Over the Farmer's Gate

by Roger Evans

  When I first bought him, we had a young lad working for us who asked what breed he was. ‘Limousin’. ‘Where do they come from?’ ‘They come from a region in France.’ ‘France eh, we’ll have to call him Herman.’

  I’ve never quite worked that one out, but Herman he’s been ever since.

  All cattle have passports now; it’s an inevitable process to improve traceability after problems like foot and mouth, and BSE.

  I know lots of farmers who’ve never been on holiday, never been on an aeroplane, never been abroad and never needed a passport. Their cattle all got one before they did.

  I’VE BEEN on a tractor most of the last week, ploughing and working a field for a fresh seeding of grass. The family all reckon I like ploughing because I usually manage to work that job for myself. I usually find it relaxing, but this time it wasn’t.

  We’d spread a lot of muck on the field, and it was difficult to strike a balance between ploughing at a proper depth to bury the muck without the wheels spinning too much.

  Working the field down is done in one pass, with a machine we call a power harrow, but that is a slow job in terms of miles per hour and it all gives you plenty of time for reflection and thought. It can be quite a lonely job on a tractor all day on your own. The radio is tuned to Radio 1, and I don’t know how to change stations, so it stays firmly switched off.

  This particular field is the first one I ever worked in that was my own field. I’ve ploughed it and worked it so many times since that I even recognise some of the worms. On that occasion, I was rolling the furrows down after someone else had ploughed it. And I was driving my first tractor, a Fordson Dexta, which was about three years old and cost me £600.

  I remember that there was a flurry of snow that day that wet the ground so much that it clogged the roller, and I had to pack in. I’m pretty sure I can remember how cold I was because we didn’t have the cabs and the clothing we have now.

  For company today, as I plough, I have four cock pheasants, four jackdaws and a seagull. I wonder what the seagull’s name is. It’s not easy, as I don’t know what sex it is. It’s bound to have a name, all the animals in the nature programmes have names – lions, cheetahs, even meerkats. It looks like a Dougal.

  For a land-based gull, my tractor and plough turning up worms is probably his equivalent of a trawler returning to harbour and throwing bits of fish overboard.

  It’s a very hot day, and none of our tractors are of an age that means they have air conditioning. I have to choose between having the windows shut and slowly roasting or have the windows open and sitting in fresher air that is dust-laden. Still, a bit of hardship never hurt anyone and when I walk across the yard later on covered in dust everyone thinks I’ve been working really hard.

  I have my tea, shower and read the farming papers in the garden. It’s almost like being in heaven – except we haven’t got any decent garden furniture to sit on, and I’m wearing shorts and the dogs keep licking my legs.

  THERE’S QUITE a decent shed in one particular field so most years we put some turnips in it and use it and the shed to overwinter about 10 heifers. In the spring we scatter a few grass seeds on the field to provide some grazing for calves, but come July we plough it again and put in some more turnips.

  It looks a bit untidy at this time of year because what is left of last winter’s turnips has run away to seed. The landlord drives past there every day so it wouldn’t hurt to tidy it up a bit, so I put on the machine we use to trim the fields and venture forth.

  It turns out that this field is a bit of a wildlife sanctuary. There’s quite a few pairs of partridge in there, the inevitable pheasants and a lot of tiny rabbits – what they are doing out and about at that age goodness only knows, they should be at home with mum. But what really surprised me was the number of half-grown leverets.

  As you progress over a field, as I was, the wildlife usually keeps moving on into the bits you haven’t cut yet, so you have to be careful you don’t count the same leveret twice, but there were lots of different sizes of leveret. I’m sure it wasn’t the same one going round and round the field doing a lap of honour.

  I reckon there were 10 or 12 there in a nine-acre field, a sort of hare crèche if you like. My activities have put an end to that but I’m not too worried, there’s an abundance of cover about at this time of year in the adjoining cornfields and in the heavy crops of second-cut silage.

  On the other hand, being fond of wildlife can come back and bite you – and it has. We have two fields of maize this year, and about 10 days ago I walked them both to see what sprays they needed. Maize is an expensive crop to grow; the seed alone can cost more than £40 an acre. Apart from providing a very high energy feed for the cows, which complements grass silage in the mixed diet we give them, it has the particular advantage of growing well in a dry summer. A dry summer is our Achilles heel, because ultimately it’s all about having enough tons of fodder for nearly 300 mouths to eat for six months of the year.

  So maize is a very important crop for us. It thrives on plenty of farmyard manure so we spend days and weeks carting plenty of that. It’s the tallest, most robust plant that most of us grow, yet ironically, it will not cope with any competition. It’s critical to get the spray right because it won’t compete with weeds.

  When I walked the fields to decide what sprays to use, it was coming up well with a good plant population. As I passed the one field where I always keep an eye on wildlife, as far as I could make out there were four pheasants regularly there, two hares and 19 rooks. I watch the rooks in particular because they can play hell with a maize field.

