Over the Farmer's Gate (7 page)

ABOUT EIGHT years ago a farmer at a show told me how he had gone to market in a brand new Land Rover, bought some cattle and duly backed his trailer up to the loading pens.

At market there are gates to put in place for loading and he’d dropped the ramp of his trailer and gone to get the cattle, putting various gates in place as he went. It is then a simple task to drive the cattle back to the trailer.

The first cattle went on to the trailer ramp and the trailer sat up in the air because in the few minutes he had been away (and never out of sight) someone had taken the Land Rover.

The worst bit was still to come; his insurance company wouldn’t pay out a penny because he had left the keys in the Land Rover.

At that time, we as a family never took a key out of any vehicle, day or night. I went home that night and established a new regime whereby all keys had to be taken out at all times.

At first it was a damn nuisance – so many time I walked up to the yard, got in the car and then had to go back in the house for the keys.

There was another new regime established here last night. I locked the kitchen door when I went to bed. It felt really strange; I would guess that it’s the first time the door has been locked in 45 years. In fact, we had no idea where the key was and had to buy a new lock just to get a key!

Last week my wife had some money stolen out of the drawer in the kitchen. It’s money she puts by for Christmas. If I’d known it was there I could have warned her someone would steal it – I’d have had some myself.

It’s left a really strange collection of feelings, the worst of which is the sort of witch-hunt that goes on in your mind as you search for culprits.

It’s not fair on us and it’s not fair on the people who work here. It was too much money not to involve the police, not that I think they will find anyone – there was little enough for them to work on and no forced entry.

What is a shame is that it has changed the way we live our lives. The shed where we keep all our tools is wide open and that’s next on our list of ‘to dos’.

Strangely, when we came to live here over 40 years ago, every shed, loose box, granary and cattle yard was locked every night with a padlock and the farm foreman had to take this huge bunch of keys to the house every night when he finished work.

The reason for that would almost certainly have been the fact that they were only just coming out of an era when farm workers lived (only just) on subsistence wages.

Most of them would have poultry, or if they were the lucky ones, they would have had a pig. There would be hardly any waste food in their lives and the bosses’ grain stores would be very attractive.

The place where the corn grinder was kept was built with 2in-thick boards and was as impenetrable as Fort Knox.

Life always goes in cycles, and here we are locking things up again. It makes me a bit sad.

WE HAVE three fields of maize this year, which is more than usual. One of the fields should have gone into winter wheat last autumn but the ground was too wet to do a tidy job of working and sowing, so we decided it was better to leave it.

With modern kit and powerful four-wheel drive tractors it is possible to sow a crop into soil conditions that you just would not have contemplated years ago. But if the soil is not right you will see the results come spring, with lots of bare patches where the crop has simply not grown.

Two of our maize crops were sown by 7 May, which is the date I always have in my mind as a deadline. We’re in borderline maize-growing country here because of our height above sea level and if we sow it any earlier, it can suffer damage from late frosts.

Our worst growing years are hot, dry ones, because we have a low depth of soil and the grass will die off (we call it burning). Maize will thrive in those conditions and keep on growing and bulk up.

You can concentrate on producing top quality forage as much as you like but if you run out of forage at the end of January you are, to put it mildly, in a bit of a mess. Maize is a good banker for a dry year.

Our third field of maize was sown about 10 days later. This was because it was being planted into a grass field from which we wanted to firstly take some silage.

So we took a crop of grass and then there followed a frantic week, spreading manure, ploughing and working it down and, of course, drilling the maize.

We have a good young lad who works here part time but he also has his own tractor and he soon gets tempted away to join
silage gangs for large contractors, so the week turned out to be more frantic than we thought.

Anyway, the maize went in in good order and because it was later going in we drilled it at a lower seed rate, 40,000 an acre, so that the plants mature a bit quicker in the slightly shorter time they will have.

