by Roger Evans
When Mert is busy on his shed-clearing, you actually think all the cows have gone and he’s just double-checking, when this Jersey heifer will come trotting out. She looks more like a fallow deer than a cow. When I bought her I christened her Peggy because she looks a bit like a girl I was at school with, but Bambi would have been more appropriate.
WITH ALL the cats busy rearing kittens, it has surprised me how many rats we have about here. My assessment comes from the numerous rat remains that I find about. The cats are obviously giving the rats a hard time, which is excellent. Funny things rats: people react to them in different ways, from total fear to total hatred. My son is dead scared of them. I once went round a corner to where my son and an employee were tidying up a shed to find them both standing on five gallon cans while a family of rats that they had disturbed scurried about looking for a new home.
They’ve never bothered me. I was tidying up the mangers for the cows the other day and came upon the back-end of a rat busy sorting out the silage for bits of corn. He soon found himself underneath my welly – some people would have run the other way.
I HAVE alluded in the past to the issue of producer milk prices. This topic has gained prominence recently because of the interest shown by the Women’s Institute, and good luck to them and thank-you. Some of the headline-grabbing statements from major retailers have led people to the view that we’ve all had a 4p increase in our returns, and the job is done.
Just to put things into some sort of perspective, I have just had a price increase of a quarter of a penny per litre and I am still getting less for my milk than I was 12 months ago. What should worry consumers is the fact that milk powder (dried milk) is trading on world markets at higher prices than are available to us from selling our milk into a liquid dairy or a cheese factory. We have been told for years that we have to accept what the market will return.
Well, the market now gives us an alternative option and the boot is finally on the other foot. If the UK wants UK milk, it will have to pay the market price for it.
MORE TIME spent on a tractor of late means more time to observe what is going on around you, and this time of observation has led me to the conclusion that it isn’t necessarily that wonderful being a pheasant.
Cocks and hens lead very different lives at this time of year. The hen pheasants have secreted themselves away in hedgerows sitting on eggs. Measuring their success at this, in terms of the numbers of young pheasants that they will actually rear, would suggest that this is a complete waste of time and contributes very little, apart from so many ready meals for carrion crows and the like.
Once or twice a day your hen pheasant will make her way off her nest to look for some sustenance and is promptly sexually assaulted by every cock pheasant within about 50 yards. How they actually survive this period amazes me, but survive they mostly do.
The cock pheasants, for their part, are showing signs of wear and tear. They patrol what they think of as their own territory, but are under constant attack from their neighbours. Most of them are now limping as a result of all the fighting and their beautiful spring plumage is starting to lose its sheen. They spend three months of the winter being shot at and the next four months fighting. It’s true that they spend quite a lot of that four months trying to make love, but it never seems to lead to any meaningful relationships. I think if I were a cock pheasant I would be smoking about 40 a day by now.
On the shoot next door, the keeper has taken to rearing a particularly dark strain of pheasant, darker even than the ones I call melanistic. A small colony of these has made its way on to our shoot, probably about two miles. The birds keep themselves very much to themselves and seem to live their lives to a higher moral standard than I see elsewhere in the pheasant world.
THE ‘NEW’ world of environmental benefits in farming is starting to make an impact. Several hundred yards of new hedgerow has been planted on this estate during the winter and it is pleasing to see how much of it has established itself successfully.
Farmers and landowners are paid to put in these new hedges, just as a generation or so ago they were paid to remove them, further evidence, if it were needed, of what a mad world we live in. As for me, I see all this going on and shrug my shoulders at it. I’ve never taken a hedge out in more than 40 years of farming. I’m quite proud of that, seems I was right all along.
TURKEYS, it was always said, are compulsively suicidal. If, for example, a young turkey in a rearing shed should die, another turkey would come and lie down next to it. Then another would do the same, and another and another, so that in no time at all there would be a whole heap of turkeys.
Unfortunately, the ones at the bottom of the pile would be suffocated by those on the top, so it would be possible to progress from one dead turkey to lots and lots of dead turkeys in no time at all.
There is something of the death-wish about all livestock. We had a cow that had a difficult calving recently that left her a bit wobbly on her back legs. We put her out in what we call the stack yard where she could lie under cover should she wish and where there were several patches of fresh grass to nibble. Most importantly she was off the concrete and on natural ground where she could find her feet at all times and recover. I was working up there all afternoon and twice she made her way 30 yards or so to the water trough, ate some of the silage we had put out for her and then, each time, returned to a cosy spot in the corner under the hedge to lie down. Because of the work we were doing, there were no gates to keep her in but given her condition and her obvious contentment with where she was, I was not particularly concerned.
During the night she became more adventurous and she wandered further afield. She declined the opportunity to go into our garden, by two different gateways, as she did the gardens of our two immediate neighbours. She rejected the chance to go into my son’s garden through the small wicket gate, but decided instead to try to enter his garden over his cattle grid where she spent most of the night with her legs firmly stuck between the bars.
Fortunately, we have the kit on farms these days to lift cows out of situations like this without too much trouble. Her back legs, which were a problem after the calving, are fine now, but one of her front legs is now badly swollen.
