Snow, Early Lambs

A snowy morning after several days of biting cold. At present the snow is not a problem as it just a dusting though it is falling quite steadily. If it continues and schools and roads may be closed farmers have to carry on whatever the weather throws at us and snow, while quite lovely to look at, casuses huge problems for farmers with livestock out in the fields and on the hills and for those of us with milk to be collected. As I have mentioned before we now have to take out insurance against non-collection as we are no longer allowed to use emergency milk tanks to take it out ourselves to meet up with the milk lorry on the main road if the lorry cannot get up our driveway.


Lambing has begun with two orphans who are being bottle-fed and hopefully they will not have too many companions as more ewes produce. Whilst bottle lambs are sweet and pathetic to start with they do become rather a nusiance and we always try to adopt them onto ewes who have only a single lamb and plenty of milk.

February Snowdrops, Februdairy

February and the snowdrops have been appearing in hidden corners and along the drive for a couple of weeks now, a sure and welcome sign that spring will soon be on its way, though it is now very cold again and at regular intervals throughout the day we have been pelted with heavy showers of hailstones.
Late December & January were very busy with family events and now that things are getting back to normal I am catching up with myself.
This month has been renamed Februdairy! 28 days of social media posts devoted to promoting a positive understanding of the dairy industry in the face of the current campaigns by certain anti-farming & anti-dairy groups. @februdairy on Twitter is buzzing with farmers all over the country posting images and text telling the story of dairy farming in the hope of correcting the gross mis-information that has been put out by the vegan community amongst others. One thing can be certain, farmers will not stoop to the level of certain individuals in abusing and insulting those who farm this land as has been demonstrated on Twitter with posts containg aggressive and hateful language directed at the farming industry as a whole, not just dairy farmers. We will always inform and hopefully educate in a polite & courteous manner without pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Work on the farm is as always at this time of year hard & busy with feeding and bedding down the cattle every day. The sheep are now in too ahead of lambing which is due to start in late March though a couple of ewes ahev pre-empted us by producing a lamb each which was a surprise indeed. It would seem that a ram lamb missed the 'snip' & got in amongst the ladies at a critical time and so we have a couple of very early lambkins.

When not doing the routine work much time is being spent removing the standings from the old milking parlour with a samll digger in the building drilling away with a pecker at the concrete block upstands. The room is coming back to its original look and there is lot of discussion on what it will be used for. The Farmer wants to make it into his brew room with all his apple-pressing and cider-making equipment installed there as well a place for extracting honey and storing the bee-keeping equipment, while Elder Son is talking about making more calf-pens of which we can never have too many.

Christmas Past and New Year Anticipation

Nearly a month since my last post and we have seen Christmas come and go and the dawning of the New Year.
Christmas was very family-orientated and quiet despite two very excited small grand-children...do you not remember that all-consuming sense of anticipation and the longing to see Father Christmas and know that he really does exist? My grand-daughter has assured me thst she met the real Father Christmas last year at Castell Coch and I believe her! She has a photograph to prove it!
Yesterday being the Twelfth Day of Christmas we took down the decorations and removed the tree from the dining-room leaving the usual confetti of pine needles which despite thorough sweeping and vacuuming will continue to appear throughtout the year, they are ineradicable.
The daily routine of the farm continued as usual over the festive period in horrible weather a lot of the time. The rain has been incessant and it is impossible to get tractors onto the fields to start hedge-trimming. Even walking across the fields has been miserable, squelchy and slippery. This morning however we have a good frost and everything is crisp and silvered with a pale sun gleaming over the valley.
The Farmer and I managed to take a couple of days away last week joining my sister and her husband in a cottage they had taken in the Forest of Dean. It was lovely much-needed break and a good start to the New Year in a beautful place. We walked the dogs through the Forest to Symond's Yat to the high viewing point above the dramatic meanders of the River Wye. At this time of year there were very few people there but I know that later on it is a very busy tourist centre so we saw it almost empty of people and in its winter bleakness.
Now it is back to the normal routines and ongoing projects with no doubt new ones to be started in 2018.
Blwyddyn Newydd Dda!

Snow

SNOW! After too many years of snow-free winters it is a white world this morning and its still falling. Other parts of the country have had much greater snow-fall than us but we have enough to satisfy the small grand-children's desperate longing for snow, having never seen it. As I sit at the kitchen table (the unheated office is not conducive to sitting for any length of time!) writing this the falling snow has become thicker and with bigger flakes and is falling in a lovely feathery swirl from a full grey sky so dense that I cannot see across the valley. Our 4 year-old grand-son has already been out and landed a snowball on his dog-walking Granny, to his huge delight!

