The South Penquite Farm blog can now be found at

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I never like to make our hay before the middle of July. There are good conservation reasons for cutting this late (to the benefit of some ground nesting birds) but also I just like to see the old moorland grasses turn to seed and other plants such as Ox-eyed Daisies & Birdsfoot Trefoil have a chance to flower before we lay in with the mowers.

Having watched some decent spells of sunshine pass us by in late June and early July, the more recent weather has been frustratingly unpredictable and there were a couple of times that I went to bed thinking “Yes – this is it. We will cut in the morning” only to wake up and find that the Met office had changed their minds and were now predicting heavy showers in less than 48 hours time.

Anyway after one false start this week we did cut on Wednesday and I was out with my new second-hand four-star tedder on Thursday morning to turn the hay.

Spending over two grand on a 14 year old machine that we would only use for four days of the year was a bold decision (or madness - depending on whether you are talking to Cathy or me) but after 3 hours of buzzing round the field, turning over the freshly cut grass to dry in the sun, and I was well pleased with my purchase.

I was less pleased a couple of hours later, with my new toy in pieces in the yard, and even less pleased when having driven twenty miles to get a spare part I was told that it was not in stock and to come back on Saturday morning.

Not only was the part going to cost me the best part of £200, but I then had to pay someone else to come and turn the hay on Friday.

Come Saturday morning and the good old Met Office started to give warnings about rain on Sunday and so in rolled the balers to harvest the crop, and I am glad to say that by 8 o’clock in the evening all of the round bales had been wrapped and the last of the small bales was safely stored in the barn.

Meanwhile – after a real struggle (and several swift blows with a sledge hammer) the new tedder was all back together in full working order ready to be stored until next year’s merry-go-round.

About ten years ago I attended an eco event at the local wind farm and one of the speakers said “If you only do one thing to help the environment – then stop flying”. I’ve no idea why this struck such a chord with me, but it probably because it seemed an easy option for us as at the time as we didn’t have either the time or the money to fly anyway. With four children at primary school most of our family holidays were spent camping at the local beach at Polzeath.

Ten years on and with four teenagers our holidays have become more adventurous, and of course the era of cheap flights is now with us for good (or bad – depending on your point of view!)

With Jane off to Camp America for the summer and Mitchell now working full time as a building apprentice, we asked the remaining two teens where they would like to go this summer. Italy was the unanimous reply. Determined to keep up my no-fly policy I began to research the train options and stumbled upon what has become my new favourite web site – www.seat61.com

Everything you could possibly need to know about planning and booking international rail journeys has been lovingly collated by Mark Smith (a career railwayman and total enthusiast) and the resulting web site is a gold mine of information and inspiration.

So for the last few weeks I have been busy booking sleeper tickets and the connecting trains that will take us from Bodmin to London and via Paris to Florence. By booking in advance and by using all of the tips from Seat61 I have managed to get four of us there and back for about £1200.

Quite a lot you might think – is it really worth it?

Well in terms of environmental benefits the CO2 saving of “train-ing” over “plane-ing” for the four of us is about 620 kg – or just under one month’s output for our new wind turbine. Not a startling amount and something my green conscience could probably live with.

However the finances are interesting when you consider that even with a budget airline the total tickets would cost about £900 and then we would need one or two extra nights in a hotel. Add in the airport stress and the undisputed romance of the train and it becomes a no-brainer. Tuscany here we come!

With the new season of The Apprentice upon us, and with the Tories main plan to get us out of the recession being to cross their fingers and hope that private enterprise will fill the gap - where will we find the next generation of young Bransons to save the nation?

Well here at South Penquite I am pleased to say that we may have the solution.

Young Churton has seized the opportunity of a captive audience on the campsite and can now be found most mornings - with sleeves rolled up and apron on - up to his elbows in cup-cake mix. It hasn’t taken him long to realise that for a few pennies of ingredients and half an hour less of watching CBBC can yield him three dozen cup cakes which he can then sell on at a handsome profit.

His cakes are not only green because of the renewable energy used behind the baking process, but also literally green - as this is his favourite shade of icing. Personally I usually shy away from any pastry that is luminous in colour and is topped off with a random assortment of fruit pastels, jelly babies and plastic figurines – however Churton has obviously done his market research and the cakes have been flying off the shelf.