We’ve only ever had a cow stuck in a grid once before. That was on a Sunday afternoon and the incident occurred on some land we were renting about a mile away. A passer-by came on the cow in the grid and telephoned 999. You might have spotted by now that we live in a very rural area populated by very rural people, most of whom have a very good idea of what goes on and how things all ‘work’.
The local volunteer firemen ‘scrambled’ to the call. They knew immediately where the field was, and whose cattle were in the field. They also knew which pub my son was in so they drove there first of all, blue lights and sirens busy, collected my son, took him in the fire engine to help them extricate the cow, which they soon did, and then, at a more leisurely pace, returned him to the pub and his pint.
YOU MUST have 40 to 50 hares up on your top ground,’ the keeper told me during one of our Saturday morning chats. He calls them ‘my hares’ because he knows I love to see them about.
I knew there were a lot of hares about, but had no idea there were that many. He has a much better idea than me, because he’s been lamping for foxes lately and the hares sit still there in the spotlight for him to count.
If there are that many, and he’s rarely wrong, I take great pride in it.
I’ve often been told that hares are a good barometer of the wellbeing of the countryside, so using that criteria, all’s looking quite well. And they’re not just any old hares; they all look fat and well.
I often come across four or five playing together, oblivious to the approaching Land Rover, so full of themselves that they will often look you right in the eye before they slope off. A neighbouring tenant has a different view on hares and phones the landlord’s agent on a regular basis complaining about hare numbers. It takes all sorts!
&nbs
p; Quite what damage they do to mature arable crops I don’t know, they are more likely to be grazing the short grasses on the field margins. But ‘my’ hares could be getting too numerous for their own good.
I drove around the stock and the fields on Saturday morning. It is one of my favourite jobs and it suited my plans the next day, the Sunday morning, to go around before breakfast. It had rained hard in the night and as soon as I went off the hard road onto the track and the field margins I could see the tracks of a four-wheel drive vehicle that had travelled there since I had the previous evening. I was able to follow its marks all around my land and it was quite a tour. I’m good at reading the signs, I even found where they’d got stuck and had to have another go. (I’m probably an Apache Indian reincarnated as an impoverished dairy farmer.)
I was concerned about who had been about. The keeper usually travels about on his quad bike and has a four-wheel drive vehicle as well, but a quick call on the mobile soon determined that it wasn’t him.
The hares didn’t behave as if someone has been ‘having a go’, you can soon tell, but someone could have been checking to see how many were about. A few years ago a gang used to go up on the top, hare coursing, perhaps they’d been back to have another look. At the moment the keeper shoots about three or four a year strictly for the landlord who will talk eloquently about the delights of jugged hare.
I’M NEVER quite sure of the right word; the word I’m looking for is litigious. I’m trying to find a word that best described the society we find ourselves in. It describes what some people call ambulance chasers, the people who appear on adverts on our television with: ‘Have you had an accident at work?’
Of course I have, who hasn’t, it’s a part of life. When my son broke his ankle ice-skating last winter there were two ‘suits’ there getting him to sign disclaimers before the ambulance arrived, and who can blame them? This blame culture has manifested itself in a new way, one that will affect the countryside.
Apparently there are vigilant council employees out there, scrutinising roadside trees. The story goes like this; your council employee spots a tree with a couple of dead branches, it could be a large dead branch which could be dangerous and in need of removal, or it could be a tiny bit of dead branch, about a foot or so long.
A letter is sent to the owner of the tree, questioning the safety of the whole tree and giving the owner 28 days to do something about it, putting the responsibility for any future accidents firmly onto the owner.
The owner of the tree usually takes advice from a tree expert along the lines of ‘Is this tree safe for ever?’ Well no-one in his right mind is going to say ‘yes’ to that. Around here there are 26 healthy oak trees marked up for felling with red crosses on them. There is an established paper trail of passing the buck that ultimately ends with the tree being cut down. If a farmer were to fell 20 trees somewhere it would probably lead to an outcry. But for Health and Safety, it’s apparently OK. No-one wants to see anyone injured by a falling tree, or bough, especially me, but this is all a bit over the top. Where’s the commonsense, where’s the balance?
The past weeks have seen us out and about on our land on a daily basis, as the seasons and the work progresses. After all these years, I still find the views from our top fields remarkable and remind myself on a daily basis how lucky I am to live and work in such an environment. I took some sandwiches and a drink up to our young tractor driver the other day and took the opportunity to take it all in, while I waited for the tractor to go around the field and come back to the gateway. When he got off the tractor I told him that we’d got it all wrong, I suggested that it was ridiculous that I was paying him to drive up and down this particular field on such a lovely sunny day, with panoramic views that some people would envy. I went on, quite eloquently, to suggest that it would be much fairer if he paid me for the privilege of doing what he was in such surroundings. He took a sip of tea, thought about it a bit, and said he would rather leave things as they were.