The dog and I, driving past the field a couple of days later, reckoned between us that there were 200-300 rooks on there. This might have been OK but then again, it might not. There was a fair chance they were eating grubs, which was good. But while they stab away in the soil looking for grubs they could turn up a bright yellow thing and think: ‘Look everybody, corn on the cob.’

The dog, who is a lot brighter than me, reckoned that 250 rooks eating 10 seeds a day for a week would make a fair inroad into the 40,000 we drilled.

I reckoned it was much worse than that because they cart a lot more than that back to their nests.

Clearly, we needed to monitor the situation closely. It can, if you let it, drive you to distraction. They would be there just after 4am until late at night. I could get up early and fire a shotgun at them but I doubt if I’d ever hit one; it would just make me feel better.

My neighbours, on the other hand, wouldn’t like it at all. Nor would they like bird-scarer guns going all day.

There had to be a better way. A quick phone call to the keeper and within an hour he had shot one rook and examined the contents of its crop, which was full of grubs, so I had nothing to worry about.

He said he would shoot another in three or four days time to see if their diet had changed. But in three or four days time there wasn’t a rook to be seen and the maize was coming up fine.

Summer

WE’VE BEEN doing our silage these last two days. It’s a contractor who does the work, and he can clear 60 or 70 acres a day if everything goes OK. He has a huge machine that picks the crop up, chops it up and blows it into trailers. Today, there are four tractors and trailers carting the cut grass and they are struggling to keep him going. It’s a bit ‘rip and tear’, or would ‘frenetic’ be a better way to describe it?

Our farm adjoins a B-road, and where you join it as you come out of our farm, it is not that easy to see oncoming traffic. We have a couple of young lads driving tractors so I thought a bit of safety wouldn’t go amiss. I bought two big red triangles with pictures of tractors in the middle and I nailed these signs on to pallets. I put one either side of the junction, giving about 100 yards warning of the hazard. I thought I was doing something that would make young lives safer. I didn’t realise my own would be at risk. You’d think someone carrying a pallet across the road with a big red triangle fixed to it would attract attention. I was glad to get back into the Discovery. I certainly wasn’t safe putting the signs up. So I’ve done my bit. Does anyone pay any attention?
Not that I’ve seen. If it wasn’t so serious, it would almost be funny. Going to work in the morning is the most dangerous time, with builders in vans, late for work and eating bacon sandwiches, and women doing 70mph while they put their make-up on.

IT CAN be very exciting, going on holiday, but I always look forward to the first ride around the farm when I get back. I like to look at the stock and the fields and mentally note the changes that have taken place. I set off this morning also quite excited, which may seem a bit sad but to me it means that I find my everyday life fulfilling. I was looking particularly to see some improvement in the maize, and there was. The weedkiller has worked well and the plants have grown — a bit. I don’t know how many times I was told in France that the French maize looks better than mine — and it did.

THERE’S A LANE I travel every day to get to our other land. A kestrel lives somewhere near the lane, he or she has been there for years. I tend to drive along the lane slowly as I look over the hedges (being nosey) and the kestrel has taken to flying along in front of whatever vehicle, tractor or Discovery that I’m driving. At this time of year, the sound of an approaching vehicle can make fledglings cross the road from one hedgerow to the other. We don’t have to travel very far, the kestrel and I, before he has a meal. It leaves me feeling as if I were being used, which of course I am.

Through the window about 100 yards away is a small clump of trees I planted years ago in a wet place below our pond. There were two pairs of carrion crows there this morning kicking up a noise. I always think the word ‘alight’ is very descriptive. When
you say a bird alights it creates a vision of a bird landing gently on a bough. It doesn’t describe in any way what these carrion crows are up to this morning. They are working the clump of trees methodically to flush out game and when they see the game they crash into the branches and bushes with force. Their behaviour tells me that there are some fledglings about that have just left the nest and they are hunting them down. I don’t know what species they are chasing but I see all this going on and it really annoys me.

