Category Archive

A quick update on the bluetongue information. Unfortunately there has been a technical hitch with converting the two Dutch power point presentations into pdfs. Andrew, who is very kindly doing this for me, is away on holiday this week, but as soon as he is back I’m sure that the problem will be resolved and we’ll be able to either upload the pdfs or give a link to them.

The good news is that I’m in contact with Karin from Pirbright who is keen to help and is willing put some information together for the blog. Though due to the warmer weather over the past week she has been extremely busy and won’t be able to do much before the weekend.

But, with a bit of luck, by next week I should have pulled together some useful sources of information that you will hopefully find helpful.

We still have no grass. I’m waiting patiently for the current warm weather to have its magic stimulating effect on the recalcitrant stuff. The cattle are not! As I write this, the perfect, here-at-last, golden-green evening is reverberating with deafening booming bellows, bouncing and crashing up from the yard just metres below me. This noise thunders around my head, twangs and plunks every taut stretched fibre in my body with insistent persistent discord. Of course this is exactly what it is meant to do. I, as number one food provider, am failing at my duty. The unrelenting bawling coupled with the compelling force of combined herd psyche is designed to send me into a spin, in much the same way as the cry of a newborn.

I’ll explain. Last year’s wet summer and very late harvest meant the forage we made was not as nutritious as usual. In the winter, when the cows are in-calf, this is not a problem. But now they are coping with the demands of their fast growing calves with an ever increasing need for milk. My cows are telling me they need plenty of accessible protein, carbohydrates, minerals and vitamins as well as roughage, and last year’s haylage is not delivering. Fresh grass would!

Trouble is, the cold wet spring over the last two months has meant the ground is still soggy and producing little forage. Coupled with this, our landlord on the ground we normally turn out onto – our best drained land – has entered into an Environmental Stewardship Scheme which prohibits the use of round feeders. So we can’t put the cattle out just yet. It’s been a long winter, very nearly six months of looking after the herd indoors. And they are not stupid - they know full well they should be out by now - it’s close to summer and they can smell what fresh grass there is: it’s time to be munching that first delicious bite. So the psychological warfare escalates….

Uuuhuu…big breath. I’m down to only six in the household and have a little more room to expand.

Today I managed to take the dogs for a walk over Hannaborough and in just a few days so much has appeared and the countryside has shifted and changed. I love the way it alters and moves, infinitesimally, but directionally and forever forward. It sometimes seems the landscape is locked in time, but remove yourself from it for just a memory flash and all changes.

This afternoon I found lousewort, lady’s smock, oak trees in the initial explosion of bud burst, skylarks ascending heaven high on a note and the first swallow flying over the farm. The deer have rearranged their groups and are subtly preparing to drop their calves. I felt I was walking a bridge between disappearing winter and oncoming spring.

I know I’ve mentioned that when I walk I think. All your debate and comments over the last few posts are beginning to spill through into my consciousness and form ideas. One that keeps pushing itself to the forefront is our unconscious search for the familiar…what we, or our mind’s eye, are used to. Take livestock, for instance. I choose and breed for certain characteristics and traits that appeal to me, no doubt ones that I picked up from the first stock I ever kept. When I go to look at other people’s animals again I tend to pick qualities out that reinforce my ideal. I believe that this mental process is the same with landscape too. I can remember the day I first saw the countryside around here which I now find so attractive – it was alien, uncomfortable and altogether different from anything I was used to. I searched for the familiar, attempting to compare it other far-flung landscapes I knew, even Indian grasslands, African bush, tropical jungle…but without success, of course. So putting this feeling to our debate on the countryside, perhaps this is why we are so passionate about what we see or want to see – we constantly search out the well-loved familiar? What I fondly romanticise about is another’s bête noir. There are even those who adore the flat fenlands…But as we become accustomed to new environments, so we can come to love them too, as I do now the haphazard countryside I live in. And as the strange becomes familiar, so the desire for order and structure, the need for everything to be explicable and classifiable, diminishes, and we welcome rather than fear the unexpected and unmanaged. At least I do!

Checking the sheep yesterday I found green. Look! It’s just beginning…

Touches in the willows alongside the pond in First Rutleigh.