He has shrewdly calculated that with a small army of kids on holiday with pocket money to burn and the nearest shop over a mile away he cannot fail to make a killing – even at the very reasonable price of 30p per cake.

Where this will end – who alone knows? It is surely only one small step from cup-cakes to pizzas and then to a full a-la-carte menu. After that it is only a matter of time before Channel Four pick him up for a new series and he can start to compete with all of the other celebrity chefs that litter Cornwall and overcharge the tourists and locals alike.

How long can it be before I hear him say “Dad….you’re fired!”

It’s not often that I can claim to be ahead of the curve farming wise, but my decision to move away from pure bred Cheviot hill sheep and cross them with a lowland Romney looks like being a smart move.

I like the Cheviots. They are extremely hardy and stick the moorland winters well and whenever before I have dabbled with moving away from the breed I have always regretted it and swung back to them pretty promptly.

I tried my first Romney ram a few years ago but made the mistake of getting one that had actually come from Romney in Kent. He was big, woolly, and compared with the Cheviots a soft southerner. Too soft for Bodmin Moor and his offspring would line up huddled under the hedge at the first sign of rain.

I then read an article about how the Kiwi’s had taken to the breed. The first importations of Romney sheep to New Zealand were by Messrs Bennett and Young in 1843 and today the Romney makes up over half of the 40 million sheep farmed in New Zealand.

As luck would have it an enterprising young farmer not five miles down the road has started breeding the New Zealand Romneys in a big way and has been able to supply me with a steady stream of young rams to work our flock.

Why does this look like a smart move for us?

Well wool prices are on the way up and the Romney breed is renowned for its fine fleeces. It has long been the view of anyone in the trade with an ounce of commonsense, that the replacement of wool (a totally natural product) with oil-based synthetics for clothing was going to be unsustainable in the long run. Add into this a surge in popularity within the fashion industry for wool and a reduction in the UK flock of some 40% (and similar trends down under) and the price of wool is at last on the way up.

Also, thankfully, our government has relented on its proposed ban on Aussie sheep shearers coming into the county under the new immigration cap and so I won’t have to dust down the old clippers and shear them all myself!

This week marks the culmination of our renewable energy project as my brother Ben (finally) gets round to installing 30 photovoltaic (PV) panels on the barn roof. So in addition to our 5KW wind turbine we also now have 5.8KW of PV panels.

We are of course ideally placed for both of these technologies as we are exceptionally windswept during the winter and then have long daylight hours during the summer without getting too hot (like say Spain), which can actually reduce the efficiency of the panels.

The total cost of the project which included upgrading the local transformer at our own cost will be in the region of £55K and if the estimates are correct (and so far the wind turbine is exceeding expectations) this should bring in an income of some £4,500 per year through the governments feed-in-tariff (FIT) scheme and also reduce our annual electricity bill by a further £1,000.

As you can see this equates to a return of over 10% on our outlay, which is pretty darn good in these financially straightened times and the payments are guaranteed for twenty years on the turbine and a whopping twenty-five years on the panels - or until I reach the tender age of 73!

How can I be sure that the government will keep up its side of the bargain in the topsy-turvy world of coalition politics where broken promises litter the ground like autumn leaves? Well because the government aren’t actually funding the FIT’s – the electric companies are picking up most of the tab. This in turn is being passed on to consumers in the form of slightly higher electricity bills.

Morally, I find this slightly uncomfortable. Whilst I am fully signed up for the need for us to install green energy as quickly as possible and can see that the FIT scheme will incentivise the whole renewable sector in the UK so that we may begin to catch up with some of our European neighbours, I am also well aware that the poorest families in the UK spend the greatest part of their income on energy and so will contribute the most in proportion. I liken it to the National Lottery which also takes money off of those least able to afford it and distributes it to projects that really ought to be self funding or paid for by government.

Having built up our supply of free electric the challenge now is to tackle the demand side and see if we can reduce our total electric consumption to nearer that of our total generation. No easy task as the kids seem to think that one small turbine means they can leave all the lights/heaters/computers on 24/7 and in addition I would dearly like to be an early adopter and get one of those shiny new Nissans that run on batteries.

