Over the Farmer's Gate

by Roger Evans

  The feeder is quite big; it stands about 3ft 6in tall and is about the same across. If there are 20 calves to feed, I put in about 10 gallons of milk. So we’ve got about a ton of calves, a lot of milk and, as if at some unseen given signal, all the calves give the feeder a combined push. The problem with this is that one half of the feeder screws into the other. Some days they all push clockwise; this is fine because it just tightens the two halves together, but some days they all push the other way around, which starts to unscrew things. My aim is to get the 10 gallons of milk into the calves. If everything comes apart, the 10 gallons of milk will soon be on the floor and I will have to start all over again.

  In the next pen to the calves that star in the twice-daily pantomime of me trying to feed them, is a very different calf. This is a black and white heifer calf born about five weeks premature. It’s smaller than my border collie but I’ve decided I will rear it. It’s always been fundamental to my life as a farmer that I will do my best to keep things alive. It’s a firmly held principle that is nothing to do with profit. In fact, time and time again, it has proved to be a very costly principle. Apart from being tiny, and to a degree emaciated, this little calf has shrunken, crinkled ears, so altogether it looks a poor thing. When I go to feed the calves, it struggles to its feet and so far gives itself a bit of a stretch. This is always a particularly good sign. I’ve got it on a diet of warm milk, glucose and an egg twice a day — my wife hasn’t spotted the egg deficit yet. As soon as it has finished its food, it scuttles off to the corner of its pen and lies down until next feeding time.

  This is quite a common phenomenon with calves. You often see it in calves that are born outside. They will have a feed and then hide themselves in some long grass or a clump of nettles. Sometimes you can spend ages looking for them. I think this particular calf is looking for somewhere to die but so far I haven’t let it. If it survives it will acquire a name, probably related to the state of its ears, but the superstitious element in me says it is too soon, tempting providence, to give it a name.

  I WAS on the tractor again yesterday in that field next to those neighbours who ignore me. It has become a bit of a challenge, try as I will, to catch their eye. I could blow the tractor horn but that would be too easy. One of them, the male, was trimming his boundary hedge so he was actually facing me; he kept his head lower and lower every time I passed. In the end, I was putting my head lower and lower as well, which was ridiculous. I bet I’d get his attention and his conversation if I drove into the hedge. I won’t be beaten on this.

  ON THE WILDLIFE front everything seems to have gone floppy with the heat. I took a friend for a ride around the fields and he was delighted to see so many hares about. On the basis that healthy hare populations are said to be a good indicator of a healthy countryside, I feel just a little bit proud. I have a saying that I usually trot out when things go wrong ‘Just when you think things can’t get any worse, they do.’ Well, on the wildlife front, things have taken a turn for the worse.

  A family of mink has been seen on the estate. Voracious killers, not just for food, but endless in their pursuit of birds and mammals. The damage they cause to wildlife is endless as well. Many are descendants of mink that were released into the wild by poor misguided souls who had no idea of the implications of what they were about. I can remember a time when there was a bounty on grey squirrels’ tails. It’s a pity that there isn’t one today. Grey squirrels and mink were both introduced from elsewhere in the world and have no place here. I’ve never seen a red squirrel within 200 miles and I would love to see one as I went around the farm.

  WE WERE one of the first to finish our silage around here and everyone is now catching up with the season and the delay caused by the wet weeks in May. Everywhere I look fields are being stripped of grass and sheep are being stripped of wool. We don’t keep sheep anymore. I miss them but I don’t miss the shearing. We never kept many sheep until I was about 50 years old, when we moved up to about 400 ewes. I thought it appropriate to learn to shear, which was quite late in life, but I did, and even sheared for other people occasionally.

  We used to shear our ewes in the field and, unfortunately for me, the field was next to the pub. Two friends used to help me and, besides being paid to shear, my helpers used to think it appropriate that I took them to the pub for sausage and chips at lunchtime, plus a couple of pints. Large quantities of coke and lemonade were carried back in the afternoon and ‘naturally’ I would want to buy them a couple of pints when we finished in the evening. It used to be two hard days’ work, plus wages, plus my tab at the pub.

  One year, for various reasons, my help wasn’t available and so I employed ‘professional’ shearers. We were finished by 3pm on day one. All I had done was sit on a bale and watched and then put a blue E on each ewe’s backside as it was finished. It cost me about half of what it was costing before, I hadn’t broken sweat and my back didn’t feel as if it was about to break in two!

  After that salutary experience I used to use some young shearers from the rugby club. It was a Saturday job, again we were finished by 3pm, their wives and girlfriends knew all this but struggled to understand why their partners were still not home by midnight. There’s something satisfying about being in a pub on Saturday evening, filthy with sheep grease and smell when everyone else is dressed up. They used to look down their noses at us, and turn their noses up at us when they smelt us, but as we’d been in the pub two or three hours by then we didn’t care. It reminded them that they were drinking in a rural area.

