert is very clever. I use the word ‘my’ deliberately because, as a farm dog, he used to be everybody’s dog, but over the last few weeks he’s become my dog. Most weeks I have to go away, sometimes for a couple of days at a time. During these absences he has taken to lying by the kitchen door until I come back and refusing to move.
He’s developed that even further just lately by refusing to go with anyone else to fetch the cows, even if I’m at home. This has made him quite unpopular but no-one is going to do anything about it because he will soon curl his lip up and show his teeth just to emphasise his position.
When I’m at home he’s always with me and it’s amazing how he develops as a working dog. Our cows are milked in two batches and, without going into detail, the yard has to be cleared of one batch before you let the second batch go. To clear the yard properly, you have to look up each row of stalls to make sure you haven’t missed a cow lying down somewhere. He’s watched me do this countless times and now he does it on his own.
If there’s anyone about, I can now have this sort of conversation with him because he will quite automatically go up each row of the sheds in turn. I lean on a gate and say ‘just go and check that next row’, which he was going to do anyway but it makes it look as if he’s understood what I said. The ‘audience’ usually consists of people who he won’t even fetch the cows with, so they get a bit tetchy about all this.
We have to be extra vigilant on clearing the yard because, a few weeks ago, I bought a fresh calved Jersey heifer at a sale. She turned out to be a lot smaller than I thought and, as she’s a bit of a free spirit, she will often go off on her own to lie down in the sheds somewhere.