My wolf dog, Ness, waiting patiently whilst I looked for more signs of spring.

Amazing molinia - purple moor grass.

On Saturday the rain hurled rods and sleet flung stinging shot; the wind whipped and howled, crashing and banging anything and everything with vandalistic glee; the fields ran and sighed with cold clay water – and I lost a lamb. She died from pasteurella. She was bonny, big and strong; she and her sister were some of the first lambs to be born.

I’d been up in the top yard checking the buildings were holding out, and the ewes and lambs hadn’t succumbed to drowning or hypothermia. Surprisingly everyone was okay though a mite wet and bedraggled; the ewes had sensibly brought most of the youngest lambs into shelter. Returning back down to the farmhouse Robert made some remark about the water supply and so couple of hours later I went back up to check all was well. And there she was, dead. Pasteurella is that sudden. It’s a bacterium, p. heamolytica, which leads to severe pneumonia. I’ve never had a case before on this farm. They say if you’ve had one probably more will follow so I’ve been keeping an ever watchful eye on the flock and…I dare say no more.

But what a difference a day makes.  It was time to move Dot, her offspring and a couple of other ewes and lambs up to rejoin the main flock.  Walking them slowly up the hill to the Rutleighs I felt and smelt a balmier air.  A definite stirring. The verges along the lane had erupted with the crumpled unfurling of cow parsley and hog weed.  Down in the dip the pungent cat’s pee smell of wild currant mixed with earthy watery dampness. Primroses cover the hedge banks and nestled in a sheltered mossy hollow I found the first shy violet. Promise…

I’ve run out of steam. For me March can be like that. The world around me has lifted; lighter and brighter, faster and smarter, pulsing in an elevated frequency - but I am not resonating to this hammering beat.

Bird business flourishes and whirrs through bush and branch, a helter-skelter of display, mating and nesting, collecting and feeding. A lattice-work city of frenetic activity. Song clamours from every direction swelling the air with vibrating tunes and notes; the head-banging enthusiasm of the woodpecker’s drumming, a heart-busting liquid cadence from a blackbird, the clear loud chime of the great-tit belling, a robin’s hope-filled spring aria, the rabble-rousing, chattering, squabble of sparrows. Even the night echoes around the vixen-cry of the barn owl discordant against the quivering ‘oos’ of the tawny owl’s hoot. The first chiffchaff, the first skylark, an imagined cuckoo…

The trees shift imperceptibly as their roots suck up draughts of deep cold water. Buds tremor, blush, swell and burst. Peeks and flashes of fresh-clean acid green. Cotton-wool buds of pussy willow, golden-rain catkins. Shoots thrust with phallic determination through wet glutinous clay topped with winter detritus.

Ice-clear light bounces off surfaces in shattered kaleidoscopic patterns. My eyes sting - hurt. I’m so far behind this living vitality. Lost still in the sludgy greys of winter, my body has yet to shed its winter skin. I feel a pale, slow, sallow shadow beside the energy of life around me. Ugly and unlovely. Soon I will catch up with mother earth but for a few weeks more I shall struggle to free myself from Skadi’s clutch.

In the glow of the setting sun on Monday evening Dot gave birth to twins. The last lambs of 2008 to be born. Dot is my oldest sheep (to find out more about her click on Sheep Secrets) and quite a character - even Robert has a soft spot for her and he has no time whatsoever for sheep. I was hoping to keep her away from the tups last autumn, but Dot had other ideas. I kept my fingers crossed that at least she would spare herself and have a single - but no, in true Dot style, she was in lamb to twins…yet again.

Old productive ewes carrying twins can run into problems during the later part of the pregnancy. Pregnancy toxaemia can develop as the fast growing lambs take more energy than the ewe can take in. If the signs are not seen early on the ewe can become so depleted she’ll stop eating all together; having reached this point it becomes very difficult to pull her back to recovery.

Over the last month I’ve watched Dot with an eagle eye and as soon as I saw her interested in food was waning I took measures to make sure she had access to an easy unchallenged measure of oats and molasses. Soon she was back to her old self, bright and lively, though still thin.

