by Sally Urwin
Instead, we eat a takeaway, check the animals, put the kids to bed and go to bed ourselves, with Cinders the new kitten snoring happily on our feet. Before we go to sleep we raise our cups of tea and wish for a healthy year – happy kids, a good harvest, a good lambing and maybe a little profit in the bank.
Wednesday 3rd January
Today, Steve and I decide that our flock of in-lamb ewes need to come inside to be foot-bathed for scald, as their feet are beginning to get sore again in the wet and icy weather.
Our sheep are now fat, woolly and pregnant. They’re also exceedingly tame, especially whenever they get a sniff of a sheep nut.
I put on my usual sheep-wrangling kit: a warm fleece and a sad-looking black-and-white penguin hat that ties under my ears. I filched it from the kids’ wardrobe, as it was the warmest thing I could find. The penguin has lost one of its wings where the stitching unravelled, but in the driving rain of a January morning it keeps my ears and head toasty.
Steve hands me a bag of sheep nuts that is so big that the top of the plastic comes up over my nose.
‘You shake the bag of sheep feed at them, and they’ll follow you up the field and into the pens,’ he says.
I start trudging through the muddy field, making my usual ‘sheep call’: ‘Sheeeeepies! Sheeeeeepies! Come on sheeeeeepieeeees!’
I’ve spent the last few weeks shovelling in Quality Street, pigs in blankets and home-made Christmas cake, so it’s really hard going through the sticky mud.
The ewes look up, catch sight of the feed bag and belt up the field towards me, Mabel in the lead. I jog to stay ahead of them, trying to keep my feet over the soupiest, muddiest part of the grass.
The bag gets too heavy to shake and begins to dislodge my stupid penguin hat, so I heave it round to my front and clutch it to my chest.
The sheep get faster and faster, and I try to stay in front of the flock, wheezing and gasping, and batting at Mabel’s nose to keep her from tearing the feed bag out of my hands.
Just before the field gate they overtake me, and I’m swept on top of their woolly white backs. The sheep always speed up as they approach the pens, and they shoot past an astonished Sunday Lunch party, who watch as, with legs like a blur and my hat on backwards, I involuntarily race past them and into the yard at the top, managing a weak wave as I whizz by.
When I finally fight my way out of the pens I have lumps of mud and sheep poo from my eyebrows down to my ankles, and I sit down on a hay bale to recuperate. For a moment I think I’m going to have a heart attack.
The foot bathing is over in a jiffy and the sheep can now go back to their field. This time Steve has the sheep nuts and I sit on the bike.
Friday 5th January
When the weather is frosty and dry I like to go for a walk. It’s my favourite type of weather. The mud and clarts freeze over and the fields look stunning when they’re covered in a thin layer of white. When it’s very cold everything is outlined in ice: trees, leaves and grass. The low sun and bare trees mean I can see straight through all the branches and hedges, which would normally be cloaked in green. It sounds stark, but the farm still looks beautiful.
Today Mavis and I walk down to our wood.
As a working collie, Mavis doesn’t normally go on doggy-type walks, and for the first ten minutes she keeps trying to gather up the sheep. When I tell her to stop she’s confused, and doesn’t understand why I want to walk down through the fields when there’s perfectly good ewes to herd together.
But in the forest she begins to relax, and starts to play like other dogs, sniffing and pushing her way into the thick, tangled undergrowth, chasing rabbits and bounding across the brambles in hunt for interesting smells.
Today she’s like a domestic pet dog, and it’s lovely to see. I sometimes forget she’s only eighteen months old, little more than a pup. She races up to me, coat covered in burrs and her tongue hanging out of her mouth, and then bounces away again to investigate a foxhole she’s found under a tree stump.
Saturday 6th January
Today we’ve started giving extra feed to all the pregnant ewes. We need to feed them supplementary food to ensure that their placentas are secure, and that the lambs are growing properly inside them.