If you live in Cornwall, have a south facing roof and would be interested saving the planet while earning a good return on your investment then give Ben a ring on 01208 850797 – www.penenergy.co.uk.

Almost two years to the day since I first picked up the phone to a local renewable energy company, and today our wind turbine was finally erected and spinning. Two years of indecision, research, planning, financing and battling with the planning permission issues and we are finally there.

It has been a steep and unpredictable learning curve and as usual with these things the project has evolved to meet the challenges, and our total renewable project looks completely different from my original concept.

My initial idea was to install one 10Kw turbine neatly in the corner of a 5 acre field and that this would produce enough energy to broadly meet our needs.

After a couple of months driving round and looking at a range of turbines already in Cornwall (with an abundance of sea winds the county has become a bit of a Mecca for turbines) I felt that the 10Kw was too much of a beast to sit comfortably within our landscape of small mediaeval fields and so I sought permission for two 5Kw's. A dearer option but much better aesthetically.

Then as the planning was going through I met with an objection from Natural England as they considered that small turbines next to hedge banks would constitute an unacceptable risk to low flying bats that may use the hedge line for navigation. To move my two turbines from my preferred spot into the middle of the field would bring them too close to my happy campers and so after much deliberation I went for one in the middle of the next field up and 10Kw of PV panels on a barn roof. Once again a dearer option – but one that would as compensation also produce electricity on sunny windless days.

Then came a consultation with Western Power (who maintain the power lines in Cornwall) and they required an upgrade of our local transformer to cope with the excess of electricity that I may push back up the line. This would have to be at my expense (another £5K on the project) but I would have to either like it or lump it and to add to the misery they would only allow 6Kw of PV panels to be installed.

While this reduced the cost of the whole project it also reduced the amount of juice that I would generate and so I decided to splash the money saved on two more solar thermal panels (one on the farmhouse and one on the campsite loos) in an attempt to reduce my demand.

So after a frustrating summer of preparation the turbine is now up (installed by my dear brother – a real family affair), the solar panels are on stream and next month the PV panels and transformer are booked-in to complete the project. I am looking forward to juggling all of our electric appliances (with the aid of a small army of timers) so that we can reap the maximum benefit from our new ‘free’ electricity.

“Darling - I’ll just nip down the hay field and pick out a couple of sheep for the abattoir”
“OK, sweetie, don’t be long.”
“No worries honeybunch, I will be back in half an hour”

So went the conversation (or something like it) and I loaded the two dogs into the pick-up and the horsebox and trundled down the farm lane to fetch the next batch of mutton.

This particular field we rent from a friend and is off the moor - just outside the picturesque village of Blisland. A classic rural idyll, with a picture postcard village green surrounded by a church, the pub, the manor house, the rectory and an assortment of ivy clad cottages. We drove through the village, merrily waving to the punters outside the pub and drew up at the field gate.

Now the hay field is long and narrow in shape and my usual plan is to drive up to the top furthest corner away from the gate and reverse the trailer against the fence so that the dogs can hound the sheep into the trailer. Once the dozen or so sheep are in I can use the trailer to pick out the best two and then let the others back out – simples.

As I opened the gate I could see the small flock quietly grazing half way up the field and so I let the dogs out and by the time I had driven the 400 or so yards to the corner the dogs already had the sheep in a neat bunch waiting for me. I opened up the tailgate and encouraged Morag and Maggie to gently goad the sheep towards the waiting ramp.

All was going well until one particular ewe noticed that Maggie wasn’t keeping eye contact (very important for sheepdogs) and made a dash for freedom. Off she bolted with Maggie in hot pursuit, straight down the field, out the gate (that some idiot had left open) and onto open highway with me shouting vainly in the wind.

Obviously, round the village lanes the sheep had the twin advantages of speed and manoeuvrability over my pick-up/trailer combo and it was a good half an hour before I and the dogs located her stuck behind a garden fence. As I made a grab for her she twisted free and shot off back up the road.

I was only saved by the fact that another slack farmer had also left his field gate open and once she was in his field I was able to pen her up and take her home. She is now extremely securely residing at the bottom of our freezer as 98 burgers and 144 sausages – so all’s well that ends well!