Dot gave birth on Monday evening with the minimum of fuss and bother. But she wasn’t out of the woods quite yet. With the unborn lambs having used up all her resources and her labour having sapped every last ounce of energy, she had nothing left to make milk with. It’s a fine line allowing the lambs to suckle to encourage milk supply and teaching them to suck a bottle to substitute the ewe’s milk. But with patience one eventually gets the balance right.

Old ewes can crash after the stress of giving birth, and Dot did. The immediate need for energy and the changing hormones can cause digestive upsets and prohibit the liver from working properly. So it’s careful nursing and feeding, letting the ewe have access to ivy and certain plants that will help her rebalance her metabolism. I gave her a multi-vitamin jab as B vitamins help kick start the liver.

We’re there! Today Dot is nearly back to normal and has begun grazing, making some milk and eating a small quantity of whole oats. Her lambs are bonny and bouncy and joy of joy the little ewe lamb is a replica of her mum – a mini Dot!

So here’s to Dot’s last lambs…and a peaceful retirement!

bluetongue’s winter warmer

Now here’s a thing. I had a fit of the giggles. Actually it was probably a touch of mini-hysteria; the uncontrolled, raucous, thigh-slapping, tears-pouring-down-face kind, coloured by total disbelief. Wishful thinking there – what I would hope to be total disbelief.

In this week’s New Scientist under the heading ‘Bluetongue’s Winter Warmer‘ we were told about the distinct possibility of bluetongue virus overwintering in the unborn calf cosseted and protected by the cosy bubble of bovine uterine warmth.

And as those hungry veracious biting midges reappear (the end of the non-vector period was the 15th March) these bonny babies would become a delicious fresh source of the bluetounge virus. Hey-presto! Yup, you have it in one.

Pirbright suggest there should be additional controls targeted at newborn animals. Now, me-wonders, what on earth have they in mind? No vaccine around yet. Could only be one other thing.

And if that’s not sinister enough – listen to this…the only bluetongue virus ever seen to cross the placenta of infected mothers to infect their foetuses was a laboratory-adapted strain used in experiments with sheep in the 70s.

Ring any bells? Shades of last summer’s FMD fiasco? Afterall the great and the good have been wondering how the BTV8 strain gained such an unshakable foothold in northern Europe.

Maybe they now have their answer.

I’ve surfaced from a surfeit of lambings. Zombie-like and mindless. Why?

It doesn’t seem to matter much if you have a large or small flock – for one reason or another it evokes the same reaction in the shepherd. I started off my shepherding with a dozen or so Longwools expanding to two hundred Mules and Mule-Suffolk crosses when I was dairying, back down to a medium flock of Herdwicks which I grazed over moorland on the North Devon coast and finally to my Whiteface Dartmoors here at Locks. Oh, and somewhere in there was a sprinkling of mad hysterical Shetlands that Robert gave me as a present one Easter – never again! Each breed has its good and bad points and it really depends what you’re after as to what breed you choose. The main thing is you like what you’ve got – that will help you tolerate multitudinous sins…

Sheep generally lamb together, it’s part of their flock survival strategy. So you are dealing with rapid-fire; that’s lots of births in quick succession, many of them multiple, and associated difficulties.

And then there’s temperament, theirs and yours. Sheep have tendency towards hysteria when they lamb whether there’s a problem or not; but if you’re dealing with a complication, and the ewe you’re helping suddenly decides she’s not dying and legs it across a muddy field, or uses the lambing shed as a race track, it can be difficult to keep one’s patience and cool.

And patience, calmness and time are definitely needed - to make sure all newborns have suckled and have a belly full of colostrum (first milk full of fats and antibodies): baby lambs are tiny and it’s imperative they suckle as soon as possible after birth. Once ewes have lambed and are penned, ewes and lambs are bonded, and lambs are sucking well …it’s maintenance time - water bucket, hay net, feed, bedding. At the same time you are dealing with all this you could have a handful of ewes in varying stages of labour. It’s trying to be everywhere at once that’s energy sapping.