LAST SUNDAY was the Bank Holiday weekend. You probably want to forget it. It didn’t stop raining here all day, it wasn’t a day to do much, I did a couple of hours of essential work after breakfast, came back and watched Country File, slept in the chair for an hour, fought off thousands of Zulus on the television and set off around the stock while afternoon milking was in progress. It was still raining heavily and some way off the council road, on a farm track I came upon a minibus backed well under a tree and almost out of sight.
Mindful that someone might be after ‘my’ hares, I thought to myself: ‘Aha, I bet these are up to something.’ And I was right, they were up to something, but nothing that hares or rabbits needed to worry about.
HOT WEATHER and goats. It’s all changed now, yesterday morning I was actually looking for a pullover because it was, in relative terms, chilly. But throughout July it was as hot as we’ve known it, and on some hot sticky nights it was difficult to sleep. There is an age-old solution to this that goes all the way back to Adam and Eve if you follow my drift, sleeping on top of the bed without night attire.
A friend of mine was regaling us with this solution one night in the pub. He’s one of those farmers who has rarely been sighted without a cap on his head. Well, he’s been seen at weddings and funerals without a cap on his head but it’s always stuffed in his pocket. His ruddy weather-beaten countenance stops halfway up his forehead and becomes very white where his hair starts to recede. There was some discussion in the bar about the possibility that his ‘naked’ solution on hot nights did in fact include his cap, but he assured us it didn’t, although the cap was on the table at the side of his bed.
And then there are your goats. I’ve never kept goats but many years ago, no, even longer than that, a lot of dairy farmers kept the odd goat running with their cows because goats carried a disease that was related to a similar disease that caused abortion in cattle. The presence of the goat helped the cattle to build up a natural immunity. The goats carried brucella melatensis — I’ve had a brain cell carrying that information locked up since I was in college — which was related to brucellosis in cattle, which we have now eradicated from our herds.
From casual observation I have come to the opinion that all goats are rascals. I think there is a part of them that yearns for the rocks and boulders of their ancestors. When Julie Andrews climbed every mountain, goats were right up there with her in spirit, leaping from rock to rock with abandon.
And so, for those of you still with me, I draw the stories of the goats and the hot weather together.
Our friend with the cap has made lots of mistakes in his life, as have we all, but well to the fore in these mistakes is allowing his daughter to keep two goats.
These two goats were chained up at night, but most nights managed to escape, dragging the chains behind them. Having achieved the escape bit the next essential for your frisky goat is to do a bit of leaping about on boulders. Most farms around here don’t have boulders on the yard, but goats are inventive and imaginative creatures and if they can’t find a boulder, what better than a five-year old Vauxhall Vectra?
So we return to our hero whose sleep is disturbed, on a bright sunny morning, by the sound of long lengths of chain being dragged across his car. The goats have decided it is great fun to jump on the boot of his car, then onto the roof and then off the bonnet down onto the ground. They take it in turns and then reverse the procedure.
My friend leaps out of bed, pausing only to put his cap on, and rushes to the bedroom window. He takes in the scene out on his yard in an instant and rushes downstairs, his bad language, legendary locally, now in full flow. He puts his wellies on at the back door and launches himself out onto the yard wearing just his cap and his wellies with nothing in between.
The goats aren’t dull and are off around the corner at some speed with our hero in hot pursuit hurling abuse and anything else that comes to hand. There’s a public footpath running through his yard and coming towards him are about 20 ramblers.
There are several aspects to this story among which are: goats that had the last laugh, ramblers that had a surprise and a farmer who inadvertently became a flasher, without the long mac.
I’M ON my daily round of the off-lying cattle. The 30 in this group are all lying down chewing their cud. I pull up next to the bull and switch the engine off. He’s lying there contentedly in a soft bed of fresh grass and buttercups. He gives absolutely no acknowledgement of my presence, although I’m only a yard away. He continues cudding rhythmically, pausing only to swallow that particular mouthful and to replace it with another.
I sit and stare at him, and he steadfastly stares back. We’ve been together a long time, the bull and I, but there’s never been a relationship developed. He knows what his job is and he leaves me to do mine. His is to eat, sleep and breed – an idyllic life. It seems a long time since that was my job as well.
He’s a Limousin bull, his calves are easily born and we’ve used him on our heifers for their first calves for years. Every now and again, I introduce new maiden heifers to his harem as soon as they are old enough.
I’m not sure how old he is, I’d have to look at his passport, and I’ve not seen him ‘perform’ for years, but he certainly does, because in due course all the heifers start to develop their little bosoms and eventually go on to calve.
Although the calves are nice and small and easy to deliver, they go on to make excellent beef cattle, because we often sell a calf to a local farmer who has lost a calf off a suckler cow, and they are always very pleased with the sort of cattle they grow into.
They have also been heard to say that they can run so fast they don’t know whether to fatten them for the butcher or send them to a trainer and enter them for National Hunt races. There’s nothing in the bull’s demeanour to suggest he could father race winners. I reckon he must be 15 or 16 years old now, which is quite old for a working bull. If I ran him with more than 100 cows, he probably wouldn’t last long, but where he is and what we expect of him seems to be well within his capabilities.