Over the Farmer's Gate (12 page)

IT’S A BIG day on the farm today. Today’s the day I take Bill, our bearded collie to be clipped. A bearded collie in full coat looks a bit like a Herdwick sheep and ours is just about as much use as a Herdwick sheep at fetching the cows.

The best working dog I ever had was a bearded collie bitch. She was so clever and so good at what she did, she was a once-in-a-lifetime dog. I always used to clip her myself. She wouldn’t allow me to use electric clippers, but she would lie flat out on her side for about 10 minutes once a day for me to snip away with Ann’s best dressmaking scissors. After 10 minutes she’d had enough, would open her eyes and be away. You wouldn’t be able to catch her again until the next day and as the actual clipping
took many, many sessions, it was a very strange dog that would be about the yard for a couple of weeks.

I always used to leave her head and neck until last, which made her look like a lion. I think she quite liked that. One of the problems for a long-haired dog that spends its day around cows and cow muck is that quite a bit of the latter sticks to your coat, so that, come the dry weather, all these little bits of coat have what I call clinkers on them that rattle as you go about your daily routine.

To digress, I’ve always had a bit of a weakness for different animals, that’s why, in a herd of about 190 dairy cows there are some Ayrshires, some Jerseys, some Dairy Shorthorns and some Brown Swiss. There are about 175 conventional black and white cows but I do like to see a few different sorts as well.

When I kept sheep, I occasionally had some Herdwick. They are a native breed of the Lake District and, when I say I had them occasionally, it was because I owned them but I couldn’t keep them in. One day I was driving to a speaking engagement in the Lake District and, three miles from home, I passed three Herdwick ewes marching down the road in single file. ‘There’s a coincidence,’ I thought, ‘Me driving to the Lake District and seeing Herdwick sheep on the road.’ I ignored the fact that they were mine and kept on driving. They were back at home when I returned next day.

Anyway, I arrive at the vet’s where the dog trimmer sets up shop twice a week. The lady groomer rolls her eyes when she sees Bill (funny how women do that) but she likes him really, and apparently he stands on the table as good as gold for the two or three hours this all takes. I think he actually enjoys the fuss, and the freedom from a hot coat. The coat is so dense that the piece that comes off his back hangs together like a fleece. I ask the lady to leave a tuft of hair at the end of his tail, Bill would like to look
like a lion as well, but we get a bit more eye-rolling, and when I fetch him there’s no tuft.

The dog I take home has been transformed. Everyone who comes on the yard for the next week thinks we’ve got a new dog, he bears absolutely no resemblance to the dog of the day before. I think he misses his warm coat at nights; no more sleeping on the doorstep, he’s under a bush in Ann’s shrubbery, but no need for you to tell her that.

It’s not all positives for Bill. The other dogs don’t recognise him so they want to fight him to establish where everyone sits in the pecking order. This doesn’t take long as he was always at the bottom anyway. Next morning he comes with me to fetch the cows, which is unusual. They don’t recognise him either so they all want to chase him.

While my border collie Mert is away around the boundaries of the field getting the furthest away cows into motion Bill decides he will help as well. It’s quite strange how he behaves; he fixes a stare on the nearest cow, goes down on his belly, and stalks her. To use the lion analogy again, that’s exactly how he does it. He stalks the cow until she, or he for that matter, bottles out. It’s usually the cow, then he chases her for a few yards before he moves on to stalk the next one. If I were to rely on this process to collect 190 cows it would take all day, so I’m not sorry when he loses interest after a couple of days and Mert and I don’t have to witness this morning pantomime. Bill? He stays on the yard and goes back to being fat and lazy which he does really well.

While I’ve been writing this, I’ve had one eye on the pond in the field in front of our house. A few days ago, a mallard came out with six ducklings and I find myself counting them all the time. When mother duck takes her brood out on to the field they are always accompanied by a pair of carrion crows or a pair of ravens. These birds busy themselves at a safe distance, affecting
nonchalance as you’ve never seen it affected before. But I know what they are really there for and so does mother duck.

When the brood are on the pond they are much more mobile and I can see them now darting about like so many little jet-ski riders. But they’re not safe here either. Also busy in the background are a pair of coots who will go under water and take a duckling from below the surface. This is how most of the ducklings will disappear because mother can’t see the attack coming. It’s all dramatic stuff, a bit like an avian version of Jaws.