  A friend of mine went to shear two sheep that were owned by some ‘newcomers’ who had bought the two sheep to keep the grass down in a small orchard. The sheep were called Mary and Ivy. Mary had a little lamb, but then she always did, didn’t she? My friend sheared Ivy first. ‘Ivy hasn’t had a lamb yet, Mr Jones.’ ‘No, I can see that.’ ‘Do you think she will have one this time?’ ‘No I don’t. In fact, I don’t think she ever will.’ ‘Oh dear, why ever not?’ ‘Well you see this little swelling in the middle of ‘her’ belly; well that’s where ‘she’ pees. If a sheep pees there it isn’t a female sheep, it’s a male.’ Ivy quickly became Ivor and as far as I know he’s still alive and well and keeping the grass down in the orchard.

  I WAS reminiscing about the passing of our village blacksmith recently and inevitably my mind doesn’t just stop there, it goes on and remembers stories of long ago that were passed down.

  They were quite remarkable in the fun involved, given that all those years ago the life of a farm labourer and his family must have been so difficult and the farmer employer would have a huge hold over a man, as almost all of them lived in a cottage that was tied to the job.

  Step over the line and job and home could be gone in two weeks’ time. But despite that, they did have fun and here is one of the stories.

  At the other end of the village to the blacksmith was a cottage that had with it three acres or so of ground. For the time, that ground was, compared with the lot of the farm worker, riches beyond belief.

  If life was hard, and it was, there would be some envy and resentment – and the lucky man who had the bit of ground wasn’t particularly nice anyway.

  Every year this man would watch the progress of the hay harvest on the farms around the village. Most of these farms were of 400 or 500 acres and might employ five men.

  As the hay harvest was drawing to a close he would get someone to mow his hay crop and over the following days he would turn it twice a day by hand. With immaculate timing it would be ready just as everyone else had finished, so it had become traditional for most of the men in the village to go to his field after tea with pitch forks, they called them pickles around here, and gather it up by hand and carry it forkful by forkful to the barn and put it safely into the dry.

  It might sound an impossible job in today’s mechanical world but there might be 10 or 12 of them and in three or four hours of very hard work they would have the job done.

  They would all be paid on
the night and it became tradition for them all to walk the mile or so to the nearest pub and no doubt they would drink all the money they had earned that evening. But why not? And good luck to them.

  But one year things didn’t turn out as expected. When they lined up to be paid, the pay was less than the year before. The resentment and envy festered to the surface and harsh words were exchanged. The man with the field wasn’t to be moved – he had all sorts of excuses and it wasn’t the usual jolly crowd that made its way to the pub that night.

  Instead of the drink and the company lifting their mood, they became more morose and when they walked back down the lane at 10pm, revenge was in the air.

  Unfortunately for the man with the field, it was a beautiful moonlit night. The labourers paused at his gateway to collect their pitchforks, looking at the cleared field and smelling the new hay sweet and safe in the barn.

  Into the field they went and over the next three hours they carried all the hay back out of the barn and put it back in the rows in the field just exactly as it had been when they arrived that evening.

  You can only imagine the reaction of the man with the field when he went to the gate next morning. He must have done what is sometimes described as a double take. His mind must have gone through a rapid sequence: who did this; why did they do it; what am I going to do now; and more importantly, what’s the weather forecast?

  He had to go from cottage to cottage seeking help. Everyone was expecting him but they made him grovel. And then there was the matter of payment to decide.

  The hay was returned safely to the barn that night, none the worse for its adventures. The men had two nights in the pub that week, and a good story to tell, too.

  ON ALTERNATE Fridays I have to take calves to market. I usually arrive at market by 11.15am for an 11.45am start but these starts have been delayed recently because it’s the time of year when people sell ewes and where I go to market, the ewes are sold before the calves. It’s no good being impatient, so I lean on a gate and watch the sheep trade.

  The market for sheep has never been better: driven by our currency that has helped exports, against the New Zealand currency that hasn’t helped their exports. If you spot a sheep farmer today it’s just about as close as you will ever get to seeing a happy farmer.

  In today’s market place they take a trailer load of sheep to market and they can’t get all the money in the same trailer to get it home.

  Yesterday I watched them selling the Clun Forest rams. Forty to 50 years ago, the Clun was the most popular breed of sheep in the UK. Now it’s something of a rarity on farms. Traditionally I think there were more than 30 breeds of sheep in the UK and on top of that, endless permutations of crosses. These days the most popular cross is called a North Country Mule, which is a cross between a Blue Faced Leicester ram and a Swaledale ewe, but there are Scots Mules, Welsh Mules and just about everything else you can think of.

  When the champion Clun ram came into the ring yesterday I thought it would make about £300. It made £310. I thought to myself that I wasn’t involved in sheep but I was spot on as a sheep valuer!

  I was reading a history of the Cluns recently. On one day in 1928, I think it was, there were 22,000 sold on one day in Craven Arms. Two days later a different firm of auctioneers had a similar large sale in the same town.

  In those days, all the sheep were walked in to the sale and the historians noted that there were so many flocks of sheep being driven down the valley from the Clun Forest area to Craven Arms that shepherds arriving at junctions to the main road would sometimes have to hold their sheep back for 20 minutes before there was a gap in the procession sufficient for them to join.

