Over the Farmer's Gate (4 page)

IT WAS A lovely sunny Sunday morning and the sumptuous breakfast I prepared – beans on toast – had been consumed and I was back out in the yard.

There’s only me about at the moment and my first job was to let out the group of lower yielding cows who, for a week now, have been going out in the daytime to lie in the field in front of our house. This left two separate groups of high yielders very envious, and I could see them contemplating a bit of gate-jumping as they watched their colleagues make their way out.

It was such a nice day (it could easily have been May) so I decided to divert the low yielders on to a fresh field of grass. I let one group of high yielders on to the field in front of the house and the other group of high yielders out into what used to be a two-acre orchard.

None of them needed any bidding to embrace this new regime and within just a few minutes the buildings were empty of cows.

One group was soon busy grazing and the two others were lying down, soaking up the sunshine.

It was the first time for more than six months that the buildings had been empty of cattle and there was strangeness about it.
There’s been births, deaths, cows mooing against gates, ringing their bloody bells, and now just silence.

I’ve noticed this before in a lambing shed. Two months of activity and then it’s all gone. Just the debris is left; bits of wool, the empty isolation pens, a dead lamb slung over a gate. The flock, and their incessant bleating, move on to the next stage of their annual cycle and, like the cows, they are pleased, as it takes them back to the fields where they belong.

THE FIRST bunch of cows we milk in the morning – they are the group we optimistically call ‘high yielders’ – have to be fetched home by torchlight.

The second group is usually further away and fetched in a sort of half-light, not quite light, but, then again, not really dark enough to take the torch, especially if you’d rather fetch them with your hands in your pockets.

When I arrive at the gate of their usual night field – they have the run of 12 acres going up to the wood – I can only see the very white cows. More importantly, I can’t see the dog.

Mert can be a bit hard on cows but he is also easy to stop. I send him off into the gloom and watch carefully. Up by the wood fence, a white cows bolts about 20 yards so now I know where he is. ‘Steady.’ After that, they all come in a very leisurely fashion, many of them pausing as they cross the stream to have a drink.

I like to see cows drinking out of a stream. The water is provided free by gravity – it doesn’t cost over a pound a cubic metre like the water in the troughs on the yard. Within the 10 minutes or so it takes to clear the field, it has become perceptibly lighter and I can take one quick scan around the field to make sure it is clear of cows. All around the field are little columns of vapour marking where the cows have had their first pee of the day
or their first number two.

We, the cows and I, make our way home up a stone track that is softly carpeted with thatching straw, which I had salvaged from a cottage which was being re-thatched. It makes for very comfortable walking for men and beasts. The dog is thirty yards away. He doesn’t use the track – it’s bordered by an electric fence and he’s inadvertently brushed it with his tail on occasions.

Among the straw are a lot of the hazel stick spars that had been used to hold the straw in place on the roof, but that’s not all. There are just a few pieces of a newspaper that must have found its way into the roof at the last thatching. I pick up a piece to read as we make our way slowly home. It’s not easy to read because I think some mice have read it first. It is dated 1 February 1954. It tells me, among other things, that the country is carpeted with thick snow and that there is more on the way.

The big political issue of the day, as in really big, was should Britain trade with Germany or Japan? To be fair, this is less than ten years after the end of World War II, but it’s a question that seems bizarre today. I’m writing this and you are reading it surrounded by products of both countries in abundance. I can, I am told, buy a new English electric cooker for £37 12 shillings and sixpence. I bet that was a lot of money in 1954. Surprising what you can find out in the early morning just fetching the cows.

I shut the gate behind the cows and sneak off for a second cup of tea. Around the taller trees in the garden a buzzard and two carrion crows are involved in one of their perpetual dogfights. Both species seem to spend the hours of daylight in a constant squabble to the extent that I wonder if they ever manage to get anything else done, like breeding, laying and feeding their young.

The dogs make their way back up the yard. It’s not much fun being a dog at our place at the moment. A couple of months ago
we had about twenty sleek, well-fed cats about the place. I think we still have the same number but you can’t see them all. A lot of them developed big fat tummies that someone as perceptive as me diagnosed as pregnancy.

Since then, they have secreted themselves away to give birth. There are cats under things, among things, down holes, in stacks of bales, under implements, everywhere. And where the cats are, there are also kittens. I haven’t seen any kittens yet but I know they are there; the big tummies have all gone. For your unsuspecting dog it’s a difficult time. Quite innocently, making its way about the yard on some doggy business or other, your dog is likely to walk past a stack of bales only to be violently attacked by a spitfire of a protective cat. I’ve even seen a dog fast asleep in some warm, sheltered corner when a cat comes into view and leaps on to the unsuspecting dog, spitting, clawing and biting. What sort of awakening is that?

