February 2001

Since we couldn't put our "mums" through the market, we have been wondering what to do with them. Options include, finishing them ourselves and selling as home grown beef in boxes, putting them back in calf and selling them with a calf at foot, just carrying them over into the OTM scheme (beef cows must be slaughtered before they are 30 months old since the BSE crisis. Cattle that go over thirty months but are otherwise fit and healthy can be culled and a payment is made under this scheme), we could put them back in calf and use them as the basis of our own suckler herd. So many things to learn about and so many decisions to be made - and what to do for the best? We hope to send the other 9 off to market next month, although they are very small and we wonder how they will do.

We spent a lot of time with our neighbours this month, talking about feeding cows, what, when and how much. Our practical training continued learning about calving, taking care of calves, moving groups of cattle around, helping with milking, watching feet trimming and scraping lots and lots of poo!

Our land is very wet - clay on clay with added clay it would seem. It's still raining (surely we could recycle some of this) and cold, although not freezing. We've moved the silage and feed troughs from outside in the yard to a covered barn so the cows can eat without getting soaked to the bones. The horses are still out, although their field is very boggy in places. We really wonder how it will recover and are taking this year as a bit of an experiment. It is difficult to imagine that the surface will ever support an animal, let alone a tractor!

Lorraine did actually get to drive the tractor, scraped out the yard and brought in a bale of silage. Mark got faster cleaning the cowshed and one day forgot to lower the loader - which means that we've got a new arrangement to the front of our barn - probably needs some attention in the summer! He made some less damaging forays with the digger - moving muck heaps (there seems to be a lot of that in farming!), rolling a flat-ish path in the what-was-hard-standing for the tractor, and trying to flatten out some of the very big bumps in our drive.

We have also sold some of our excess haylage and silage so feeling some cash going into the bank has made a refreshing change!

The farming side of life seems to be settling down and, although we continue learning, we find some time for family interaction. Emily came home and created a base for herself and Anna passed her driving test. Whilst all is well with the children, life is not quite so rosy in the farmhouse. Although we've been living together and around each other full-time for some eighteen months now, our relationship has a different dimension to it with "working together" thrown into the equation. We have quite different styles. Lorraine is generally good at hitting it with a bigger hammer... Mark is excellent with the finer touches. Useful when you're wanting to install a new boiler... but translated into herding cows or doing some financial planning it has brought us some interesting and sometimes uncomfortable challenges.

And whilst we're on the subject of relationship, our driveway is shared with another farmhouse the owners of which are upset with life and wanting to have us take responsibility for their house flooding, the number of rats in their garden and to fix the driveway yesterday... phew!

Finally... as the month draws to a close fear has gripped our friends in the farming community as Foot & Mouth Disease pops up all over the place. It seems right now that we're all sitting targets with no way of knowing what to do to avoid it, other than shutting the doors and staying at home. Then that doesn't take account of the wind and birds.

We've got a straw mat out, have asked visitors to stay away and it doesn't seem right for us to get too concerned with so little to lose, but we are especially concerned for our neighbours and they are understandably feeling the stress of this situation.