A Farmer's Diary

by Sally Urwin

  Monday 25th June

  Steve is cross today. He was out in the front and back fields, and about a hundred new molehills have appeared overnight. They’re everywhere; in some patches you can’t step between them and there’s no grass to be seen.

  Moles in moderation are good for the soil, but in this density they risk introducing harmful bacteria to the grazing, and can cause listeria in the sheep. They need controlling, but Steve and I can hammer in as many mole traps as we like and we never catch a single animal.

  We used to have a local mole catcher, but he’s retired, so instead we trawl the British Mole Catchers Register and find Allan, who is just up the road.

  He arrives the same day and has a look around our fields.

  ‘You’ve got a bad case of them,’ he says, after surveying the black heaps littered all over the fields.

  ‘I suppose you could say it’s a molemaggedon,’ I answer, waggling my eyebrows up and down.

  He looks at me, and a long silence stretches between us.

  ‘Right,’ he says. ‘I’ll come this week and lay some traps, and let’s see how many we catch.’

  After he drives away Steve shakes his head and wanders off across the yard.

  Tuesday 26th June

  Our crop specialist turned up at the farm today. Stewart (and his dogs) keeps a close eye on whatever we grow on our farm. He shows up every two weeks in his Land Rover and spaniels and walks in a zig-zag across our planted fields to look for weeds, diseases or pests.

  At the first sign of meadow grass, slugs or flea beetles, he places an urgent call to Jonty, our sprayer man.

  Jonty then roars down the road on his huge yellow sprayer and green tanker and trundles around the farm applying the recommended solution. We’re not an organic farm, but we’re not intensive farmers either, so we don’t use excessive amounts of agricultural chemicals, but we do need to protect our crops against diseases and pests.

  Stewart seems well pleased with our burgeoning crop of barley, and there’s no sign of any pests or black grass weeds, although he tells us he’s seen a fair few crows and pigeons on the soil, scoffing the newly sown seeds.

  Wednesday 27th June

  Steve is driving my little car up and down the road. There’s still a strange rumbling and knocking noise in the lower gears, but he’s booked it into the garage for another MOT.

  After lunch we wait by the phone for the mechanic to ring, hoping that it’ll squeak through the test without needing any expensive repairs. Eventually the call comes, and he explains that it’s managed to pass, although he recommends that we only run it for another twelve months, in case something important drops off. I give Steve a hug. He beams from ear to ear, pleased that he’s managed to fix it himself and get it back on the road. The car is held together by rust but at least it means I can putter about the countryside like before, without relying on anyone for lifts.

  Thursday 28th June

  The whole family is glued to the landing window. We’re watching the crows and pigeons that have landed on our barley and are stuffing themselves full of unripe grain.

  Cursing, Steve rushes outside and drags the gas-powered bird scarer out from the shed, and sets it up at the side of the barley field. Our days are now punctuated with three loud bangs every thirty minutes. After a while I don’t hear it any more and neither, it seems, do the birds. So we add the ‘Terror Hawk’ to the mix, which swings around on the end of a thirteen-foot telescopic pole. It seems to do the trick, stopping at least the pigeons from pilfering the seed.

  Later that afternoon I hear the noise of galloping feet as Steve charges upstairs and reappears with his gun over one arm. He then rushes outside and shoots three times. I’m in the kitchen, and I hear him march back into the house, and go upstairs and replace the gun in the lockable cabinet.

  ‘Crows,’ he says shortly, reappearing in the kitchen. Crows, ravens and jackdaws are very clever, and it’s clear that the bird scarer and pretend kite aren’t dissuading them from scoffing their fill of our expensive barley seed.

  The galloping feet and gunshots continue through the afternoon. By teatime Steve has shot two crows. We leave the bodies lying in the soil to warn off the other birds. Crows are clever enough to remember parts of the farm where they’ve been in danger, and will avoid any sign of a man with a gun.

  I’ve read a little about the habits of crows and admire them for their intelligence. But with the exorbitant price of seed we can’t afford to keep re-sowing fields just for their benefit.