THE BIG JOB lately is getting our maize crop planted. There’s just a bit more to it than that. Maize is a crop that thrives on plenty of manure.

Ours gets plenty of that but that, in itself, is a big job. Carting muck to the chosen field and then spreading it all is very
time-consuming,
but well worth it.

Over the years I have come to learn that carrot is usually better than stick, so I try to generate some enthusiasm to get the job done. Suggestions that ‘Bank holidays are so busy you’re all better off working,’ get a mixed reception. ‘If you work late tonight I’ll go and fetch us some chips,’ is better received. No-one who works here is ever asked to do anything that David and I wouldn’t do, so yesterday I spent all day with our youngest worker spreading chicken muck.

Things had gone well all day, so that at 7 o’clock I said I’d pop for 10 minutes into our local town to fetch fish and chips and something to drink. Standing in the queue in the chip shop, thinking about the tons of chicken muck we’d spread that day, and what good it would transmit to the subsequent maize crop, I realised it had gone quiet and everyone was staring at me, except for the proprietor.

He was scowling – but it was probably him that has got to clear up the mucky footprints in his shop. He was probably hoping the smell would disappear when I did.

DOGS ARE clever, my dog Mert is very clever. I use the word ‘my’ deliberately because, as a farm dog, he used to be everybody’s dog, but over the last few weeks he’s become my dog. Most weeks I have to go away, sometimes for a couple of days at a time. During these absences he has taken to lying by the kitchen door until I come back and refusing to move.

He’s developed that even further just lately by refusing to go with anyone else to fetch the cows, even if I’m at home. This has made him quite unpopular but no-one is going to do anything about it because he will soon curl his lip up and show his teeth just to emphasise his position.

When I’m at home he’s always with me and it’s amazing how he develops as a working dog. Our cows are milked in two batches and, without going into detail, the yard has to be cleared of one batch before you let the second batch go. To clear the yard properly, you have to look up each row of stalls to make sure you haven’t missed a cow lying down somewhere. He’s watched me do this countless times and now he does it on his own.

If there’s anyone about, I can now have this sort of conversation with him because he will quite automatically go up each row of the sheds in turn. I lean on a gate and say ‘just go and check that next row’, which he was going to do anyway but it makes it look as if he’s understood what I said. The ‘audience’ usually consists of people who he won’t even fetch the cows with, so they get a bit tetchy about all this.

We have to be extra vigilant on clearing the yard because, a few weeks ago, I bought a fresh calved Jersey heifer at a sale. She
turned out to be a lot smaller than I thought and, as she’s a bit of a free spirit, she will often go off on her own to lie down in the sheds somewhere.

When Mert is busy on his shed-clearing, you actually think all the cows have gone and he’s just double-checking, when this Jersey heifer will come trotting out. She looks more like a fallow deer than a cow. When I bought her I christened her Peggy because she looks a bit like a girl I was at school with, but Bambi would have been more appropriate.

WITH ALL the cats busy rearing kittens, it has surprised me how many rats we have about here. My assessment comes from the numerous rat remains that I find about. The cats are obviously giving the rats a hard time, which is excellent. Funny things rats: people react to them in different ways, from total fear to total hatred. My son is dead scared of them. I once went round a corner to where my son and an employee were tidying up a shed to find them both standing on five gallon cans while a family of rats that they had disturbed scurried about looking for a new home.

They’ve never bothered me. I was tidying up the mangers for the cows the other day and came upon the back-end of a rat busy sorting out the silage for bits of corn. He soon found himself underneath my welly – some people would have run the other way.

I HAVE alluded in the past to the issue of producer milk prices. This topic has gained prominence recently because of the interest shown by the Women’s Institute, and good luck to them and thank-you. Some of the headline-grabbing statements from major retailers have led people to the view that we’ve all had a 4p increase in our returns, and the job is done.

Just to put things into some sort of perspective, I have just had a price increase of a quarter of a penny per litre and I am still getting less for my milk than I was 12 months ago. What should worry consumers is the fact that milk powder (dried milk) is trading on world markets at higher prices than are available to us from selling our milk into a liquid dairy or a cheese factory. We have been told for years that we have to accept what the market will return.

Well, the market now gives us an alternative option and the boot is finally on the other foot. If the UK wants UK milk, it will have to pay the market price for it.