As I speak our local council is deliberating the outcome of my planning application for two wind turbines here on the farm. It is a project that I have been talking about for at least two years now and finally in November of 2008 I picked up to phone to a local firm of renewable energy consultants and arranged for a site visit.

A very nice gent called Mike from Natural Generation came and started by telling me a few things I already knew (e.g. its very windy here) and then a whole host of things I didn’t. There is a bewildering range of options available to the new micro-generator such as size of blades, height of mast, make/model and then there is the thorny question of where to site the beast.

This was an easy one for Mike, who had a one item agenda; i.e. which spot would produce the most electricity. As it happens, the North East corner of a five acre field close to the house but with panoramic views to the prevailing South West seemed ideal to me too. He then went on to advise that the larger the blades the better the returns and also that for every extra metre of height in the mast, produced exponential growth in bang for your bucks.

My vision with this project is to move the farm and campsite towards becoming carbon neutral, and so I wanted to put up a turbine that would generate as much juice as we consumed in the average year; nothing less – nothing more. This turned out to be a 10Kw model and would be a visual reminder of how much energy we use for one and all to see.

Over the next few months I visited quite a few of the small turbines that already punctuate the Cornish countryside and as luck would have it a 10Kw turbine went up in the next parish, and so once it was in place I made a couple of visits. To be honest I found it quite scary and couldn’t imaging erecting such a monster on its 15 metre tower here at the farm. As both developer and resident I became, overnight, my own one-man nimby (Not In My Back Yard) protest group!

This gave me several sleepless nights over the summer and was compounded when a lady from the local AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) office came for a site meeting and said that while there was some sympathy with the need for turbines in the countryside, the height was the issue that caused them the most concern.

Did I go for carbon neutrality or should I go for a smaller 6Kw model that would sit more easily in the landscape?

In the end I had a flash of inspiration and went for two of the smaller types. Yes it was more expensive that the one larger model and yes (as Mike kept pointing out to me) they would also benefit from taller towers, but I am happy with my decision and feel that on their 10 metre mast they will be no higher that some of the larger trees around the house and (fingers crossed) I can look forward to guilt free electric in the near future.

Another year – another decade, and this looks increasingly like the decade of Chinese. If fact the more I think about it the last decade was probably mostly about China – except we just didn’t notice it.

My new years resolution (in fact my new decade resolution) is to try and stop buying stuff from China. Its not that I dislike the Chinese (to be frank I’m not sure I know any) and its not that I have anything especially against their culture – its just that I strongly feel that while we are all hooked on so many affordable consumer goodies from the far East, I am convinced that they are never going to listen or engage with any of us on any of the important issues of the day.

Having come to this decision I went around and reviewed some of our Christmas haul. One of my favourite novelties was a magnetic bottle opener that you can stick to the side of your fridge, and as you prise off the bottle top with gay abandon the top will be attracted to one of the magnets and so magically not fall to the floor. A simple device with the potential for years of innocent pleasure – manufactured in China.

Next up an Airfix model aeroplane that I purchased for the boy with fond memories of my own childhood. Again made in China, but with the added insult that they had packed two left hand sides of the Harrier Jump Jet making it impossible to construct.

Finally I had managed to track down a couple of board games from my youth called Touring Europe and Touring England. These were produced originally in the 1930’s and involve ‘driving’ a small tin car around large board/map collecting towns as you go. Exciting Interesting and Educative says the box and they were indeed a big hit. I managed to pick up a rare original copy of Touring Europe on eBay and fortunately Russimco Ltd of Bridgewater has lovingly reproduced Touring England in their range of Heritage Toys & Games. A totally English game about England and made in…you guessed it – China.

I’m not sure we can solely blame the Chinese for the failure of Copenhagen, but they are probably shrugging their shoulders and saying do you want cheap flat screen TV’s or not? And you can’t totally condemn them for executing a British national for drug trafficking given the misery and humiliation they suffered at the hands of empirical Britain during the opium wars. You may wish to frown at them for processing 10 million cubic tonnes of illegally harvested Russian hardwoods a year, but whose gardens will the resulting furniture end up in?

I realise my one-man sanctions may not immediately grab the attention of President Hu Jintao and that I may have started something that in this day and age is not even possible to follow through - but you have to start somewhere. Power to the people!

