Anton Coaker: Cracking on with the livestock work

JP1

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Livestock Farmer
In the absence of settled weather, we’ve cracked on with the livestock work with a vengeance. All the Galloways are now gathered in, sorted into the right groups for each bull, and the 13 new calves tagged and dealt with. Curiously, despite the cows having been up in the clouds for about 8 weeks, none of these calves seems to have been born more than a week or two when we handled them. Which is just as well, or we mightn’t be allowed to register them, and they would become bovine pariahs, unable to enter the food chain or polite society. So that was lucky wasn’t it boys and girls! The cattle are mostly in lovely condition, and there are plenty of calves about this year. The frontline bulls are very happy to be in with their girls, while the ‘B team’ are held in reserve, and are somewhat disgruntled about this state of affairs. And even as I tell you this, I realise that this begs the question…what does a gruntled bull look like? I suppose that’d be one that’s happy with his cows. Anyway, the valley echoes with the various fellas grumbling and trumpeting. Oh, and speaking of bulls, I’ve a very nice South Devon bull surplus, if you need such a thing. He’s very easy calving, solidly put together, and lives out up here easily. His replacement is already at work and stopping cows, so he’s currently unemployed.

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Gathering sheep for shearing goes on apace, moving on up through the bracken and out onto the open peat, with only one lot of Scotch ewes left to hunt down. With a following wind, we might see that task ticked off the list by the weekend. There isn’t an overabundance of lambs, but they are at least looking pretty good, and the ewes are handling well too. A downside of all this livestock work is that my limbs are fairly bruised and scraped. Several sessions wrestling calves in the cattle crush have taken their toll. The phrase ‘hold his tail up Joe, I got em’ usually precedes another thrashing about incident, which leaves a couple of us bashed around…and another ex bull calf even worse off. Then loading some cows and calves into the trailer saw me trodden on and squished against a granite shippen wall, which I could’ve done without. The shearing shed hasn’t been much better, with the Scotch ewes liking nothing better than to rub their antlers vigorously up and down my shins, and that’s after I’ve spent happy hours wading through waist deep gorse thickets trying to persuade them to come and play in the first place. Ungrateful wretches.




Domestically, things are equally seasonal. As well as getting the boy’s best cattle washed and leading on a halter ready to show in a day or two, and the usual sort of nonsense they get up to, the kids have been making jam from some of the surplus fruit. Mostly Logan berries, they’ve appeared en masse from a neighbour’s polytunnel. To help this preserve set, Agnes has harvested a few of the bitter little feral apples to be found about the valley- it looks like a good year for them. This is something to do with pectin she assures me…and I do try not to argue with the girl, as I always lose. The boy has eaten one or two of these apples whole, but he’s a braver man than I Ghunga Din. The recipes and results have mostly been, um, experimental to date. A previous batch was boiled down to something so thick you could tip the jar over and read the paper before any spillage occurred, while another isn’t set at all as far as I can tell. To apply it to your toast you simply spoon it on. But it has all been quite edible, and I can’t see it lasting til winter. Meanwhile, the cheese they’d made from Beltie milk has been consumed, the last going in a quiche dish the other night- there’s too many blinking eggs as well.

It’s early yet, but it would appear to be another bumper year for most hedgerow stuff generally up here. The hawthorn looks like being laden, and the raspberries around the yard are starting to ripen in abundance. Fetching them out involves a bit of dodging the stinging nettles, but they’re all the sweeter for it.

And that is probably this week’s metaphor for life.

Right, what else can I do while we’re waiting on some weather?

About the author

Originally published in The Western Morning News, these articles are reproduced for the enjoyment of TFF members World-wide by kind permission of the author Anton Coaker and the WMN

Anton Coaker is a fifth generation farmer keeping suckler cows and flocks of hill sheep high on the Forest of Dartmoor and running a hardwood and mobile sawmill.

A prodigious writer and regular correspondent for The Western Morning News, NFU and The Farming Forum, Anton’s second book “The Complete Bullocks” is available fromwww.anton-coaker.co.uk
 

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Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

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As reported in Independent


quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

read the TFF thread here: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/gfc-was-to-go-ahead-now-not-going-ahead.405234/
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