Easter Eggs & Venison

Easter Sunday and it's a bright, sunny, though chilly morning. So lovely that it is NOT RAINING!!! The Farmer spent yesterday working out the trail for our annual Easter Egg Hunt around the farm for the grandchildren and some of their friends and this morning he now has to go round again placing chocolate eggs in the various nests of straw he has dotted around the fields and hedges. They are in all sorts of odd places, down rabbit holes, up in trees (with a ladder firmly tied in place) or on a large stone in the middle of a stream. It is all great fun and the children love it and it is also a good long walk for them (& the grown-ups!) before coming in for hearty tea...,for the grown-ups as the smalls so are full of chocolate by that stage that proper food is not required! For Easter lunch we are having roast venison. We have a herd of wild red deer roaming the valley and were spotted in our fields recently, so the menfolk had bit of sport and brought back some excellent wild, free meat. Whilst the deer are very beautiful to see, their numbers need controlling as they eat any trees that are planted and a lot of grass that is needed for our cattle. A herd of twenty or so deer can do a lot of damage and by next year the numbers will have increased. They also are known to carry TB which of much greater concern to us than any other aspect of their close proximity. As dairy farmers bovineTB is our greatest worry and if the deer and the cows come into contact it is a great risk to our business. The biggest irony though, is that when we need to move any cattle we have to have them TB tested by a vet (which we have to pay for), but a herd of deer can roam freely from farm to farm as they please, in our case they will have crossed at least three seperate farms before they reach our land and later they were seen entering the woods on a farm far distant across the valley.