Flattened Toes.

 Hot day after the blustery heavy showers of the last few days. Could do with some fine weather to finish making hay. I have also got to find the time to drench last summer’s calves. This is a  horrible job involving  catching each animal and drenching it with, to the animals taste, foul liquid. They really struggle and fight, and you end up with heavily trodden toes and a really bashed body. Worse than two  rounds with Big Daddy.  If only some way could be found to give animals something to kill the lung worms etc that doesn’t involve the farmer risking getting trampled to death himself !
Drenching cattle is  one of the worst jobs on the farm, but not as bad as hop tying. Hop tying is training each young hop shoot to climb the Hessian hop string. We have 18000 hop roots on the 11 acre hop yard and each root has 2 strings reaching from the ground to the 12 foot wirework. above. Each string has 2 shoots  climbing  one string, and 3 shoots climbing the other for optimum yield. For the variety called Fuggles,  that’s not 2 & 2 or 3& 3. It has to be 3 & 2. It is back breaking and mind numbingly boring work.
It was also ‘one of those days’ on the calving front I’m afraid. The good news is that we have so far calved 29 cows with 21 bull calves and 8 heifers. The bad news is that one cow died. She calved quickly and with little trouble giving birth to a lovely Hereford cross bull calf, and I left the mother contentedly being suckled by  the calf. On checking them both 30 minutes later the cow was dead. Probably a burst blood vessel according to the vet. Now the difficult part is to find a foster mother and persuade  the calf it was all a bad dream.                      

I have kept a farm diary for the last 35 years, and it can be very interesting looking back. In fact it seems like another world.

Farming was very different then, and the format of farming was different. I see that on that Friday, July 27  1973 ,I  was blackcurrant picking having got an annual contract with the makers of Ribena. And fruit picking  was a lot of fun as well as hard work. The pickers were all local, and relied on the income from farm work from July though to early September . Blackcurrant picking, then plum picking and then hop picking.  It was not big money by today’s standards, the blackcurrants  earned 30p per 12lb bucket which took about 30 minutes depending on the crop and how much sun bathing was done. Some people got very carried away on hot afternoons ending up very red and embarrassed. It has to be said that some of the village lads enjoyed sneaking down the fruit rows, which were quite tall, hoping to catch any inexperienced young lady unawares - topless being the order of the day.

As we had a  Hereford cross suckler cow herd, later on that day 34 years ago  two calves were born, one with help from a vet as it came backwards. Hay making was  also in progress because it was a cloudless day, and everyone knows that farmers make hay while the sun shines. And  that’s what I did, down by the side of the river Teme. The same fields are still there now growing the same  hay crops, though this year they  have been destroyed  by the floods. You can’t make hay under six feet of water.

 This year not a blade of grass has yet been cut for winter forage . Quite a concern !

And it rains again. Twenty years ago this week Jeffrey Archer had just won half a million pounds and costs of up to 1 million against a London paper. I’m afraid that the flood losses to farming alone is going to come to that sum many many times over. In my valley alone the losses are huge. On this farm we have been luckier than some. All the winter fodder has been lost which will necessitate the sale of all the cattle on the farm, but only 8 acres of wheat have gone. My neighbour has 150 acres of cereals under water. Probable losses to me are in the region of £4500, but at least I will be able to have longer ‘lie ins’ in the winter with no cattle to feed every morning. Every cloud has a silver lining!