Archived News

9th August 2008

It is like winter outside, grey and miserable and pouring with rain - quite depressing when the crops are ready to harvest.     1,650 acres of crops to harvest and not one acre cut.  The combine harvester has been driven into Home Field and the cutter bar is connected, it’s ready to go.  If it stops raining over night and is dry tomorrow morning, then Laurence will start combining the oats.  The moisture content will be much too high so the grain will have to be dried.  Diesel in the drier cost £10/tonne when we last dried Maize and the cost of diesel has risen since then.  We get the market price for all our grain, farmers cannot demand a higher price just because their production costs have risen.  At the moment things are not looking good.

Over the coming week the calf sheds will be cleaned out and prepared for the next group of 10 day old calves coming in and 25 head of cattle are going off to the abattoir.

The chicken count is down by another one, the fox was back again and just left a pile of feathers as a calling card.

We have made contact with Animal Health who are tracing cattle which may have had contact with a possible bovine tuberculosis case in Hampshire.  We have confirmed with them that we still have the calves (bar two) that they are trying to trace and they say we will be contacted by someone next week about testing these cattle for TB.  Cattle passports and ear-tags are invaluable at such times as we check where 30 cattle are amongst 1,100. 

Calves come onto our farm in small groups and as these particular animals were born between between July 2007 and January 2008 they are at different growth stages and therefore in five different locations.  The cattle are in barns (the youngsters), two fields and grazing on Epsom and Hackhurst Downs; it will be time consuming work running all of the larger animals through the cattle crush, checking every ear-tag in order to find and test 30 cattle for TB.

George shot and skinned his first rabbit today so that's our Sunday lunch sorted.

As I bring my writing to a close it's now blowing a gale outside, whatever happened to summer?