I’d like to put some lead shot into them but they’d be long gone before I got into range, they’d watch me from a safe distance and return to their slaughter as soon as I disappeared. By lunchtime they will have done their worst and moved on somewhere else. Some people blame farmers for the decline in songbirds, when all about me I see birds of prey and other predators wrecking havoc with bird populations.

At this time of year our dry cows, cows that are resting between one spell of giving milk and the arrival of their next calf, are all away on our other land and it is important to check them closely every day. I need to see if they are approaching calving and that their udders are healthy. A modern dairy cow’s life is a busy one and this eight to 10 week period of rest and relaxation is an important time. We check their feet before they go away and trim them if necessary; a few weeks off concrete, recharging their batteries, works wonders. My holidays seem to do the opposite for me but then my dry cows don’t stay up too late and drink too much wine.

Earlier this morning, I saw a hare and a pheasant sitting in the maize. I see hares and pheasants in the maize every day, so what’s different about these two? Well, they were both sitting close together. If the pheasant’s wing had been an arm it could have put it around the hare. I watched them for five minutes before
I moved on and they were still there. What do you reckon was going on?

IT’S MORE than a month now since I went around the landlord’s 6m margins with the topper. There is supposed to be a 2m strip cut into these margins on the side nearest the field.

It was once explained to me that these were for birds to dry off after heavy rain. If that is true, then the strips will have come into their own this year.

What particularly caught my eye was how much these margins have changed in their nature and composition in the three or four years they have been there.

I was also told that the idea of the margins was to provide wildlife corridors around fields. When we first left them they were obviously also a valuable food source because what was left to grow was the remnants of what was there before, be it grassland or cereals.

These would obviously go to seed and provide a good food source for birds in the winter. But the nature of these margins is changing with time.

Most of the food sources have now disappeared and boar thistles and ragwort catch my eye. This last year, I have noted that the beginnings of trees are appearing, especially blackthorn and saplings, that look a bit like willow but obviously aren’t.

Given a few more years, I don’t think these margins will be doing what they are supposed to. I was always told that they were RSPB-inspired, and you have to ask yourself if these people who seek to take over the countryside actually know what they are doing. In a few years’ time I will probably report that we have had to take a chainsaw to the margins so that wildlife can get through.

TODAY I’m topping a field, cutting off grass that has given way to seed, of which there’s a fair bit, but mostly where dung pats have been deposited thus far in the grazing season.

There are a few thistles and lots and lots of docks. I like to hear docks going through the topper so there are lots of nice noises coming from behind me.

There are quite a few plants that I call burdocks – I’m not really sure if that’s the right name. It’s a plant that grows a sort of burr that clings to your clothes. They have a tough woody stem and go through the topper with a clunk.

I decide that the docks have gone beyond what is acceptable and therefore decide, as I drive along, that I will spray them when they regrow.

There’s quite a lot of white clover in this field and that will disappear with the spray, but I can put some clover back into it – it’s better to lose the docks.

Cock pheasants are at the skulking stage of their annual cycle and when I start the process of topping there’s not one to be seen but as I progress with my work, one by one they come out of the undergrowth and when I go to the gate, job finished, I look back and count 20 cocks in the field.

The hens I’ve disturbed can’t be seen and so far this year I’ve not seen a pheasant hen with chicks. I ponder on the subject of burdocks. There used to be a soft drink available in my childhood called dandelion and burdock – a sort of coke-coloured drink – but just which part of either plant was used to make it, I have no idea.

LAST WEEK saw the last ever Royal Show at Stoneleigh. If someone had told me that 20 years ago I would never have believed them. In the past we always went in a car-load, going
early and coming back late.

We would rest on large stands provided by the banks, who would offer a gin and tonic without even asking if you were a client.

There would be countless stands selling wine and farmers who looked a bit affluent would be encouraged to try a few samples.