  Saturday 30th June

  Another wedding on the farm.

  This time I’m stuck inside cooking tea, so I don’t get the chance to see what the bride is wearing.

  Steve has been out tinkering with his tractor and comes back for his evening meal.

  ‘What type of dress was she wearing?’ I ask.

  ‘It was white. And sort of long,’ he replies, stuffing himself with spaghetti.

  ‘And the bridesmaids?’

  There’s a long silence and finally, ‘I don’t know … sort of wafty, floaty kind of things,’ he says while fanning his hands vaguely about in the air. He perks up a bit. ‘One of the bridesmaid lasses had some amazing tattoos.’ He picks up the Hexham Courant and takes a slurp of tea. This is about the extent of Steve’s fashion knowledge.

  Monday 2nd July

  I spot Scabby the ewe by the back-field gate.

  She’s managed to squeeze her head under the garden fence and is delicately nipping off the flowers from my border, concentrating on the clematis bush. She’s grazed the lawn as far as she can reach, which is handy as she keeps the grass trimmed down around the fence posts.

  Scabby is still tame, and puts in a regular appearance whenever we cut the lawn, waiting patiently for the grass clippings that are flung over the wall.

  She’s lost the ‘toast rack’ appearance from early in the year, and has filled out quite nicely. Her jaw is still undershot, so she has a constant slobber of green round her mouth, where she’s been ineptly nibbling the grass and chewing her cud.

  But she seems to be holding her own, and Steve reckons that we could put her to the tup in September. As long as we keep an eye on her, she should be able to raise a lamb.1

  I shoo her away from the remaining flowers and sit next to her at the field gate to hand-feed her some apple slices. She loves Cox’s apples, and sucks in the chunks one by one, carefully checking over my pockets for any that I might have forgotten.

  When they’ve all been eaten she does a big gusty sigh, then ambles slowly back to the rest of the flock.

  Tuesday 3rd July

  Steve is cutting the hay field today, filling the air with the fresh smell of cut grass as the mower purrs along the meadow, leaving long rows of drying proto-hay behind the tractor.

  The hay needs to dry for three to four days until we ask Jonty the contractor to charge in and bundle it up into huge round bales.

  The grass is already starting to bleach in the sun and the kids run into the field to play, kicking the piles into the air and covering their knees in green stains and their clothes in tiny flecks of grass.

  Wednesday 4th July

  I saw a bumblebee outside our door today. He was crawling lethargically along the porch step. I filled a spoon with a drop of water and sugar and laid it alongside him and he dipped into the sugary solution. When I checked back, he’d gone. Hopefully the extra food had given him enough energy to continue his journey to wherever he was going.

  I’m less kind to wasps. They get swatted or sprayed. We do get a lot of spiders in our cottage, and I used to shriek every time I saw a big one. Now I’m less scared of them. I won’t squash them, as I don’t like the crispy splat noise they make, but I can manage to usher them out into the fresh air. No doubt they come straight back in again, but getting temporarily rid of them makes me feel better.

  Thursday 5th July

  I’ve spent a happy afternoon in the Northumbrian archives at the Woodhorn Museum, looking
up information about the history of our farm.

  I’ve found a wonderfully detailed hand-drawn map dated 1825, with all the old names of our farm fields and the position of the farm house before it was modernised by Mr Clayton.

  John Clayton lived at Chesters mansion in Northumberland in the nineteenth century. He was famous for saving long stretches of Hadrian’s Wall as well as remodelling farms to improve their efficiency. Our farm was redesigned by Clayton in the 1840s, and it’s still easy to see how the existing buildings would have been used for Victorian farming, with the brick chimney for the steam-driven threshing machine, the stables and stalls and the ranges of cattle yards with open-fronted hemmels that are so typical of Northumbrian steadings.

  The map is very precise and carefully records the name of each field on the farm. They include such gems as ‘Lady’s Crook’, ‘Golden Bourie’, the ‘Whins’, ‘Lumpy South Field’, ‘Lumpy North Field’ and ‘Henry’s Tack’.