While we do enjoy the snow the daily farm work has to continue but fortunately the cows are all indoors and the only activity with machines in the snow is to fetch big bales of silage from our yard down the drive and to make sure that the milk tanker can reach us. At the moment that should not be problem but should the snow continue to build up we may have to re-open an old track that does not have a steep slope for the tanker to reach us. Our driveway is on a hill and in the past we have had to tow the tanker up in icy conditions. In the absolute worst-case scenario, which I doubt will occur this time round, we have to dump the milk and insurance has to taken out in case of this. Years ago we were allowed to take the milk out ourselves to the main road in an emergency mobile bulk tank, but this has been forbidden in the last few years due to food hygiene issues and the risk of contamination both of which were extremely unlikely as the emergency tank was as clean, safe and tamper-proof as the big tanks in the dairy on the farm. So, the powers that be would rather we let the milk go down the drain even though the main roads are clear enough for the milk tankers to reach the end of the drive. One of the advantages of living in an area with many dairy farms is that the main roads were always kept as clear as possible in times of severe snow, to allow the milk tankers to get to us all, even if only to entrances to the farms but where we could leave our emergency tanks. Now it is deemed better to waste the milk and rely on the insurance companies to compensate us for the loss of earnings.

Computerised Cattle Ear-tags & Hideous Weather

Walking the dogs one morning recently I found we were being closely watched by one of our neighbours handsome Charolais cattle peering through the leafless hedge at the antics of the dogs who were busy chasing imaginary rabbits along the hedge line.

Today the weather is vile, very blustery with persistent rain being hurled at us as we were working outside. I had to stand for about 15 minutes at the end of our lane to halt traffic as we were moving lambs down the main road with the aid of our trusty sheepdogs and got very cold and damp, not pleasant. After moving the sheep I was then called upon to be the scribe for taking down the ear-tag numbers on all the miking cows. They were given new tags that link to the computer system of the new milking parlour that will record how much milk each cow gives and how much cake she is to have. It is all very clever. All 71 of our milking cows were passed through a crush, tagged and then released into a holding area before returning to their nice dry, clean cattle-shed. With three of us working that was the morning gone.
While we were with the cattle a tree came down near the shed where the Farmer houses his saw-mill...rather conveniently really...but an indication of how very windy it is here today.

The puppies are now reduced in number as they go off to their new homes. Another one leaves us this evening. They are lovely and very jolly but unfortunately they are having to be kept in an indoor pen as they get so muddy after these days of rain. They would much rather be outside watching what is going on.

Autumn

Walking around the farm with the dogs each day the seasonal changes are a joy, especially at this time of year when the colours are glowing. Even the shades of green are made more distinctive with the fallen golden russet leaves veiling the mossy banks in our beautiful ancient sunken lane and caught on the spines of the deep green holly leaves that grow under the tall oaks.



Although it is November it is still relatively warm and there are are columns of midges floating in the sunshine. Most os the trees have lost their leaves and I spend much time sweeping away the drifts of golden brown beech leaves that accummulate outside the door to the house and take every opportunity to blow in whenever anyone walks through the door.

The puppies are now almost 8 weeks old and very jolly. I have got homes for them all and they will make a lot of people very happy.

New Milking Parlour Up & Running

Here is the first cow in the new milking parlour, now fully installed and up and running with the first milking session in it taking place last night. After a very busy, long and stressful day the first cow made her way in and the others followed her lead with a little persuasion from the Farmer & Sons and enticing cake in the feeders...it went very smoothly and once everyone, the cows and the men are all used to a completely new system it will mean that instead of milking taking 3 hours it will all be done in 1 hour. The new parlour can milk 16 cows at a time instead of only 6 as in the old parlour. It has taken about 7 months for this project to be completed which included the building of a new shed, digging drainage systems, plumbing in the washing systems and all the other mechanisms necessary for milking cows in a herring-bone parlour. I have nothing but admiration for my boys as they have worked hard and long on the project as well as doing all their usual farming activities.

While everyone was enjoying the sight of the cows in the new parlour our old parlour puss-cat was very confused...he was waiting in his usual place in the old parlour and nothing was happening. It will be interesting to see how long he takes to venture near the new parlour and find a place to watch as he always has done.

Storm Ophelia

We have survived Storm Ophelia with nothing more than one tree down across the lane, no electricity for most of the day & a general feeling of being battered. We did not get the full brunt of the storm but it was still uncomfortable. Without any power everyone was anxious about milking the cows but fortunately we do have a generator which is powered by a tractor so that was brought into play in the early afternoon and ran until about 6.30pm when it was learnt that the mains electricity was back on after a phone to a neighbour to find out the situation. Of course there was time when every farm ran a generator as matter of course before mains power was brought out to country areas. Electricity came to Penyrallt only in 1958. I can recall one of our older neighbours, now no longer with us, saying he remembered the sound of humming generators across the valley as each farm started milking every day before everyone was connected to the national grid. Thank goodness we still have to have a back-up power source for the rare occasions like today when the mains system goes down. We have friends who live off-grid and have their own systems of wind turbines and solar panels to run their homes and workshops but none of them have cows to milk. If it wasn't for the milking we may well be off-grid ourselves but the powere needed to run a milking parlour and the cooling of the milk in the bulk tank is too great to be reliant on alternative power generation.
There are reports of serious storm damage across west Wales and many trees came down to say nothing of tidal surges and flooding along the coast.
It is now a beautiful calm, clear morning with sunshine lighting the autumn colours against a blue sky and the rambler rose outside the farm office window is full of fat little sparrows chattering away without being buffeted about by the winds of yesterday.