Twelve to twenty-four hours after birth, all lambs (providing they are strong and healthy) need double-tagging in the ears, tail docking, and castrating if males; mothers need their feet trimming (they haven’t been done for the last three months  of their gestation) and worming. When lambs have recovered from handling, tagging, docking and castrating they are numbered along with their mums for easy counting and identification in the field. Mine are transferred to an adjacent nursery field close to the house with access to shelter. Back in the lambing shed, the pens are mucked out and disinfected ready for the next occupant.

Every year due to tiredness or just lambing pandemonium there’s someone whose tail is forgotten, a tag wrongly recorded or a lamb who slips through as a female when he’s a male and should have been castrated. I have a note book in the shed which I translate onto the lambing sheet in the house – there are always mistakes in transcription, however hard I try!

And that, in a nutshell, explains the dazed, shell-shocked expression friends’ or acquaintances’ have when they say in a rather bemused fashion ‘Oh, I’ve been lambing’.

plannin’ and dreamin’ that she’ll have some time to spare away from that lambing affair…

The dogs find this time of year a trifle tedious. Apart, that is, from the delicious morsels that come from multitudinous birthing and milk-sucking baby animal - more detail would be too much information. Read the rest of this entry »

This year’s first lambs, born at mid-day today, a few days early. Interestingly the ewe, a second lamber, lambed on exactly the same day last year. Though young, she chose well - a good time of day for their shepherd and mild gentle weather for the lambs.

Being licked dry.

A few minutes later they attempt their first wobbly, unsteady steps.

Searching for the teat. One is a little eager and is sucking hard on his brother’s face!

I briefly mentioned that I had a cow calving yesterday. This was Jennifer. In the Social Life of Cows I mention Jennifer and her position in the herd so do follow the link to get an idea of her. I’ve put several ‘ah-sweet’ images of cows and calves on the blog previously, so I thought you might be interested in some working images, so to speak.

early stages

Jennifer is my most senior cow; she is imbued with calmness, wisdom and intelligence. This hasn’t always been the case and whilst working her way up the herd hierarchy she was aloof, independent and didn’t tolerate humans. Now respected, secure in her place and in her immediate governing council she has relaxed into being a wise and benevolent leader.

progressing steadily

She is a very experienced mother and handles her calvings in a way that many humans could learn from. She started calving yesterday morning and having put her in a calving pen I left her to get on with it. After a couple of hours I was surprised she hadn’t produced her calf; she wasn’t showing any signs of distress so I continued to monitor her at a distance.

In these extraordinary poses she is almost squatting, straining to open up the pelvic cavity. I’ve never seen another cow do this other than Jennifer.

Another couple of hours went past; I was getting a little worried, even though Jennifer appeared unperturbed and was calmly working with her contractions. I decided to check the calf was presented correctly and alive. Everything was as it should be, so I left her to continue. At last, at four-thirty the feet were out and the head had filled the birth cavity, almost six hours after her water sack had first appeared; now she was exhausted.

the last stages. you can see the two white hooves, still in their sack, and the bulge of the head behind them.

I decided to attach ropes to the calf’s legs and help her with this last stage. It took hardly any effort on our part; she’d worked so hard at relaxing and opening the birth canal in preparation for the birth. So with a firm but gentle pull from us and a final push from her a monstrously huge but beautiful calf was at last born. Worn-out, shattered, she nevertheless immediately turned her attention to her calf; lowing in gentle velvet-soft tones, nickering and licking him into rosy pink life. Sneezing and jerking he gradually opened his eyes becoming aware of his surroundings and his mother. Buffeted and stimulated by her rasping, massaging tongue, almost immediately his pink wet nose and softly whiskered mouth indented, his tongue lengthened and curled as he nubbed and bumbled his mothers damp red hide searching for milk.

This calf is bigger than Jemima’s born just over a month ago! Generally big calves experience trauma during their birth making them slow and a bit addled – standing, feeding and sucking can be a big problem. Jennifer handled the whole calving in such a way that not only was she undamaged from having given birth to such a large animal but so was her baby. He was standing and sucking within the hour and though Jennifer has taken a bit longer to cleanse (expel the afterbirth) they are both doing well.

Yesterday a heavy metal shearing stand fell, with some force, onto my head and shoulder. Taken completely by surprise I couldn’t answer the urgent questions as to whether I was okay. I had no idea.

