Over the Farmer's Gate (15 page)

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. What 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.