Spying on the neighbours and ‘Date Night’ for the Rams!
Mat Cole takes a brief look at farming life further afield, and gears up for nights drawing in at Greenwell farm.
As the days get shorter the seasonal rollercoaster with its timeless inevitability seems to tighten its grip on us all once more. Those long summer days and the holiday in the sun seem a distant memory. Gem the boys and I did manage to get away this year and visited friends of ours in Lincolnshire and Norfolk. It was a lovely break and great to catch up with good friends and their young families and share a few war stories about children and life in general. As a typical farmer I spent most of the road trip trying to peer over hedges to see what is going on in the countryside. It was always said of my late father that he farmed every bit of land from here to Scotland, as he was never happier than when he was looking over a hedge and passing comments on the state of a field, tractor, hedgerow, flock of sheep or herd of cows! And as I am getting older, and to Gemma’s annoyance, I find myself doing the same.
Our friend Rob in Norfolk has a large arable operation and seeing the scale of farms in this part of the country it did make me question whether smaller family farms such as ours here on Dartmoor have a viable future. After spending a few days with Rob however you realise that ‘all that glitters isn’t gold!’ and these guys, even at their scale, are also struggling. Poor commodity prices, high land values, rising cost etc. etc. and they have little choice but to sell on the open market and are at the mercy of world market and supermarket cartels alike. At least on our farm at Greenwell at our scale we are still able to build lasting relationships with our customers and add value to our produce through Dartmoor Farmers and local butchers like Howells of Tavistock. Getting as close as we can to the customer we can shout about our fantastic produce and the landscape and environment which it delivers and the best thing of all is that helps to sustain viable farms like ours into the future.
The sheep year starts in the autumn with the ewes and rams all thriving and very much looking forward to date night, which is timed to make sure they deliver just in time for Greenwell’s ‘Lambing Live’. It is essential we have both rams and ewes in peak condition not only to maximise our lamb crop but also to face the long winter ahead. Autumn is also the main time of year when the lambs are sold and those long months when the sheep earn you nothing are suddenly forgotten as the lambs are now ready for sale. All those sleepless nights during lambing will now hopefully pay you back….
The cattle have pretty much looked after themselves through the summer and now start to look homewards, slowly returning from the high moor. They have calved on the moor through the autumn and will come into the yards to be fed through the winter. They left the yards in early May keen to get out with the promise of spring and fresh grass, the reverse is now the case and as the weather turns and the moor goes from green to brown they are equally keen, with young hungry calves at foot to get in and feast on all the hay and silage we have been harvesting for them all summer. It is lovely to see them return looking well, but the inevitable winter-feeding routine starts once again.
Mat Cole