Poor Old Farmer Dom looked out
On the eve of Christmas
And the mud lay all around
Deep unto his knees’es
Verily it rained that year
Day on day on d-ay
Spring and summer, autumn too
Rain that washed all hope a-way

Early drew the evening in
Get the old log fire ablaze
Smoke pours in and fills the room
Can’t see nothing through the haze
Open windows and the doors
Stand outside and shiver
Cat sneaks in and licks his paws
Helps himself to tur-key dinner

Settle down to watch TV
For some family viewing
Kids all shout and disagree
Fisticuffs are brewing
Two stomp off to text their mates
Two for M S N
Leaving us with just the boy
Bloody Top Gear once a-gain

Midnight finds old Farmer Dom
Wrapping the un-needed
Well into his second glass
Cursing all un-heeded
Grumbling at the gross excess
Reaches for the wine jug
Christmas comes but once a year
And it’s mostly Hu-m-bug.

With four teenagers who over the next couple of years are going to be leaving education and seeking their fortune in what is likely to become a decade of high unemployment, I am still bloody angry about the bloody bankers and their bloody bonuses.

To compound my frustration, Cathy and I received a cheque last year that was the result of a ten-year savings plan that was tied to the stock market. Unbelievably the result of our ten years of labour was actually less than the total amount we had deposited over the life of the plan.

I have resolved to do what little I can about it and over the last twelve months we have slowly moved our money away from the city and into safer hands.

First up was our Halifax current account. Their determination to stick with bonuses even after the Goodwin pension debacle as made me very glad we switched to the Co-op, who pride themselves in their ethical structure. I wouldn’t say that the change was painless, but eventually all of the wrinkles caused by swapping so many direct debits and standing orders were ironed out and we happily no longer contribute to Sir Fred’s retirement fund.

Next up was to find a home for the cheque from the last (non) savings plan. This we invested into an ISA with Triodos Bank. These guys are well known to most organic farmers and the bank was set up in the early seventies in Holland with the express intention of finding a way to see how money can be managed in a socially conscious way. Their ISA had a reassuringly low rate of return (a sure sign of ethicalness in my book) and when Cathy then ticked the box to donate the puny interest to Amnesty International I know we had struck ethical gold. OK so we will only get out exactly what we put in – but hey that’s still better than the city boys and it doesn’t leave a bitter taste!

Finally we needed a new savings plan and here I have found a real winner – not only morally unimpeachable but with a healthy rate of interest too.

Zopa.com (Zone Of Possible Agreement) is an Internet based credit union. You put your hard earned cash in and they distribute it to other poor souls needing loans. The loans are made up of £10 chunks from various members so that if it all goes pear-shaped each of the members is only exposed to £10 of risk. Because they are not-a-bloody-bank-with-bloody-bonuses there are no hidden charges and both the lender and the lendee get a favourable rate of interest. Any charges are totally transparent and they use the same credit checks and balances as any high street bank would.

Over the last three months we have lent £10 to fifteen different people so that they can buy a second-hand Volvo, or redecorate their house, or consolidate their credit card debts and everyone is a winner. You can even read their little notes of thanks on your monthly statement. A truly inspired use of the Internet and one that I urge you to look into if you have any cash under the mattress – the peoples revolution starts here!

For the last ten years now we have been paid as commoners to reduce the amount of grazing with cows and sheep on the open moors. This has been under the governments flagship conservation scheme Countryside Stewardship, and is aimed squarely at improving the common land for wildlife and allowing the heather to regenerate wherever possible.

It has been a bit of a bumpy ride with the farmers bemoaning the loss of agricultural ground and Natural England dissatisfied with the rate of recovery of the dwarf shrub cover. However one element of the moors has been completely happy with the scheme and flourished over the decade – European Gorse.

The lack of livestock and a milder climate has enabled this tenacious plant to build on its foothold and spread and grow at an alarming rate.  Within the uplands it is now recognised as an invasive species and there is funding under the scheme available to deal with it if you can.

It is a known fire-climax plant, which means is readily catches fire but re-grows from the roots afterwards, and the seeds are also adapted to germinate after slight scorching. So you can burn, but unless you introduce livestock again afterwards (to nibble off the fresh shoots) it only reinvigorates the plant and will re-grow very quickly, using the ash of the fire as plant food.

