Social

The 'manageable and affectionate' but refers to the cows, not me, as Jonny kindly pointed out. The full article, all about our first year at Farrantshayes is on sale now- how exciting!

Today's blog is called 'some thoughts about cows', principally in honour of a book I have just finished reading- well more accurately, listening to, as smallhold in combo with the day job doesn't allow much time to luxuriate in an actual book. In an effort to redeem my status as a reader I've been listening to audiobooks on my commute, which gives me roughly five hours of reading time weekly. I recently listened to Rosemary Young's 'The Secret Life of Cows'. Though I did sometimes fear that Rosemary's soothing, if rather monotonous, voice might send me into the arms of Morpheous on the A30, I can highly recommend her work. She writes compassionately and vividly about the close relationships between cows and also between cows and humans. Such is her belief that cows are able to choose what is best for their welfare, that her herd,over winter, can choose whether to stay in the barn and eat hay, to or wander out into the field to graze. Different cows, she says, have different preferences. I believe her entirely.    

I would very much like to be able to offer our eight Rubies the same options.The current herd is comprised of the three Whitefield heifers, purchased last Autumn, the two cows with calves at foot from the Colleton herd and Alfie, the steer. Despite them all appearing identical to the uninitiated (one brown cow surely looks the same as another brown cow, no?) we know them very much as individuals. Ange,herd leader of the Whitefield gang, has grown one lonely horn. You can rely on Ange to do the right thing and reason with the others to follow her lead. If you have her head in a bucket of nuts, you've as good as penned the whole herd, ready to do whatever needs to be done. Audrey and Amber are her loyal followers- though Amber has a wilful streak and often won't listen to reason, or even the laws of physics. She is the most troublesome to get into the crush and would rather throw the whole thing over than in a fit of pique than submit. The two 'new' Colleton mums are recognisable by their lighter coats and loud, grating voices; unlike the Whitefield heifers, they're  mums already and must need those loud calls to speak to their heifer calves. I must admit to preferring the low, kind moos of the maiden heifers. The calves, who arrived at food with the Colleton girls , Gracey and Georgia, are indistinguishable to us at the moment. Their time to be known will no doubt come.  

Alfie, the only boy, stands apart from them all. He is the 'face of the farm' ; a casual picture I snapped of him munching hay one day conveyed his character perfectly and ended up becoming our logo.His eyes were lit up with humour and joy, his nose tipped upwards and his mouth formed what, for all the world, appeared to be a soulful, grin. It put across all that we wanted to say about how very right life could be for animals. This was no one off moment either - anytime we have wandered out into the field, sweet Alfie is first over to extend his pink, moist nose towards you, venture a lick and exhale slowly his scent of wet grass.  Fortunately, or more often unfortunately, he is also endlessly inquisitive. He loves cars- mostly licking the paintwork but also wondering where they might take him (see video below)- and ponderously investigating new buildings en route to wherever he is going. He breaks my heart, because he is the only one who won't stay with us for life. I haven't had too many problems with 'sending off' any animals so far, but I am unspeakably sad about the thought of 'our' Alfie going. 'Why couldn't he be a bull?' we say sadly to one another. When I put a picture of him on an internet forum suggestions come in about the possibility of training him to pull a cart, like an oxen. Being as he can't even find his way to the water trough unaided much of the time I don't think this is feasible. I am (rather fruitlessly) hoping that our fondness for him might fade. Or that he might develop a womb and become a useful heifer in the first ever known case of bovine 'sequential hermaphroditism'- like that fish on 'Blue Planet' the other week. 