Predominant among the busy sounds of birds in the morning is the sound of wood pigeons. I really like to hear them. There is something of calm and contentment about it. Traditionally, it’s called cooing but I don’t think that really describes it. But as I can’t come up with any better description, cooing it will have to be.

Our AI man described the sound as being that of a working man’s cuckoo. He’s already heard a cuckoo. I’ve not, but then he gets about a fair bit more than me, into softer warmer climes than we enjoy, into places like Herefordshire for example.

If there is a bird sound that I put way out in front of all others it’s the sound of the curlew. There’s a pair busy about the area again this year which is such good news. Curlews reappeared around here last year, as I may have reported, after an absence of several years. They bred and have now returned.

What does disappoint and concern me is the absence of
lapwings in the area. There are lots of suitable sites around here that you would assume would be perfect breeding areas, mostly on set-aside fields.

Lapwings seem to prefer open ground to nest on – and a partially worked, set-aside field would be perfect – and then the opportunity to take their chicks nearer to water after about three days. I know of two sites in the area that hosted lapwings – one had nine pairs last year. The local wildlife trust took over the sites and fenced them in. The carrion crows and buzzard used the fence posts as perches and cleared up every egg.

Still, they know best. After all, we are only simple farmers.

AS THE YEAR goes on there are milestones that mark the passing of the days. Now I can switch all the yard lights off before we finish milking in the mornings.

Every year, the Canada geese arrive at dawn. You don’t always see them arrive, but you always hear them. They come to nest on the little island in the pond in front of our house.

Sometimes, half a dozen come at the same time and they fight for two or three days for the nesting site.

In goose terms, the island is a ‘one up, one down’, so there’s room for only one nest. This year, a single pair have arrived and I did see them fly in. They swept in with loud calls as though proclaiming ownership of the island, the field and the territory.

Like the season itself, they are late this year. They usually come in mid-February, which puts them nearly a month late, but the spring around here is about the same.

Our daffodils still aren’t out and it intrigues me that plant and animal life – or in this case bird life – is attuned to the same sort of timing that adjusts itself to the vagaries of the weather.

The pair have been here only a couple of days and already the
female is sitting on what she presumably calls a nest, laying her eggs. It’s all very interesting.

In due course there will be the young gulls to watch, too, and then they’ll fly back to the lake a mile away, from where they came.

But what we really want are some swans.

I’VE ALWAYS categorised myself as being pretty ‘cool’, laid back, fairly unflappable. Not as laid back as my son, though. If he were more laid back he would fall over.

But there are a few times of the year when I admit that I do become a bit more ‘on edge’, and as I write today, we are right in the middle of one of those periods.

It’s the time of year to get our maize in. It’s a very important crop to us, it’s expensive to grow and it’s critical to get it right. Last year, we had to abandon 17 acres of maize to the wet weather and there was a very serious knock-on cost to our business for the rest of the winter. So that makes this year’s crop all the more important and puts me just that bit more ‘on the edge’.

I have a date in mind of 11 or 12 May for drilling here. We are just on the margins of growing maize because of our height above sea level and we also suffer late frosts. Maize is a tall and vigorous crop but it won’t compete with weeds, bad weather, and even the shadows cast by the trees across the road leave their mark.

We put a lot of farmyard manure under maize, it loves it, and we did that part of the operation ahead of schedule. So when I put the plough on, I was pretty cool about it all because I would be more than a week ahead of time to plough and work down the fields. I actually enjoy ploughing, if it’s going OK, and I was looking forward to a couple of days on my own surrounded by the beauty of the spring countryside and the opportunity to observe the wildlife.

Being on my own is the best company I can have. The dog would come with me in the cab if I let him but it’s a long old day for him, bumping along on the cab floor. He would follow me up and down the field all day if I let him as well, but, then again, he might not – it’s springtime and at the moment he is much given to carnal thoughts.

So off I go and, in my mind’s eye, I have a picture of endless shiny furrows falling smoothly away from the plough, a flock of seagulls following me up and down the field – an idyllic scene (I can almost feel a poem coming on), while on the radio the rest of the world is queuing up around an accident on the M6 near Birmingham.

But life can let you down. There were some furrows falling away, but not many. Problems with the plough, problems with the tractor, there was more time spent with my hands on spanners than on the steering wheel. I had gone from cool to very tetchy in a short time.

By mid-afternoon I had ploughed, to use a technical term with which a few of you will be familiar, bugger all. A piece on the plough broke (it’s surprising how long it takes to go six miles to fetch a spare part), but then all fell into place and away we went.