  They will dig out the seed when you sow it and they will pull out the young plants as they grow. But 19? Not a big problem. There’s usually 19 birds of some sort in any field at any time. When I walked the field again this week to see if it was ready to spray, to say I was dismayed would be the understatement of the year. Huge areas of maize had been decimated, mostly plants about six inches high pulled out.

  The crop is in effect, a write-off. I don’t know what this has cost me in terms of time and effort but it will certainly be in the thousands of pounds.

  Over the years you get used to setbacks like this but in today’s dairy industry, with finances in such a parlous state, this is a huge body blow. Part of the therapy in coping with this particular reversal is to think: ‘What are you going to do about it?’

  My first reaction was to start all over again with a fresh crop of maize but it’s getting very late for that and would be a gamble I can’t now afford to lose. We’ve decided to work the ground up again and sow a variety of very fast-growing ryegrass. It should grow us a crop in about six weeks and with luck another after that. Our priority now has to be accumulating enough tons of silage for the winter.

  We will have less feed value but it’s no good having high feed-value silage if it is all finished by the end of January. My friend, the keeper, has just been on the phone. He shot four or five of the rooks yesterday and opened their crops up. They were full of leatherjackets (cranefly, daddy-long-legs) and slugs. So there we have it, the rooks are digging for slugs and grubs, the slugs and grubs are feeding on the maize plants and up they come. In their way, the rooks were trying to help.

  THERE IS a part of my life that takes me to London most months. I always travel by the train from Birmingham to Euston. Farmers are strange travellers – they look in every field as they go by and assess the crops and livestock.

  I’ve done this journey so many times that I recognise every field as I pass it and know what crops are where and how they are progressing. I often wonder what normal people look at as they travel. What struck me was that I saw only one dairy herd in the fields during the whole journey.

  It was milking time on the way back but I don’t think I missed any others. I saw one field with a nice bunch of black and white heifers but couldn’t see their mums anywhere.

  There were a few beef cattle and sheep about but not in any big numbers. W
hat is for sure is the fact that there were a lot more horses than cattle. What we will eat if there’s a famine, goodness only knows – horses? Going to London is something I’ve done only over the last few years and I never knew it very well.

  I always use taxis when I get there, it helps me to get to know London and the taxi drivers know their way around better than me.

  I don’t reckon much to tube trains. I wouldn’t put animals on them and you never know who’s down there. A simple country boy like me could end up in the white slave trade or as a rent boy.

  I GOT BACK from band parade last Sunday reconciled to the fact that my Sunday sleep in the chair was going to be curtailed by at least 50 per cent. One of the worst parts of being a dairy farmer is that I’m always tired.

  An hour or two in my armchair on Sundays is quite precious. I’ve had a bad sort of a week. But then I haven’t had much of a life, either. I’m no stranger to heartbreak. It all started with the school fete.

  We’ve always supported the local primary school, especially when our children were there. I was successively chairman of the PTA, a governor and chairman of governors.

  Now our granddaughter is at the school, so when we were asked if we would host the summer fete, there wasn’t much hesitation.

  Of course, I knew all along what it was all about – me doing some gardening and tidying up. But I was fairly philosophical about that as well. Sometimes you need something specific to push you into making the extra effort, and the benefits obviously last beyond the function itself. Some farmers regularly host farm walks for other farmers. The only time that our place was tidy enough for that was the day my daughter got married.

  However, I don’t know if any of you have noticed, but it hasn’t actually been very good weather for gardening lately. I haven’t cut the lawns for nearly a fortnight. With only two days to go, I had to make a start. And a good start it was too.

  The lawnmower’s battery was flat, so I had to put it on charge for an hour. An hour later, it started first time, went 10 yards and stopped and refused to start again. There was petrol coming through OK so it must have been the spark plug. We tried the three spark plug sockets that we had but none fitted. Our next-door neighbour had two different ones to ours but they didn’t fit either.

  The young lad who works here occasionally goes into town at lunchtime so I asked him to call at the people I bought the mower from to buy one. But, when he came back after lunch, he reported that they didn’t have one either.

  We called on another neighbour who used to work with chainsaws in the woods and he eventually got the plug out with a spanner – it was a bit like doing keyhole surgery with a shovel. We cleaned the plug, and the mower started up first time.

  The youngster I referred to earlier used to come here one day a week on day-release from school. We’ve never allowed him to drive anything, but he’s left school now and it’s about time he made a start. I set him off and left him to it as I went to fetch the cows.

  While I was away, it started to rain heavily and, when I got back, it was too wet to cut the grass. But I could always strim the long grass around the edges instead. I put a coat and hat on and started it up.

  After about two minutes it stopped and refused to start again. For a minute, I wondered just how far I could throw it.

  The next day, I tried to mow the lawns again. The mower went a few yards and then stopped. In desperation, I phoned the dealer – things were starting to get a bit serious now. He discovered the petrol tank was half full of water.

  The lawns were eventually cut and when the big day arrived, I watched the young mothers busy themselves setting up their stalls. One of the mothers I’d not seen before looked particularly attractive, so I sauntered across to give her the benefit of my rustic charm.

