Over the Farmer's Gate (30 page)

Authors: Roger Evans

Dilemma! One on the road and 37 in the field trying to join it! Then I could have done with a dog! I stood in the gateway to stop the 37 and waited for help.

After five minutes it arrived in the form of a very attractive lady in an Audi convertible. She wound down her window and asked if I was in trouble. I explained the situation to her and suggested that she get out of her car and run up the road to fetch the heifer back while I stopped the others coming out on to the road.

Fair play, that’s what she did, and very fleet of foot she turned out to be, with a smile to go with it.

If the dog and I are a strong couple, the threesome (if you pardon the expression) are the dog and me and the Discovery. It’s how we travel about, it’s how we go on adventures together, it’s how Mert is able to put his head through the window and scare the living daylights out of joggers and cyclists.

The Discovery out on the yard cost me £1,300 three years ago. They’ve been three hard years and recent events have taken their toll. Most of the windows are now permanently open, which means wet bums for passengers.

The front right wing met a neighbour’s pick-up in a lane so the headlight on that side shines about a yard in front of you.

Worse than all that, we are milking our cows three times a day now and the evening milkers have taken to using the Discovery to fetch the cows in.

I don’t mind that so much but they leave it parked overnight in a gateway where all the cows travel. Cows like a good rub and a
scratch. Half-a-ton of cow having a bit of a rub on a wing or door soon puts a few dents into a panel. If you are a cow and want to have a good scratch, what better than a wing mirror?

Appearance is important for MOT purposes, however. We once had a farm van that failed its MOT because it was mouldy.

The MOT is due at the end of this month. Last year I took it and was told the body underneath needed £700 of welding, besides anything else that needed doing. I took it home to think about it; you have to think about it if that’s all it’s worth.

I told a friend of mine in the car trade about the dilemma. Lest you should think having a friend in the car trade sounds pretentious, he’s a sort of Arthur Daley-type who lives in the countryside – an Arthur Daley with nettles.

He said he would take it and have a look at it. Half a day later it was back, all MOT’d, with just the fee to pay. Obviously he’d got a tame MOT man somewhere, which is alright, but then, of course, it isn’t, is it?

So I’m not going to waste time this year. This Discovery will join its predecessor in our nettle patch and out on the yard is yet another replacement – £1,700 this time, but only 10 years old.

It’s pristine, with air conditioning and leather upholstery – almost too good to be true!

We’ve not used it yet (I will tax it at the start of the month), but the dog has already pee’d on all the wheels and we, the dog and I, can’t wait to start another round of adventures.
THERE is a man of my acquaintance, for whom I have great regard, who is much given to singing on licensed premises. He has a fine voice, although his repertoire of songs is quite small.

He’s a good man to have at a funeral. By and large, the singing at funerals around here is very poor. Move just 10 miles west and the difference is quite remarkable. Around here they don’t start standing up until the first word of the first hymn, so most of the
first line is lost in the general melee of standing up, clearing the throat and uncertain singing.

I have already determined, should I have the opportunity to make such plans, that at my own funeral the vicar is to announce at the very start that if they, the congregation don’t sing the first verse tidily, then we move straight to the interment. I also want to be buried in the garden under a cedar tree, so that my gravestone will be a confounded nuisance to countless future generations of strimmers.

But I return to my friend the singer. He is fairly predictable in his sequence of songs and when we have had two renderings of
Home on the Range
in quick succession, we know he is winding down.

Singing exhausted for the moment, he will try to start a discussion about rats. ‘Do you know of any use for a rat?’ People usually start to drift away at this juncture because they’ve heard it all before. It’s usually me that stops to listen because I know that with a couple more pints inside him he will get his second wind and we will start off again with
When the Coal comes from the Rhondda
, which is a particular favourite of mine.

As far as I know, no-one has ever answered his question about rats. I’ve discussed most of the species of wildlife that live around here within these pages, but it is the rat we turn our attention to today. You will have realised by now that we farm where we live and we also have a farmyard a mile or so away that we rent. We mostly keep on top of the rats here at home, partly because my son has bait points all around our poultry unit that he keeps primed, and because the rest of our buildings are over-run with cats.

I sometimes think the cats are more trouble than a population of rats would be but they are more socially acceptable even if they cost me a fortune to feed. On the other hand, the rats at our other farm have been gaining the upper hand.

Rats promote different reactions in different people. If I see one, I’ll look for a stick to chase it. My son, who is a strapping lad and well able to look after himself in most situations, is petrified of them. We have our dry cows shut in buildings at the other farm in the winter and his nightly bedtime job is to get into his truck and go to see if the chickens are all right and then drive up to see if there is a cow calving.