Each year Steve draws up a chart on the back of an old envelope detailing exactly how much poundage of sheep nuts we’ll need for each ewe. We’re already feeding the triplet ewes three quarters of a pound of nuts twice a day. Those ewes are inside the shed, so it’s an easy job to tip the nuts into their sheep trough. The sheep carrying twins and single lambs are still outside, and the feed therefore needs to be taken out to them in the field.
Steve puts two 25 kg bags of sheep nuts on the back of the quad and pours them straight into the long line of sheep troughs in the back field. The sheep belt over the hilltop towards him, and immediately gulp down their ration of nuts.
When I’m on my own I’m not strong enough to lift a whole bag of nuts, or tall enough to pour them into the troughs. Instead, all the ewes, maddened by the thought of dinner time, run at me in a stampede, and I go over like a bowling pin and get trodden on.
Today, after I stagger in covered in mud and sheep hoof prints, Steve has taken pity and gone out to the shed to pull out the ‘snacker machine’.
The snacker is a mechanical chariot on wheels that you fill with sheep nuts and pull behind your quad bike. There’s a button that you press to open the hopper at the bottom of the snacker to leave little heaps of sheep nuts at predetermined intervals on the grass.
It’s much more civilised, as there’s no need to get off the bike, so I don’t get flattened by hungry sheep and everyone gets the right amount of feed.
It also gives me time to sneak a few more nuts to my favourites, Mabel and Pudding, without anyone noticing.
Monday 8th January
Disaster. Steve got a phone call today and has been made redundant from his part-time job as a site manager. It’s not his employer’s fault, but rather the result of cutbacks in their own industry. We desperately need the income to bolster the lack of profit on the farm, but finding a new job, just before lambing, and with only part-time hours, will be a nightmare.
Tuesday 9th January
We’re still reeling from the fact that Steve has lost his job, but the farm doesn’t wait, and today we need to crack on with scanning our ewes.
Kevin the scanner has arrived with his ultrasound equipment to scan each of our ewes and find out how many lambs they’re carrying.
Knowing how many lambs each ewe holds means that we can supply each of them with the correct amount of feed, so that in April they will give birth to healthy singles, twins or triplets. The normal gestation is roughly five months, and it’s usual to scan halfway through lambing; any earlier and there’d be nothing to see. We’re hoping there won’t be many ‘geld’ or barren ewes, and that our tups have been doing their job.
We gather all the ewes into the barn and Kevin sets up his rig. It looks just like the equipment Hexham Hospital used in their antenatal department when I was pregnant with Ben and Lucy. Kevin sits in a battered old chair so he can see the computer screen. In front of him are three pots of paint: red, blue and orange.
Each ewe is coaxed down the sheep race into a small pen, where Kevin scans them and then marks their fleece with a blue blob of paint for a single lamb, a red blob for twins and an orange streak for triplets. Geld ewes get a purple spot between their shoulders.
It’s hard work keeping up a steady stream of ewes for him to scan. They’re all used to the sheep race and happily trot down the narrow corridor, but some stop dead when they see the scanning pen. They’ve never seen one before, and persuading them that we’re not doing something terrible is tricky. Pudding gets into the pen but then refuses to come out even though she can see her flockmates happily standing at the far end of the enclosure.
‘Come on Princess!’ shouts Kevin, giving her tail a squeeze. Pudding shoots out of the crate in a huff and trots over
to her friends, bleating loudly. She’s scanned as twins. My favourite ewe, Mabel, is also expecting twins. Spotty Nose, the oldest ewe and leader of the flock, is carrying triplets, and Mrs Snuff is having a single.
‘She might be the first to lamb,’ says Kevin, waving a paintbrush at Mrs Snuff. ‘Her lamb looks further on than everyone else’s.’
There’s one ewe that might have quadruplets. ‘I can’t definitely tell, but it looks like there’s four in there,’ says Kevin as he pushes the probe against her stomach. Sometimes a sheep ‘reabsorbs’ a lamb back into her womb, so there might eventually just be three. We’ll have to wait and see.