  Before I could get beyond introductions she told me that she was not that happy about holding the fete on a dairy farm because she was a vegetarian and a vegan and, as such, she knew that dairy cows were shut in sheds all the year round behind bars and never got out to enjoy the sun in grassy fields.

  Well, that was straight to the point – no hidden agenda there. I struggled a bit with this as, over her shoulder, about 30 yards away, 48 cows were lying in a grassy field sunning themselves, and down the fields another 96 cows were doing exactly the same thing.

  I didn’t bother to point this out because there are none so blind as those who don’t want to see. She obviously had such a blinkered view of things agricultural that my efforts would have been wasted.

  Meanwhile, in our little town we have a carnival every year. Every year there is a theme for floats and shop windows. This year it was nursery rhymes. Last night I was talking to the manageress of an estate agent’s. She said she had chosen The House That Jack Built. She searched the internet and found a picture of a shack in the US.

  It was the sort of thing you see in Westerns; timber-built, up on stone piers. But this one had a roof that was caving in and a tree growing out of the chimney. It even had a rail across the front to tie up the horses. She put her display in the shop window but had to remove the photograph after the first morning because two couples had come in separately and asked for details.

  IF ANYON E asks me, in greeting, how I am, I have a bad habit of saying: ‘I’m struggling.’ I hadn’t given it much thought until I read a book devoted to positive presentation.

  To say you are struggling is very negative – it’s much better to say: ‘I’m really well thank you, things are good, how are you?’ If you had said that as a dairy farmer, over recent years, to anyone who knew anything about dairy farming, that person would presumably have thought you very positive but a liar.

  But this year on the farm has been a bit of a struggle. We started the year with my son off work for eight weeks with a broken ankle. We had the most benign April any of us can remember, then we had the monsoon season, which not only went on and on, but finished with a sort of crescendo of floods and damage.

  Weather we can usually cope with, but then our only full-time employee has been absent from work for about 10 weeks now, having suffered a stroke. I’m away on business two or three days most weeks, so when my son David has about 90 per cent of his help missing, struggle is the right word.

  Caring for and milking our animals comes first; where we are off the pace is with all the repairs, renewals and tidying up jobs that we can usually catch up on during the summer. Recent August days have had an autumnal feel to them, so how far away is winter and its heavy workload?

  Most people who work here become good friends and part of the family, so Jim’s recovery is uppermost in our minds. We certainly miss him coming around the corner every day.

  ON PREVIOUS occasions I have mentioned milk prices. Well, they are finally turning the corner. We haven’t exactly found the end of the rainbow but it now seems likely that the price of milk, as it leaves farms, will return to levels we haven’t seen for 10 years. How many industries would herald the prices of 10 years ago as a triumph?

  What it does signal is an end to food price deflation. This movement of milk price is driven by a world marketplace that is in turn driven by an increase in the consumption of dairy products, in Asia in particular, that is all part of a move to an improved diet by millions of people.

  For too long, dairy businesses in this country have thrived on the ability to buy cheap milk; from now on, if they want a dairy business, they will have to be able to pay the price or they will not have their raw material.

  We also produce chicken here and I read a recent article last week about a major supermarket selling fresh chicken by the hundreds of thousands for £2. That’s all very well for the consumer, but it completely avoids reality and gives the wrong impression of the value of food.

  We pay about 25p for day-old chicks and that’s when you are buying 50,000 at a time. We make just under 4p a bird before gas, electric, water and labour. Where’s the long-term sense in that?

  I KEEP telling myself that I won’t write a
bout the weather but weather is such a big part of farming life that I can’t avoid it. It’s Sunday morning, 7 o’clock, and I’ve just watched the cows go off to their daytime grazing — off they go with a spring in their step and with a clear sense of purpose. This is a daily triumph for optimism over reality because when they get to their daytime fields there is no grass there. By 12 o’clock they will be on their way back because they know there will be a feed of silage and beet pulp waiting for them.

  They are consuming silage in ever-increasing quantities while all around, grazing fields are assuming the dry, brown look that we call burning. When this happens in July, it usually means that the grass will not green over until September with its longer nights, heavier dews and, hopefully, some rain. They are forecasting even higher temperatures for the next few days, thank you very much, but one lesson I learned many years ago is that there’s no point in agonising about things over which you have no control. So I’ll just have to make the best of it, as usual.

  I’ve mentioned at the onset of our calving season, calf-feeding is now a big job. Last winter, I bought a plastic calf-feeder. It’s like two big bowls that are joined at their bases. One bowl acts as a base and the other bowl holds the milk and has 20 teats fitted to it. I suppose it looks a bit like an egg-timer. You tip the milk into the top half and the calves all suckle the teats. Sounds simple doesn’t it? It isn’t. You would think that the calves would all fan out around the feeder in a uniform way, but they don’t. They all suckle at an angle as if they were side on to their mother’s flank. This in itself shouldn’t be a problem either, but an important part of the suckling process, if you are a calf, is to give the teat a bit of a bunt now and again.