Well, I am still without my pc and deeply frustrating it is now proving to be...Younger Son's laptop is all very well but does limit my activities (the Farmer would say that is an excellent thing!) but nonetheless trying to do 'cottage stuff' & the blog as well as various other things without the resources of my own computer is now getting to be tedious.
On Tuesday we had a Milk Academy meeting here with half a dozen organic dairy farmers and a speaker from IBERS (the agricultural research department of Aberystwyth university) who was very informative on Soil. This may sound a rather uninspiring subject but in fact was fascinating. He spoke about the structure of soil and all its constituent parts, its chemical analysis and its function and how it is affected by all that we do farmers do to it and on it. On a walk around the farm soils samples were taken to study how much compaction has occurred in the various fields due to the differing activies that have taken place and also to see what the worm population was like. Worms, of course, are vital to healthy soil.
It was an interesting day and everyone learned something new.
Inevitably conversation moved away from just soil and went onto general farming topics that affect us all, including how we cope with male calves that are worth almost nothing. The best comment I heard on the eventual sale of a calf for a pittance, was, 'Duw, it wasn't worth keeping the bugger, but at least I had the muck & the company!'
The boys are very busy re-vamping our milking parlour. It is proving to be a bigger job than anticipated, as always, but they are struggling on and the end result will be good. They are able to do this job now as we are only milking a handful of cows at present and so can use only half the parlour each milking time. Once the new metalwork and pipework are all in place and the whole place painted it will look very smart and fit for purpose.
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