Mechanical flailing will hammer it if you are brave enough to risk your machine, but this tends to scatter and spread the seeds ever wider, and so with each passing year you end up with a wider and thicker mat of fresh gorse to deal with.

Natural England’s preferred method is the good old slash and burn. You pick an area and clear with bow or chain saws and then remove and burn in large stacks. While this undoubtedly works it is to my mind a criminal waste of a valuable resource.

In my humble opinion, the best way to tackle the gorse is to cherry pick and only cut and remove the older (say fifteen to twenty year plus) bushes. Once they have reached this age they do not seem to have the energy to regenerate and the roots will rot into the ground. This coppicing will not only give the livestock greater access to all areas in the summer, but their thick tree like trunks also provide you with a usable fuel for your biomass burner (kitchen stove to you and me).

There is nothing startlingly new or original in this idea. Two hundred years ago, farmers would actually plant a field of gorse (or furze) for winter fuel and many farms still have fields call Furze Park. Once again I find we are relearning what was once commonsense sustainable agriculture.

Now, so long as I don’t lose any fingers using my lethal new tractor mounted saw bench, we should all be warm and cosy this winter.

Hopefully the last weather related blog I shall have to write for a while now as a week ago we finally managed to clear the backlog of shearing, haymaking and silage – each of which required a specific number of dry days. It was touch and go for all of these operations and as it was we had to abandon the shearing on one day, bale the hay a day early (which brought down the quality somewhat) and only just finished wrapping the silage hours before a downpour that would have completely ruined it.

As I write this over the bank holiday weekend, the sun is currently shinning, but there were heavy showers yesterday and tomorrow promises to be overcast with drizzle!

In a succession of wet summers 2009 has definitely been the most challenging and the camping fields look somewhat battered as they have struggled to cope with the constant slipping of overloaded saloon cars unsuited to off-road work and the steady trample of welly-clad campers – hoods up and bent against the elements  - as they brave it to the loos.

Particularly hard struck has been the farm entrance lane. Never the smoothest of highways, this half a mile of moorland track has developed such a series of impressive potholes that it now resembles the lunar surface, with perfectly formed craters that can rip off an unwary exhaust with ease. And all this despite spending days and days during the winter carefully filling in last years holes with tonnes and tonnes of aggregate.

In desperation I have contacted a road reclamation firm that claim to have some powerful tractor mounted machinery that will eat up the old lane, crush it and lay it out again flat, hard and compacted and smooth as a baby’s bum.

Despite an impressive array of before and after photos in the brochure, I am still a little sceptical, but ever the optimist I have sent off a deposit and wait eagerly for October to see the results. Then it will simply be a matter of digging out the little stream that crosses the lane so that the ford will drop down to a slightly less scary level and then underpin our aging bridge with some concrete and the lane will be ready to meet the climate challenges of summer 2010. Let’s hope the Met Office doesn’t predict another BBQ summer – for all our sakes!

If there is a theme to life on the farm in 2009 it is definitely water. In January we suffered an extreme freeze which burst a pipe in our boiler room causing untold damage and in June we had a mini heatwave/drought, which dried up our pond and burnt off our grass roof over the meeting room. Now we are in July and we seem to be suffering a smallish monsoon.

On the upside, the pond (which is cleverly replenished by harvested rainwater from the cow barn) is back to normal and the grass roof is beginning to show the green shoots of recovery.

The downside (apart from having to continually grimace to the hardy campers who are here at the moment) is the number of farm jobs in July that are weather dependent.

Because we are organic (and use no artificial fertilizers) and because we are a hill farm (with very poor acid soil) we like to make our hay and silage much later than our conventional farming neighbours down in the valley. Whilst the ensuing fodder is of a poorer quality (the sugar levels in grass fall quite dramatically after spring) it does give the flora a chance to flower which is good for the insects and the cover is also excellent for ground nesting birds such as Snipe.

This is all positive stuff but it does mean we rely on a spell of goodish weather from about the 10th July onwards to make the hay and finish up the shearing of the ewes with lambs. Once we get into August then both of these jobs become urgent with the days becoming much shorter making wilting the hay much more problematical and with the sheep desperate to lose their winter coats.

These are testing times and with the school holidays quickly approaching I am glad to note that the Met Office is giving me a glimmer of hope of ‘more settled conditions’ for the last week of July – not before time!