There’s only one geld ewe, and she gets a purple stripe between her shoulders. She might just be in the very early stages of pregnancy, so she’ll stay with her flock this year and have another chance at getting in lamb next autumn.
Overall we’re at 170 per cent – which works out at an average of two lambs per ewe. That’s just what we want. Too many triplets isn’t ideal as it means we would need to bottle-feed the third lamb, as sheep usually don’t have enough milk for more than two offspring. And we don’t want many singles, as the whole point of lambing is us trying to make as many lambs as possible.
Kevin packs up his stuff and races off to his next job, in Morpeth. We go home for a cup of tea, discussing how busy lambing will be this year. ‘All we have to do,’ says Steve, ‘is keep them all alive.’
Thursday 11th January
During his late-night check on the animals Steve spots a small, black car parked in the gateway of the back field. When he returns from putting extra hay in for the lambs it’s still there, engine idling. He hops onto the quad bike and trundles down for a nearer look. As he gets close, the car suddenly pulls out of the gateway and, without putting on its lights, accelerates off down the road.
He didn’t see the license plate or any of the people inside the car. Suspicious, but there’s nothing to report. We’re sent regular emails from FarmWatch, a rural police update, and they’re reporting that there’s been a spate of quad bike and equipment thefts in the area.
We sleep all night with one ear cocked, but everything seems quiet and still.
Friday 12th January
Mavis is absolutely filthy today. She’s been rolling in something disgusting and she is paws-to-ears covered in thick, black mud – very happy with herself. While the kids and I are waiting for the school bus we try to teach her to play football. She thinks we’re mental. Why are we kicking a round thing at her all the time? She waves her tail at us, looking confused, then slopes off to stare at the sheep in the front field.
Saturday 13th January
Bursting in through the door this morning, Steve drags me out on the quad to check the back field full of sheep.
‘Count them! I can only see sixty-one, but there’s supposed to be seventy-one!’
Mavis rounds them up and I quickly count up in multiples of two: ‘… fifty-eight, sixty, and one left over. There’s sixty-one. Why? Where’s the other ten?’ I ask.
‘I don’t bloody know. I’ll go and check over the hill,’ Steve replies.
He charges off on his quad, and I recount and recheck just to make sure. Yes, sixty-one ewes, all round and fat, happily munching on the haylage in the feeder.
Steve reappears, his teeth gritted. ‘Nope, there’s nothing in the fields next door. I reckon they’ve been stolen.’
Back at home we quickly ring round our neighbours to check that they haven’t suddenly found ten extra ewes in with their flock. They’d be easy to pick out, as they’re Texels – big, chunky animals – and they have a blue mark on their shoulder to show that they’re High House animals.
Steve’s on the phone to the police and reports back on his conversation.
‘Apparently we’re the third case in the last fortnight,’ he says with gritted teeth. ‘Some scrotey bastards are taking a few sheep at a time and sticking them in the back of a transit van.’
We troop out to look at the field. We’ve had a few frosty nights, so there’s hardly any tyre marks, but you can see that someone has driven into the field, and the ground is churned up round the gateway.
I’m gutted. We’re both gutted. The ewes were in-lamb, well looked after, happy and chunky. Now they’ve probably been forced into some van, squashed in and slaughtered for meat. We know their ear tag numbers, but it’s no use, as once butchered, who could tell where the carcasses were from?
I start muttering curses. ‘I hope their balls explode and roll down the bed. I hope they all die painful and horrible deaths. I hope …’
‘Ah, it’s no use,’ says Steve, suddenly looking defeated. ‘I should have heard them. It’s never happened before, but they must have been casing out the place beforehand.’
We suddenly remember the black car from a few days ago that had been idling in a gateway late at night. It must have been them.
Sunday 14th January
The police ring to have a chat. The coppers are very busy, so can’t spare much time. The lad on the phone makes us laugh.
‘Have the sheep got any identifying marks?’ he asks.