  Years ago I was in the area and had a day shearing Clun ewes within sight and sound of Clun church. There’s not many of us left who can say that.

  WE ARE not big on spraying on this farm, particularly on grassland, preferring not to do it at all. This is mainly because, in removing docks and thistles, you remove clover as well.

  But eventually we have to go in with spray and in the following years we put some clover seed in with the fertiliser and hopefully put the clover back.

  The only grass field we’ve had to spray this year is a seven-acre field on our boundary. Thankfully it’s on everyone else’s boundary as well, because it’s well out of sight from all directions.

  Because we want the spray to work properly we can’t take the topper in there to trim it so when I had to go in there last week to fetch the cows I was ashamed of it. There were dead stalks of thistles everywhere and clumps of nettles in all their glory.

  It’s a theory of mine that nettles will one day take over the world – the spray we use for thistles checks nettle but it only gives them a headache and in a couple of weeks they are back on full power.

  So it was with great delight that I gave it a really good tidy up. I gave it the agricultural equivalent of the No.3 you would get at the hairdressers.

  I don’t think there will be any thistles in there next year and I have plans for the nettles.

  But it’s amazing what you see when you are on a tractor. After spraying I drove slowly back to the gate and there, sitting on the top bar, also admiring what I’d done, was a hen turkey. I should add that I was nearly two miles away from where I see wild turkeys quite regularly and I’ve never seen one there before.

  I turned the tractor off and sat and watched her and she, in turn, watched me. I watched for ten minutes and as far as I could see she was on her own. When I eventually drove on I wondered what a lonely life she must live, going about her business on her own with one eye looking for a fox.

  I quite like the idea of turkeys being about and contemplated Christmas and taking my grandchildren out to find a Christmas tree and a turkey dinner on Christmas Eve. It’s a Christmas card vision but it’s not for here.

  Our Christmas tree goes up in the middle of November and the state my wife gets in at Christmas, you’d have to shoot your turkey at least a week before if she was to feather it properly.

  THE ONSET of autumn brings a different look to the countryside. Having taken 90 acres of third-cut silage, and with all neighbouring corn crops now cleared, the land is in a way denuded, all the wrapping has been taken off and the wildlife is there for all to see.

  As we’ve taken previous silage crops there has always been a crop of some sort adjacent to it that was convenient as a cover for disturbed wildlife. The only cover now are the blocks planted to provide food for wildlife in the winter.

  My top land is splendidly isolated, but the autumn brings more visitors to it than at any other time of the year. Mainly they are contractors who arrive to do the silage. First up is the man who cuts all the grass. A former national ploughing champion, he does, as you would expect, a very tidy job.

  I stop him for a chat; we talk about the crop and then he says: ‘Boy, you’ve got some hares up here. I haven’t seen so many hares for a long time.’ It’s inevitable that he should see them; the man with the mower does most of the ‘disturbing’ that goes on. When the gang arrives the next day to pick the grass up, I get similar comments from them.

  The comments about the hares make me proud and pleased, almost like a parent at speech day. Not that I’ve done anything to help them to multiply but then, again, I’ve done nothing to hinder them either and, as you well know, I always keep a watchful eye over them.

  My wife occasionally accompanies me around the fields in the evening and warns me of trouble to come if the hares eat her blackberries. It’s not long before she will come up here on her own to pick them.

  I sometimes think she is a humanoid squirrel and hoards them, because very few end up on any plate that I see. She must have a freezer full of them by now. Bare fields show me what the birds of prey are up to as well. Yesterday there was a buzzard as big as a turkey dining on a full-grown rabbit in the middle of a field.

  On Sunday, there were two walkers on the footpath on the very top field. I always drive over to pass th
e time of day; this comes as a surprise to some, who see the approach of a farmer as a prelude to a ticking-off. They turn out to be Americans: ‘Boy, you sure do have some big rabbits around here.’ My hares are a bit of a focal point at the moment.

  We’re just about coming to the end of our harvesting. There’s a scraggy field of maize to take home and we might have a bit of fourth-cut silage at the end of September, but we’re on the last field of straw bales, and that seems to be coming to an end. I’m with my young assistant, I’m driving the loader, and he’s supposed to be moving the trailer about the field from bale to bale.

  It’s normally him on the loader and me on the trailer, but we have a role-reversal because he says he’s too tired to drive the loader today. This, as I load the bales, is a source of some reflection.

  I must be 50 years older than him; I work much longer hours, yet he’s tired. What really surprises me is the fact that he would admit to someone my age that he was too tired to do what he expects me to do. As I load the bales, there’s not much movement of tractor and trailer to make my job any easier.

  The field we are in is quite steep in places and it’s not that easy to put a load on tidily. When we pull the full load on to a flat bit, it isn’t tidy at all. It’s 5.30pm by now, it’s Friday evening, and my assistant is ready to go.

  I won’t let him go until we strap the load on further. I know from past experience that annoyance equals very fast tractor driving and we have to take this load through the village.