He tells me that when he goes to see the cows, there are so many rats about he has to sit in his truck with the engine running until the rats disappear and it’s safe to get out.

We have started keeping a four-wheel drive loader up there because we cart quite a lot of silage home from there and if the loader is already there, one person can go and get a load of silage on his own.

Then I had a report that a young driver jumped into the loader one morning and there were four rats under the seat. The mental picture of four rats being disturbed from their slumber, getting up, yawning and stretching before tumbling out of the cab door is one I cherish.

After that, there was a stick left by the loader and various drivers would beat the cab door with a stick before they would get in. I thought it was all very amusing until the rats started eating the wiring while they were in there. It wasn’t so funny when I couldn’t start the machine.

Time for action, time for rat poison. I put a lot of bait out over four days and it was all eaten. None’s gone for two days now, so I suspect it has done its job.

I bought a de luxe turbo sort of bait. ‘Kill a dog if it eats some,’ said the man behind the counter. There’d be a row if it did.

IT’S A QUARTER to four on Sunday morning. We always start just a bit earlier at weekends so we can get the work finished up. I don’t want to be working all day at weekends.

The weather forecaster predicted minus five this morning, ‘could be colder out in the countryside’, which I think is us, and I agree, it is colder.

This is the sort of weather my mother warned me about when she tried to persuade me not to be a farmer. ‘You get a job in a bank and you’ll have a comfortable job for life.’ And ‘On a farm you’ll be out in all weathers, by the time you’re getting old, all your joints will be suffering’. And then, as if she knew she was wasting her time, ‘You mind you take one of those cod liver oil capsules every day – that’ll help’.

Like most mothers, she was right. I am out in all weathers and, yes, my joints are creaking a bit, and, yes, I do take a cod liver oil capsule every day – in a way, it’s my way of remembering her and doing what she tells me. I still miss her.

There are two of us on duty this morning, one to milk and me to clean up what has fallen on the floor during the night, what we call slurry, and to do some feeding.

We push the cows into the yard next to the parlour and you can see the breath coming out of all of us. I go to start the small and old tractor we use for this job and it bursts into life instantly. It’s 35 years old but we park it in the feed passageway at night and the warmth of the cows keeps the worst excesses of the frost away.

It’s not all negatives this morning though, because it is so cold the slurry has the consistency of thick porridge and is much easier to control. I can push it and pull it where I will and it stays nicely together. On wet days it has a mind of its own and will run anywhere – often the little tractor and I have to chase it.

A rat comes by and we chase that instead. I’ve never run one
over but you have to try. I have often managed to cover them with a wave of slurry, which I am sure makes them very popular when they get back down their hole.

That’s all I can do for now until the last of the cows have gone into the parlour and I get the loader tractor going, which is also parked in the warm feeding passage, and spend 10 minutes pushing silage back towards cows that have spent most of the night nosing about looking for the best bits so that it has ended up out of reach.

I decide to walk across to the chicken sheds to see if they are OK; a sort of fog hangs over them in what light there is, as the fans pump warm air out in to the cold. The computer in the chicken sheds tells me its 25°C in there but outside it is minus eight. Minus eight! Even in my mother’s worst-case scenario she didn’t mention minus eight.

I ask the chickens if they’d like to be free-range today. They don’t bother to answer but I know how many would come outside if I opened up the door.

This is one of the flaws in the concept of ‘free-range is best’ because it certainly wouldn’t work well in the winter months. The birds would rather stay in the shed all day and still be overcrowded. If I were to give my birds a better life, and I’d like to, I would reduce the numbers in the shed by about a third and give them longer to grow.

Most chicken growers would agree but unless the financial returns from this reduced output were the same as with the intensive regime we have now, it quite simply will not happen. The margins we work on are so minimal that people cannot believe it. If we made 10p a bird it would seem like a fortune and it is frequently less than half that sum. But back on my little tractor, the cold is beginning to get to me. The tractor is now white all over, inside and out, as its got a few windows missing.
When I get into the seat I get a frosty bum.

The parlour is being washed out now and clouds of steam rise off the yard. We use tap water to cool the first few degrees out of the milk and retain that water to wash out, so we are in effect washing out with warm water.

The steam makes it look a bit warmer but it isn’t really. Water is cheaper than electricity to start the cooling process, but only just.

I’m not sorry when it’s time to start breakfast – there’s nothing like beans on toast on a cold morning.

I make myself a cup of tea, open the Rayburn, back up to it slowly and the warmth starts to drive out the cold. It’s still not 6.30am, but it’s time for my cod liver oil capsule.

My mother was right in her prophecies about the life I would lead as a farmer, but I wouldn’t have it another way.

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