Over the Farmer's Gate (20 page)

Outside, he’s a bit of a pussycat. Mert had a brother called Neville who was renowned for being a bit on the nasty side, both in and out of a Land Rover. He would puncture the postman’s tyres with ease, which wasn’t much fun for the postman as he didn’t dare get out to change the wheel. Neville was run over and killed last week (I don’t think it was the postman). I haven’t
told Mert yet, as it would only upset him and he might decide to change his behaviour to that of his late brother in memory of him.

I once had a dog called Freddie, who was a spaniel and Jack Russell cross, which left him looking a bit like a small Basset hound. Freddie ran away with the gypsies. I fetched him back twice, but he was soon away again. Dairy farming has got to be at a very low ebb if your dog prefers to live with travelling folk. It was a blow to my self-esteem from which I have never recovered.

EVERY YEAR we buy straw from our neighbours for winter bedding for our cattle. We buy the straw by the acre, in the swath, after it has been combined. One neighbour grows a lot of cereals and every year he allocates us four or five fields, approximately, which is presumably as near as he can get to our requirements and the requirements of his other customers.

Every year we seem to get different fields, not that that makes any odds to us except, of course, that some fields are handier than others.

There’s a main road through our village. I was giving directions by phone to a bed and breakfast guest on Saturday night and I told him ‘keep following the main road’.

He said: ‘I think I’m lost, this is hardly a main road.’

I said: ‘It might not be a main road where you come from, but it’s a main road around here.’

When he eventually arrived he said he’d called in at a pub a couple of miles away to ask directions.

‘They didn’t only know you, they gave me your number,’ he said.

Anyway, that’s a digression, back to the village and the straw.

At right angles to the ‘main’ road is a road that goes into the heart of the village. The village school is on the corner and the road is lined with houses, bungalows, picturesque cottages and there’s a stream that runs the length of the village as well.

So, this year we were allocated a field of straw that can only be approached by this road. For how many hundreds of years have people been carting produce down this road out of this particular field? No idea, but what we are doing is hardly something new.

The people in the village can see the field, they can see there are still bales in it and they can see quite clearly what we are about. But every load we brought down the village was a real test of skill for the tractor driver as he ran the gauntlet of an obstacle course of parked cars and wheelie bins.

Of particular interest were the people who took their cars off their drive and parked them on the road to wash them while we were carting straw. There were wisps of straw in the air and some dust and as we snaked our loads tortuously past the cars, the hosepipes and the plastic buckets that were begrudgingly moved to one side, we had to wonder how their minds were working.

And as we drove on, I looked in the tractor wing mirror and could see Mr Indignant of Rose Cottage with his hands on his hips glaring at me before he flicked bits of dust and straw off his damp car. Not that this would always be a problem.

Come the era of food shortages, people won’t be allowed to delay us like this.

Tractors carting anything to do with food production will have priority everywhere they go, and for jobs like these through villages, they will be fitted with snow-plough type devices and we’ll be able to drive like bulldozers straight up the road, clearing the cars out of the way as we go.

SUNDAY MORNING, the cows have been milked and gone off to pasture, calves are all fed. Beans have been put on toast and consumed. The smoke alarm in the kitchen has had its daily test, courtesy of the toaster, and I’m back out scraping the muck up on the yards.

There are two cows shut in for the artificial inseminator and they are making a bit of a noise because they want to go down the field with their herd.

There are two inseminators who call here. There’s a young one who farms as well and is often trying to sell me a bull, which, from his point of view, is a bit counter-productive. But it’s the older one today. He’s my age and supposed to be retired but he does ‘days off’.

The day I started farming he came and signed me up for the AI service and he’s been coming here ever since – 45 years.

You should always have time for people so I stopped the tractor and went for a chat. When he signed me up, most of the inseminations in this country were done by the Milk Marketing Board. It was a vastly different operation in those days. There were studs of bulls located conveniently around the country and semen was collected daily and served ‘fresh’. Today it’s all frozen and comes out of a flask in what they call straws.

We often reminisce, John and I (that’s what older people do), and we often recall those early days of when he and I were young and fit. (He’s still fit and has lasted better than me; perhaps he hasn’t done as many miles as I have).

There used to be a system whereby you paid for the first service but any subsequent services on the same cow were free – presumably because it was assumed to be the fault of the bull or the inseminator if it didn’t work. Which is a far cry from the world of today, where blame is always placed on the farmer.

Bulls and inseminators were assessed on what was called a non-return
rate. I used to represent this area on an AI committee for North Wales. The best non-return rate in the UK was always at the centre in Dolgellau, where the bulls in use were mostly Welsh Black. You can see why if you look at their semen through a microscope. The sperm are big, bold, vigorous and with attitude. We still use Welsh Black semen on a cow difficult to get in calf.

At the other side of the village were a couple who milked three cows and one was difficult to get in calf. John went there every three weeks for three years before she conceived. That was a lot of free repeat services and cost for the price of one free service. No wonder the practice of free repeats didn’t last.

I WAS WATCHING rugby on television, only I couldn’t watch it as well as I would have liked because my glasses were filthy. My optician sold me a can of aerosol to clean them so I went to the kitchen to fetch it and a piece of kitchen wipe.

I tried to keep watching the rugby while I cleaned my glasses with the result that a casual squirt of the aerosol went full in my face and another squirt went all over me.

Half an hour later my eight-year-old granddaughter came in and gave me my customary kiss.

‘You smell nice today,’ she said, which made me wonder what I usually smelt like.

She’s been too bright for some time.

WHATEVER HAPPENS from now on, this will be classified as one of the most difficult harvests ever. A reminder, if it were needed, that we take for granted our food supplies, anywhere in the world, at our peril.

Progress, when it eventually comes, will be very slow, with
combines having to tackle laid crops. Straw may be damp, soil will find its way into the combine and inevitably, from time to time, they will become blocked.

The threshing mechanism of a combine is towards the front and if a blockage occurs, bits of combine have to be removed and the blocked material dragged out, usually with difficulty, by hand. This is the conventional method but I once worked with a combine driver who could not resist climbing onto the back of the combine and disappearing into its bowels in search of the problem. I think he must have been a reincarnated mole because he would burrow away through the innards of the machine until you could hear him moving about quite close towards the front.

There were three of us on the outside one day and him on the inside when I motioned to my companions to be quiet and shouted out in my very loudest voice: ‘OK, I think we’ve cleared it, start her up.’ The cries of ‘no’ that came from the inside had us in stitches. There was a very fast exit from inside of the combine, head, elbows and knees were bruised and clothes were torn. Strangely, he didn’t see the funny side.

I’VE NOT seen a rat about the yard here for months. This is good, very good. But it’s not quite as good as you think. There is a price to pay for this rodent-free zone – a feline price; we are overrun with cats.

I don’t know how many cats there are, they don’t keep still long enough to count them. Could be 30, could be 50. Most of them are kittens.

They all live, not surprisingly, close to where we have calves on milk. Next to every calf pen there seems to be a receptacle that will hold about a litre of milk. Soft-hearted farmers are known to fill these with milk when they feed the calves.

We also have a very large bale of sweet-smelling hay. You probably don’t need me to tell you this hay was made a couple of years ago. We put this sweet-smelling hay in nice little racks for the calves to eat. The sooner the calves start to eat some fibre, the better their digestion will work, and the better they will thrive.