I’d been waiting for Simon, my shearer, to come and dock the ewes prior to lambing. Yesterday morning he called to say he would be over mid-day. We finished getting the lambing shed ready during the morning. The shed originally housed cattle; since building the cow palace it’s become a useful covered area to store the tractor, stock trailer and other pieces of farm machinery. The problem we face each year is finding a home for the various bits of machinery whilst the sheep are in situ. Once we have squeezed turners and toppers, tractors and trailers into impossibly small vacant places we put up pens, plumb in water-troughs, install hay racks, straw down, and, hey-presto, we have a lambing shed conveniently near the house, yards and nursery fields.

All had gone smoothly. The ewes had been gently and expertly docked. Robert, Simon and I were chewing-the-cud over various topics whilst clearing up. We’d noticed an udder that was particularly full and another ewe that appeared to have an overly fat tail. Chatting and moving through the sheep, not wholly focused on what was happening behind me, there was a sudden shout from Simon… a rather strange noise followed – metal connecting with my head and shoulder. I had no idea what happened. I have recollection of eyes and mouths worriedly speaking to me. I remember easing myself to a bale and thinking what the hell are they going on about? I felt none of the anger or immediate pain one usually does when you’ve banged your head, elbow or toe. Just mystified and, well, dazed. I remember saying I had to go in and get a jab for a ewe and sort of wandered off.

So here I am. I might be mightily changed, for all I know. I’m waiting for star-spangled clarity, inspirational thoughts and the sudden ability to be a truly remarkable solver of the world’s problems. Unfortunately none of these things have manifested themselves as yet. The head seems to be in one piece, albeit with a rather large soggy bloody protuberance on the back and there’s also a bruised swelling on my shoulder and neck. But having calved two cows today I guess I’m still just the ordinary old Paula – though do let me know if you see a change!

bluetongue 2

My fears have been confirmed. We are in the bluetongue surveillance zone. I arrived home this evening checked the answer phone and there was the man from DEFRA with his recorded message – in a dead-pan voice he stated ‘some, part, or all of my holding now came within the bluetongue surveillance zone and…’

Below is an excerpt from an email sent to me by a fellow farmer in Norfolk. I won’t add anything. The words tell their own story - poignant and thought provoking.

‘Our stock are our livelihood, such as it is, we run an organic beef suckler herd and 700 laying hens, and work long hours trying to make a living, but that’s life: farmings’ shit at the moment, but what else do we do?’

Last year they were hit by restrictions from both FMD and Avian flu (twice), having just, in the very nick of time, saved their entire suckler herd from drowning during the floods they heard the news about bluetounge. In her own words…

‘Just after that Bluetongue was detected, and we thought Now What!!? how do we deal with this? what are the symptoms? is it contagious? does it cross species? and the media had a field day; yet again; (They virtually camped in the area during the first Avian Flu outbreak- 9 miles from us) and there was no clear information, later on the farmers that had cows with the disease said there were few symptoms to tell they were affected, but since then our vet has been trying to keep abreast of the disease, and how it will affect cows in the future, and it seems as though some of the affects of the disease is to cause infertility in some and may cause calves to be born with abnormalities. I can only liken that to thalidomide in pregnant women. Follow that up again with Liver Fluke and a blasted fox getting my five 12 week old chicks from off the lawn, and traumatising their mother half to death. (she spent hours in the pond to avoid getting caught), and one might wonder why we carry on!’

She ends…

‘Yes, you bet we’re worried, but we can’t allow it to take over our lives. We just take heart that life here, at the moment, goes on in the age old tradition, and we are thankful that at least this year we have some beautiful calves to see bounding and gambolling about, and we will worry when the time comes (and hopefully it won’t). I’ve got enough grey hairs, and F has none, he has pulled all his out over the years!!’

So how will farms and good, caring people like this cope? Beef animal are already making a loss of £139 per animal. Not to mention the heartache caused from tending sick and dying stock. We will loose those very farms and farmers that are trying their best to produce high quality food from healthy, happy, animals whilst caring as best they can for the environment.