  Some of them are self-explanatory. The ‘Lumpy’ fields still look bumpy due to the rigg and furrow that curves across the surface of the pasture.

  Golden Bourie refers to ‘bourie’ – an old word meaning a hill – and the soil in that particular field is still a bright yellow sandy colour.

  A ‘tack’ is a field that is rented out to other farmers to overwinter their sheep. Henry must have been a long-ago farm manager who earned a little extra money from renting out the grassland. Today that field is ploughed for barley, but it would still make a well-sheltered dry pasture for the winter months.

  And ‘whins’ is a name for tufts of long, scraggy-looking grass and gorse bushes. This is the field that we use for our horses as it’s not good enough for grazing sheep.

  Our wood didn’t exist in the 1830s, and doesn’t appear on the map, but looking at the hand-drawn tufts of grass denoting boggy ground, it’s not difficult to understand why they decided to plant the wetter grazing with saplings. The trees were coppiced and provided a valuable source of firewood and income, and they still make a good wind break across the bottom of the field. The wood is called ‘Angus’s Covert’, in memory of the farm manager who created it in the early 1900s. A ‘covert’ is a thicket in which game can hide. In popular memory Mr Angus was an enthusiastic member of the local hunt, so maybe he created the wood to encourage the old countryside adversary: the fox.

  I pore over the map, noting the different layouts of the ‘stack yard’ (where they stacked up hay bales and straw), the sand pit (where they dug out the pure sandy soil for building) and the tiny circles drawn to show where the wells were dug. The streams ‘Sparrow’s Letch’ and the ‘Welton Burn’ are carefully marked. The field fences in the 1830s sometimes look different to today’s boundaries, and this explains why some of our field fences make a sudden jink towards the left or the right, as a leftover from this historic layout.

  Friday 6th July

  Another day in the archives. I’ve found a photocopy of pages written in the 1890s that describe how Mr Angus, manager of High House Farm, entered and won a competition for the most efficient farm in the area. The pages describe the staff employed as cattle hands, stable lads and farmworkers, and how much they were paid (three shillings and as many potatoes as they wanted).

  The farmworker cottages were ‘one up and one down’, and in our own house the huge fireplace where the range once stood still exists in our living room, as does the marble ‘milk stone’ in the larder, where they used to put milk and cream to keep it cool in the summer.

  The farm buildings included ‘feeding hovels’, piggeries, cattle yards, stables for the many heavy horses on the farm, the dairy and the cutting edge of Victorian agricultural technology: the steam-driven threshing machine, with its tall red-brick chimney. The beautiful cobbled stall floors and the holes for the wooden partitions are still there in our machinery shed. The buildings show the low stone arches where the carts and wains lived, and you can just trace the circular shape of the gin gang behind the entrance to the brewery.

  This all makes me feel much more connected to the farmhands and shepherds who worked this land before me, and I begin to understand how a long unbroken line of men and women connect High House Farm to the past. Everything we do on the farm is done because we want to improve the land and the buildings for the next generation of farmers and farmworkers. I’m just a tiny chink in a very long chain.

  Saturday 7th July

  There hasn’t been any rain now for two weeks. The grass is crisping up in the heat, and some lambs in the back field squeeze through gaps in the fence to eat the longer grass at the side of the barley fields.

  Steve is worried.

  ‘Four months ago we were knee-deep in snow with no bloody grass, and now everything is burning up and there’s still no bloody grass! What’s next? Rivers of blood? Plagues of locusts?’

  It’s been the most extraordinary year weather-wise. It makes me long for the usual intermittent sunshine and regular grey drizzle that normally makes up a Northumbrian summer.

  Wednesday 11th July

  Early this morning I spot a dead lamb lying in the entrance of the front-field gate, and for the life of me I can’t work out what killed it.2 It doesn’t seem to have been attacked by a fox, and anyway the lambs are too big now to be taken by a hungry animal. There’s no obvious blood on the carcass. We pull it onto the bike and I see that it has mucus running from its mouth. It must be pneumonia or ‘watery mouth’.

