Over the Farmer's Gate (16 page)

IF ANYON E asks me, in greeting, how I am, I have a bad habit of saying: ‘I’m struggling.’ I hadn’t given it much thought until I read a book devoted to positive presentation.

To say you are struggling is very negative – it’s much better to say: ‘I’m really well thank you, things are good, how are you?’ If you had said that as a dairy farmer, over recent years, to anyone who knew anything about dairy farming, that person would presumably have thought you very positive but a liar.

But this year on the farm has been a bit of a struggle. We started
the year with my son off work for eight weeks with a broken ankle. We had the most benign April any of us can remember, then we had the monsoon season, which not only went on and on, but finished with a sort of crescendo of floods and damage.

Weather we can usually cope with, but then our only full-time employee has been absent from work for about 10 weeks now, having suffered a stroke. I’m away on business two or three days most weeks, so when my son David has about 90 per cent of his help missing, struggle is the right word.

Caring for and milking our animals comes first; where we are off the pace is with all the repairs, renewals and tidying up jobs that we can usually catch up on during the summer. Recent August days have had an autumnal feel to them, so how far away is winter and its heavy workload?

Most people who work here become good friends and part of the family, so Jim’s recovery is uppermost in our minds. We certainly miss him coming around the corner every day.

ON PREVIOUS occasions I have mentioned milk prices. Well, they are finally turning the corner. We haven’t exactly found the end of the rainbow but it now seems likely that the price of milk, as it leaves farms, will return to levels we haven’t seen for 10 years. How many industries would herald the prices of 10 years ago as a triumph?

What it does signal is an end to food price deflation. This movement of milk price is driven by a world marketplace that is in turn driven by an increase in the consumption of dairy products, in Asia in particular, that is all part of a move to an improved diet by millions of people.

For too long, dairy businesses in this country have thrived on the ability to buy cheap milk; from now on, if they want a dairy
business, they will have to be able to pay the price or they will not have their raw material.

We also produce chicken here and I read a recent article last week about a major supermarket selling fresh chicken by the hundreds of thousands for £2. That’s all very well for the consumer, but it completely avoids reality and gives the wrong impression of the value of food.

We pay about 25p for day-old chicks and that’s when you are buying 50,000 at a time. We make just under 4p a bird before gas, electric, water and labour. Where’s the long-term sense in that?

I KEEP telling myself that I won’t write about the weather but weather is such a big part of farming life that I can’t avoid it. It’s Sunday morning, 7 o’clock, and I’ve just watched the cows go off to their daytime grazing — off they go with a spring in their step and with a clear sense of purpose. This is a daily triumph for optimism over reality because when they get to their daytime fields there is no grass there. By 12 o’clock they will be on their way back because they know there will be a feed of silage and beet pulp waiting for them.

They are consuming silage in ever-increasing quantities while all around, grazing fields are assuming the dry, brown look that we call burning. When this happens in July, it usually means that the grass will not green over until September with its longer nights, heavier dews and, hopefully, some rain. They are forecasting even higher temperatures for the next few days, thank you very much, but one lesson I learned many years ago is that there’s no point in agonising about things over which you have no control. So I’ll just have to make the best of it, as usual.

I’ve mentioned at the onset of our calving season, calf-feeding is now a big job. Last winter, I bought a plastic calf-feeder. It’s
like two big bowls that are joined at their bases. One bowl acts as a base and the other bowl holds the milk and has 20 teats fitted to it. I suppose it looks a bit like an egg-timer. You tip the milk into the top half and the calves all suckle the teats. Sounds simple doesn’t it? It isn’t. You would think that the calves would all fan out around the feeder in a uniform way, but they don’t. They all suckle at an angle as if they were side on to their mother’s flank. This in itself shouldn’t be a problem either, but an important part of the suckling process, if you are a calf, is to give the teat a bit of a bunt now and again.

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.