I have a wild passion for the north Devon and adjacent Cornish coast. I farmed, twenty years or so ago, on a bleak windswept moor overlooking Lundy and the Atlantic. During this time the boys (my sons) and I explored every wind-blasted ridge, each hidden, veiled, greenly-secret valley; walked along peregrine-lifting cliff tops and discovered unknown coves. We collected driftwood from winter storms, and, against a backdrop of wild seas and towering rock faces, would make a fire and cook sausages - sizzling, spitting hot - and bake, deep in the glowing ashes, black charcoal-crisp potatoes. Never, ever, will food taste better than it did then. We, all of us, nurture a hunger, a need for the raw, shattered beauty of the place. Read the rest of this entry »

Two days of inspiring spring weather. Uplifting: good for body and soul. When I walked down to the river at Scadsbury, the wild daffodils were already in flower. Small, delicately-pale cream-lemon-yellow petals, translucent against the light, the base and trumpet a brush stroke more vibrant, each flower set-off by green spears of thrusting leaves. Nodding, softly swaying in the breeze from the fast-flowing water, they resembled clusters of coy, yet animated, bonneted maidens. A far cry from their loud, brash and quarrelsome cultivated cousins.

After the success of their outing last week I decided to take the cows up to silage barn again today. Still aggravatingly itchy from mites I felt they would benefit from the fresh air and sun on their backs. This week they were ready for me. Gone was the spontaneous joyful and scatty hiccupping down the lane, instead there was a wall of solid red determination! Ranks mustered, eyes forward, they surged as one. Occasionally a foot soldier would break ranks to snatch hastily at a particularly flavoursome plantain, a bind of ivy or a clump of rank, wet grass - otherwise they were single minded in their resolve – they were going out to grass. When we stopped at silage barn it took a lot of persuading and cajoling to get them through the gate into the yard. This was not the game plan. Yet once they knew my determination was every bit as strong as theirs they conceded, eventually, and didn’t have too bad a day. Returning to the cow palace for tea they ambled along quickening their pace as they got nearer home – there, in full view of the young stock, they milled around the pulling at grass, brambles, whatever was to tongue, and shouting, with mouths full, about the heavenly day they’d had out to grass.

Not to put a dampener on the glorious day I will leave my next post about bluetongue till tomorrow.

midges flying over hanaborough moor 7th february 2008

Bluetongue. Twenty-four different BT strains identified so far each needing a strain-specific vaccine. This disease is expected to become endemic in Britain. There will be no compensation. Vaccination will be the only way of protecting livestock. Our native and indigenous breeds of cattle and sheep will be more susceptible to the disease having never encountered it before.

Bluetongue. The BTV-8 strain is now affecting the Eastern and South-eastern counties of the UK with the surveillance zone having been extended into some parts of Dorset. DEFRA are expecting different strains of the disease to arrive along the South West coast from France this spring and spread northwards.
In the UK midges have not been killed off during the mild winter and are already flying. They travel two kilometres a day in normal weather conditions and much further in strong headwinds. It doesn’t take a mathematician to work out how long it will take to reach Devon.

Bluetongue. It is hoped, according to DEFRA, there will be enough BTV-8 vaccine ready to carry out vaccination in the South East during May. There is no indication of a more comprehensive vaccination programme this year, next year or ever. The costs of developing vaccines for the 24 various strains and for implementing a countrywide vaccination programme will be staggering. Will DEFRA or the government be willing to help with the costs? I’m not so sure.

I’m shit scared and worried. It seems extraordinary to me that some people appear to be acting as if it’s a mild inconvenience. This disease is potentially devastating; especially to an already beleaguered livestock industry. And I don’t know if I have the heart or energy left to cope with a farm of sick and dying animals. This could be the death-knoll for Locks Park Farm.

Twinkling fairies? Or the harbinger of devastation?

Rain, rain, rain.

Sometimes life throws a bit too much at you all at once…

I was excited- looking forward to a quick weekend visit to Ben, my son, his partner Berengere and baby Camille…

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m in love! Yes, head over heels in love with the countryside! These few weeks in late April early May are stunning. Not only are they beautiful to look at but to smell and listen to as well. Probably it’s special because it’s so fleeting. And the icing on the cake has been this glorious weather.

But something very strange has happened…

Read the rest of this entry »