  We bag up the dead lamb in a sheep feed bag and stow it in the corner of the old cattle pens. I walk into the field to find the mother and see if her other lamb looks poorly. She’s marked as number ‘25’ and she’s lying in a dip in the ground, her lamb tucked up next to her fleece. Catching him is another matter, but I manage to hook the curved end of my crook round his neck and pull him in for a check. He doesn’t have any snot running from his nose, but we can hear the slightly laboured breathing that might be the beginnings of pneumonia. Steve injects him with an antibiotic and we shoo both lamb and ewe out of the field and into the warmth of a shed.

  Pneumonia isn’t always a disease of cold and driving rain. Often, damp and warm weather for a couple of days can bring on the infectious disease. Hopefully by removing the pair from the field we’ll stop the spread of the illness and this lamb will survive.

  Thursday 12th July

  The next morning the poorly lamb looks better, but there’s still a faint ‘ruttle’ to his breathing. His mother is having the time of her life, having access to ad-lib silage and a regular delivery of sheep feed. We’ll keep an eye on them both, but they’re better under shelter.

  There’s a wedding at the brewery today, and all morning there’s been a steady flow of cake decorators, flower arrangers and musicians turning up to decorate the site and set up their instruments.

  The wedding ceremony is taking place in the hay barn, which has been decorated with a pink and cream flower arch and swags of beautiful roses from corner to corner. As always, Heather presides over the arrangements with an aura of tranquillity and calm. She’s been here since the early hours, and will stay right until the party finishes. Her staff are dressed in crisp black shirts and dark green aprons as they lay tables, set up the hog roast for the evening and make final adjustments to the decorations.

  We lean over our garden wall to watch the arrival of the guests. They come in a big red London bus. We’ve seen plenty of different wedding transport over the years, from a vintage combine harvester that struggled to make the turn into the farmyard, up to sleek Bentleys and cute antique VW camper vans.

  Suddenly, a big grey lorry appears around the corner, with vents cut into the top.

  ‘Oh hell,’ says Steve, ‘it’s the knacker van.’

  He’s forgotten that he’s organised for our local Fallen Stock collection company to pick up the dead lamb that had pneumonia. By law, we need to ensure the collection is done within twenty-four hours.

  The knacker company are incredibly efficient, but this spring has been so
dire that they must have been rushed off their feet. The van screeches into the farmyard, scattering the guests, before reversing in a hurry up to the sheds.

  Unfortunately, it’s quite a warm day, and the smell issuing from the vents at the top of the lorry isn’t very wholesome. The bride has already arrived on the arm of her father, and as she steps out the car her nose wrinkles at the sudden whiff of decomposing sheep.

  ‘Sorry! Sorry!’ shouts Steve as he charges past the marquee. Heather watches him with narrowed eyes as he instructs the driver to reverse into the sheds at the top of the yard. He waves at her apologetically. Shaking her head, she retreats into the brewery, ready to welcome the bride and her father.

  Ben, who loves the knacker van visits, rushes to pull on his wellies so he can see what dead animals are inside. The driver unlocks the back door and pulls down the ramp to reveal a sad heap of dead ewes, a limp Simmental heifer and a veritable mountain of lambs that the van has collected on its headlong trip around Northumberland.

  The driver pulls a sheaf of papers out of his pocket, peels off the top sheet and thrusts it at Steve. The poor dead lamb is added to the top of the heap inside, and once the doors are closed the driver hops back in and hurtles back out the yard.

  ‘Don’t go through the …’ starts Steve. ‘Oh. He has.’

  The smell of dead animal follows the van as it races through the yard full of guests, scattering them to both sides. We see smartly dressed visitors wafting wedding menus to try and dissipate the smell.

  We’ll have to apologise properly to Heather about the interruption to her day. Normally we keep as far away as possible from guests, as a couple of scruffy farmers isn’t really a great addition to any wedding.