Over the Farmer's Gate (14 page)

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.

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.