‘Well … they’re white and fluffy,’ says Steve deadpan.
There’s a cough from the other end of the phone, ‘No natural markings?’
‘They’re Texel ewes,’ explains Steve patiently, ‘so every one of them is just a big, white sheep.’
We get a crime number and an instruction to contact our insurers. The police reckon that our sheep will already be slaughtered by some back-street abattoir and be in the food chain by now.
This is what the Northumbrians must have felt like 500 years ago. You spend time and money building up your flock of sheep, lavishing care on each animal, and then along comes some scrofulous border reiver who nicks your best animal for his own larder.
Fortunately, we’re insured against theft, but claiming is a long, drawn-out affair, with many forms and instructions.
I can’t help thinking of the poor, bonny ewes squashed into a tiny van, terrified and then slaughtered in someone’s grotty allotment.
Monday 15th January
We’re feeling down about the theft, but Steve is busy gathering some lambs together to sell at two sales this week at Hexham Mart.
The withdrawal period for the scab medicine is over, so we’re free to sell last year’s lambs. Most of them are a good weight, as we’ve had them inside over November and December, and we’ve been feeding them on concentrates.
The fattest will go into the ‘prime stock’ sale. We call it the ‘fat’ trade, and it’s for animals that are heavy enough to be sold as meat. They’ll be bought at the Mart by a dealer, and shipped to a licensed UK abattoir, slaughtered and sold as prime lamb. These lambs are now almost nine months old, and they’re already big, woolly, full-grown animals.
It’s a difficult thing to think about, raising animals for slaughter, and I’m not trying to put a gloss on it. We have pride in the lambs we produce. We raise them to the highest standards and give them a good life. But there’s no getting away from the fact that they are shipped off to be slaughtered at nine months old.
I have read and heard all the arguments from vegans and vegetarians that accuse us of animal cruelty and that no one should raise animals for them to enter the food chain. If I’d never worked on a farm, or seen how lambs are produced, I’d also find the animal production industry confusing.
But I know our lambs are killed without pain or suffering. I’ve seen it done. At the abattoir they’re kept in special pens for a few hours before being moved through a sheep race. The sheep have done this on a farm hundreds of times before, so they don’t understand that anything is different. They go through a plastic curtain one by one and are quickly killed by attaching electrodes to either side of their skulls that delivers a huge bolt of electricity and at the same time having their throats cut. It’s quick and painless. There’s no panic and no suffering.
And I’m proud that our meat is produced
to the highest quality and to the highest standard of animal welfare.
Tuesday 16th January
We took thirty ‘fat’ lambs off to the Mart and we sold them for around £85–90 each. This is a good price, especially as we’re still so desperate for cash. Steve is always nervous on Mart days, as the trade depends on so many variables.
Lucy had named one of the lambs ‘Thorney’ and is a bit upset at the thought of her going off to be sold.
‘Come on love, you’re a farmer’s daughter. You knew exactly what was going to happen to Thorney,’ I say to her over supper.
‘And she made 88 quid!’ shouts Steve tactlessly from the kitchen.
Lucy sniffs, and nods, and tucks into her shepherd’s pie.
Friday 19th January
No news on the sheep theft.
I post the information on Twitter asking for retweets and get some heartfelt replies.
‘Bastards. Sorry to hear this. If you need an impromptu lynch mob or witch hunt forming, happy to be in on the action.’
‘They are the lowest of the low! May they catch scrofula and their “equipment” fall off!!’
‘May they die roaring! Sorry to hear this. And I hear you about the not knowing how the girls are being treated.’
I love the farming community on Twitter. Some of them have become firm friends, and are a great support even though I’ve never met them in real life.
From a recommendation by a farmer in Devon we’ve contacted a firm called TecTrace, which uses ‘microdotting’ technology in sheep marker paint to deter thieves. I’m going to wait to read their blurb before deciding whether to use it or not. They also provide great big signs saying ‘These sheep are TecTrace protected’, which might make future sheep rustlers think twice before targeting us again.