Well, hello 2025! Our weather station recorded -8 this morning, nothing in the light of the -10 recorded last Friday. In-between those two? A night of hammering rain, and a morning of flash floods in the fields alongside the brook. We are fortunate that as quickly as these fields flood, by afternoon, so long as the rain has stopped falling, the water recedes. From a distance these fields all appear dry, but try and walk across them, and the ground is sodden, or in the case of this morning, an impromptu ice rink. Sadly, for field 8 along the driveway, the flooding becomes standing water. Happily, for the intrepid, it is a larger ice rink, and with tonight’s promised temperatures, the ice will only thicken. All this so different to the fog that we sat in for four days from Christmas Eve.
The rain was the deciding factor in getting the young stock into the barn. Now all the cattle are under cover. Thanks to the inconclusive TB test in December, we are still housing the steers due to be sold. The 8 bales of straw a week, and 6 bales of hay/haylage fed to the cattle a week is being monitored closely. We will be TB tested again in February, and in the meantime, we are using the homeopathic remedies in all the cattle water troughs. Over the last weeks, we have had three calves born without too much drama, all three bull calves. Plus, the new bull, nickname Colin, has arrived, and got on with his job almost straight away. His real name, Victor of Nanhoron, is quite wonderful isn’t it. The journey with Colin from North Wales was as eventful as you can imagine!
The sheep are all doing well. The pregnant ewes and the lambs are all getting additional hay and feed to keep their weight up. The ground is too wet for tractors on the fields, so their food is ingeniously being taken to them via a builder’s sack, which on the ice, moves beautifully. Silver linings…
Farm housekeeping is ongoing, whether it be fixing fences, or cutting back brambles. There are still fallen trees, courtesy of storm Darragh to cut up and remove. The flood water attempted to be helpful in this regard, but actually, just ensured the branches were spread across the field even more. The work done on the barn gutters has made a positive difference, and now all that is left is some tidying around the drain points to ensure the water can drain away even faster.
Plans for once the ‘better weather’ is with us are also being made. We will need to coppice hazel for both fencing and the veg garden. We have bare root trees arriving soon which will need to be planted. The polytunnel garden now has a sowing and planting calendar in place, and two Wwoofers are ‘booked in’ to come and assist with the garden, and then lambing.
We are keeping an eye on the Oxford Farming conference which begins today and has a protest already in place through oxford. Government minister Steve Reed is due to speak at the conference later today in the hopes of “resetting” the governments relationship with British farmers. Given recent research discovered that a farmer will receive 1p for every loaf of bread, or block of cheese they make, the “hopes to ensure farmers are paid more fairly for their produce, making them less reliant on subsidies” alongside not raising the costs of food to us, the end consumers, would be an interesting social experiment to ‘watch’, if we weren’t so very much involved ourselves. It is true of all levels of responsibility that there is much to weigh up in any decision making. The case of the 89-year-old farmer who is being threated with imprisonment by Somerset council for knocking down an ‘historic’ wall he himself built in the 1970’s is another case in point. How to maintain a working relationship with good sense once in power is a long known human struggle. Similarly, learning that glyphosate, which is widely used across the world as a pesticide, is actually an antibiotic, and therefore can only have contributed to antibiotics becoming less effective is hard to balance with learning about the IVF calf Hilda, who has been ‘created’ as a lower emissions cow… the mind boggles.
Turning to things more cheerful, the work to open The Pantry continues apace, and across the farm, Hares have been spotted widely, even discovering a form. We also have been spotting the Sparrow Hawk frequently. The Tawny Owls are very chatty at dawn and dusk, and a huge flock of Red Wings visit our fields everyday at the moment.
A little out of season mayhap, but so cheering:
Hares at Play by John Clare
The birds are gone to bed, the cows are still,
And sheep lie panting on each old mole-hill;
And underneath the willow’s gray-green bough,
Like toil a-resting, lies the fallow plough.
The timid hares throw daylight fears away
On the lane’s road to dust and dance and play,
Then dabble in the grain by naught deterred
To lick the dew-fall from the barley’s beard;
Then out they sturt again and round the hill
Like happy thoughts dance, squat, and loiter still,
Till milking maidens in the early morn
Jingle their yokes and sturt them in the corn;
Through well-known beaten paths each nimbling hare
Sturts quick as fear, and seeks its hidden lair.