Returning to the ways of keeping cows over the Winter, I would offer ours as a cautionary tale to any new smallholders thinking of keeping cows out 'au naturel' this year. Last winter, our four (at the time) Rubies stayed out on six acres.  We had been told by some that they were a native breed and would cope well. We dutifully carted hay out to them in wheelbarrows (these were the pre tractor days)  or begged the helpful stockman of the farmer who was (entirely sensibly) hiring OUR cowsheds (oh, the irony) to spear big bales of haylage and place them in feeders outside. The areas around the feeders looked like First World War trenches in practically no time.  The rain fell, seemingly endlessly, rendering the fields lumpen,sodden realms of misery. The herd broke out almost daily; a combination of the rotten old fencing, hunger and jealously of the dairy herds, masticating contentedly in the warm sheds, drove them mad with frustration. They limboed over, under and often simply straight through the rusting barbed wire, carefully selecting days when we were away from the farm to do so, seemingly to create maximum chaos and inconvenience. for our poor smallholding sitter, who once ended up getting them out of our reed bed sewage system and tying the fence back together with baler twine. Have I mentioned she's a saint? When the short days finally grew longer, our fields were a sad sight to behold. We failed to get them reseeded or rolled at the right time. It was, without a doubt, the most hopeless, miserable few months of our 'farming' lives so far and I very much doubt it was a bundle of laughs for the cows.

In short, we made mistakes. Lots of them. All with a perfectly good cattle shed, standing unused.   

So, we have learned our lesson. I've eaten humble pie. We have struck a deal with the farmer who keeps the happy dairy cows in our 'top sheds'  and he is going to 'bed up' our shed at the same time as his own. Last week our little herd ambled into a shed full of golden straw and haylage made from the orchard field, which we miraculously managed to get 21 large bales off, despite it being utterly trashed. They seem happy and it is pleasant to be able to stroke their wide foreheads through the gaps in the feeder and know they are safe, warm and not causing havoc. The fields are now virtually empty, apart from our ever present fencer, who is spending a week putting right the damage from last year. Peace, temporarily, reigns.   

In my last blog I promised to write more about our little flock of sheep. We only have eight ewes- six badger faced and two Herdwicks,who live in with Ernie the horse and are free to enjoy the shelter of the big barn or be outside grazing in the wedge shaped field. Two Badger Faced (Torddu) ewes are particularly fond of human company and will always come up for a scritch on the head- I call them my 'pet' girls. They were all bought as ewe lambs so we have had to wait a long  eighteen months for them to be mature enough to breed; the upside is we've lots of time to get to know them. 

Our little ‘ram a lamb’ arrived on the farm back in the Summer, fresh from Dartmoor and has been out enjoying the orchard field with a bachelor gang of store lambs and his permanent companion, a perpetually fearful  looking Kerry Hill wether named Horatio. For two weeks before putting ‘ram a lamb’ in with his ladies, we were fortunate enough to borrow ‘Ted the Teaser’- a vasectomised ram whose sole purpose in life is to bring all the ewes into season at the same time, thus creating a tighter lambing period. Ernie, unfortunately, took an instant dislike to poor Ted, whose curled horns and peculiar sneer seemed to massively offend him. He picked him up bodily and flung him across the field in rage. They were kept apart from that point on. …

After his fortnight with the hareem, Ted was returned to his owners and sturdy little ‘ram a lamb' was raddled and put in. Raddle is a thick coloured paste that is slathered onto the chest of the ram in order to see when he has mated the ewe. The colour is changed weekly so that it is clear which girls have been lucky enough to receive his attentions and will therefore lamb first. As we watched him strut happily across the field he showed immediate interest in our throughly ‘teased’ and willing ewes. It seemed they loved their new ‘toyboy.’ Ernie presumably thought he was just one of the girls as he took no notice of the handsome newcomer. 

After a few days we could only see yellow paddle marks on two ewes- Bethany - always recognisable by her white head- and one of my ‘pet’ girls. It was starting to feel like he was rather too faithful to these two as no other markings have appeared since, despite changing the raddle so it was wet and  fresh last Sunday. I do hope that he is doing the job as it would be something of a disaster to only have two lambs this April! I am even beginning to contemplate putting one of the store lambs (who happens to not have been castrated) we bought for the freezer in with the girls if things don’t improve. A ‘chaser ram’ I guess you’d call him! He’s a Lleyn, so they would be crossbreeds, but that’s life. 

In other ovine news, last Monday two of the store lambs we bought back in the Summer went off to the abattoir. They had grown on well and reached 40kg by the time they left. They were both Lleyns, so we will be interested to see how their meat tastes in comparison to our little Badger Faced lambs and hoggs that have gone off so far. There will certainly be more to go around! Their fleeces have gone for curing as well and will be back in a mere eight months, if the last lot were anything to go by. There aren’t many places left in the UK that do fleeces - we are lucky enough to have one down in Buckfastleigh and whilst it’s a long wait to get them back, there’s nothing like snuggling down into a real fleece. It’s hogget chops for tea tonight and it’s so good to start feeling that the majority of meat consumed in our house is grown on the farm. It now just remains for me not to ruin the cooking of it…..

A fortnight or so ago I made the fatal mistake of showing Jonny a picture of a breeding pair of Mangalitsa pigs that were advertised for sale on one of the online smallholder groups. We had read before about the delights of the ‘woolly pig’. They were rare but known for the wonderful marbling running through the meat that makes them wonderful for charcuterie, which we thought we might one day try our hands at, if we could find a course to go on that didn’t require you to remortgage your house. The lady advertising them had lost some of the woodland she was renting, so this pair and their remaining two entire male piglets needed to be rehomed,as they were currently hanging out in her back garden. Having said, with no great conviction, ‘NO PIGS OVER WINTER’, my intrigue got the better of me. We had just created another pig pen on some rough ground at the top of the yard and it had a spare secondhand ark in there. We had the old open fronted bull pen for the piglets. It would all be JUST FINE. 

So we found ourselves,with a borrowed livestock trailer, rattling up the road to a village in Wiltshire. Having got ourselves into a space suitable for loading, the lady owner told me about the pigs escapologist tendencies. They were using electric fencing, and (as so often happens) it had gone down a few times and both she and her partner were fairly done with chasing multiple mischievous pigs around their garden. 

Matilda, the sow was big but Marmalade the Mangalitsa boar was a huge mass of porcine muscle. He looked something like an angry, prehistoric version of Puumba from ‘The Lion King.’  His yellowing tusks jutted by at odd angles and his screwed up little eyes peered at me from beneath large, pricked ears. I remembered all the excellent advice I had read about always having pigs with lop ears. They can’t see where they’re going, which gives you a fighting chance of being able to persuade them into your way of thinking. Having said that, not having been fed the night before, all the pigs were fairly eager to run up the ramp into the trailer in exchange for apples. We exchanged paperwork, thanked the (relived looking) lady owner and trucked off down back to Devon.

The service station stops on the way home were interesting. There were some slots on the side of the trailer that opened up to allow for air. People would peer in and then draw back in fear at Marmalade’s primitive grin. When we got back to the farm we unhooked the trailer and our sheep farming tenants took a break from grooming their show sheep and came out to see the new arrivals. The look of horror on the faces of those who encountered our new acquisitions was by now becoming worryingly familiar. At nine weeks old, the two uncastrated male weaners needed to be taken away from mum and dad. Fortunately the two older pigs ventured out into their new pen, leaving their offspring behind in the trailer just long enough for us to shut the gates and separate them. They were duly deposited into their new home and christened Ivan (the terrible) and Isaac. 

Marmalade and his good lady set about uprooting everything green and pleasant in their pen. Within twelve hours it resembled a badly ploughed field. Our feed bill had doubled overnight, but fortunately the apples were coming into season and all the pigs loved the bitter crunch of the underripe fruit. Over the period of a few days I became brave enough to tentatively scratch the top of Marmalade’s huge head. He chuntered away in piggy pleasure, in a bass voice very different to our squeaky OSBs. 

I might be warming to him. Give it time.