Now approaching the end of spring and the start of summer proper, we have nearly finished our calving season on the farm. Avid readers with long memories may recall that we had a change of breeding policy last year and invested in a North Devon (Ruby Red) bull from a neighbouring parish.

Most of the cows have now given birth and we have been very pleased with the result. We have only had to assist one – a young heifer who decided that late in the evening on a bank holiday Sunday would be an ideal time to give birth – with the rest of them dropping painlessly (well at least from my point of view!)

The young bull has grown and filled out and is now quite an impressive specimen and (much to Cathy’s irritation) developed a playful streak and gambols and gallops around the field when we are seeing the cows. Quite an unnerving spectacle if you are unused to it.

Last week I had the pleasure of showing round the farm a group of French agriculture students from Brittany and was explaining to them that our supermarkets (the main buyers of beef in this country) preferred French breeds such as Charolais and Limousin, which are famous for their size and leanness. This delivers economy of scale and less unsightly fat in the packet. However this is all done at the expense of flavour and texture; two attributes that the French – with their penchant for fine cooking – would surely appreciate.

What is more, the North Devon (a smaller and fatter breed) is ideally suited to our area (hardly surprising really – as it is reputed to be the oldest cattle breed and may have been bred in the South West since prehistoric times) and will happily live out in all weathers and will fatten readily on grass alone.

Like a lot of agricultural ‘improvements’ made over the last 30 years (driven mainly by subsidies and supermarkets), the popularity of importing fancy breeds from different parts of the world may eventually prove to be unsustainable. Whist the innate suitability of our native breeds – which have been bred over hundreds of years to suit our geography – will prove to be the answer to meeting the nations food needs within a low input, climate-friendly, traditional farming system. Surprise, surprise.

May is always one of our busiest months. There is still the odd sheep having a lamb and half of the herd has yet to drop calf. Our four yurts need to be erected for the half-term, and this spring we have been building a new loo block for the campsite with a seemingly never ending list of finishing touches. In amongst all of this I had foolishly agreed to come into my old school at Camelford and give the year 11 Geographers a talk about the CAP – Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy.

As you can imagine the subject is dry as dust, but has hugely influenced the way we farm on the moors for the last three decades.

Following the years of post-war food shortages and rationing, the CAP was a system of subsidies for farmers introduced with the express intention of producing large quantities of cheap food. In meeting these objectives it was massively successful, and older readers might remember the days of butter-mountains and wine-lakes that were the direct result of the policy. In its heyday in the UK we were producing over 80% of the nations food needs.

This was all swept away in 2005 with a radical reform that meant that farmers are now only paid for environmental benefits and food production is left to market forces. This has already started to bite and now food inflation has become a hot topic (and one I fear it is here to stay), and we have fallen back to meeting only 60% of the food needs of a growing population. All in all, quite an interesting story.

My class of fifteen-year-olds were a fairly tough crowd and so in order to break the ice I projected onto the whiteboard a photo of myself at 14 in my old school uniform. I had hoped that the 1976 glam rock hairstyle might at least raise a snigger, or that the fact we all wore a blazer and tie draw a gasp, but they were having none of it. I only got a small reaction when I told them that back in the 70’s - under where the new Maths block now resides - the school used to have its own farm with pigs and sheep.

In desperation for some sort of interaction, I asked the Geography teacher what he was doing in 1976 – turned out he hadn’t yet been born! Now I really feel old.

The first lamb of the year marks a turning point in the calendar and always gets a lot of attention. We try a time our flock’s lambing to meet with the late moorland spring - usually about 6 weeks after everyone else’s. This is achieved by picking on a likely date in April and then turning the rams in with the ewes exactly four months, four weeks and four days before it.

As the effects of global warming have become more tangible, over recent years I have crept our lambing date forward to match the changing times. This year I picked on April 14th and I have to say it feels about right. The grass has started to grow again and the air temperature (whilst still throwing the odd frosty morning) has been positively balmy on sunny days.

My favourite conversation starter at the moment has been the ‘long hard winter’, and whilst it was hardly a winter of discontent, there were episodes of extreme freezing and snow and it all felt much more like the ‘bad old-good old days’.

I have ridden my luck this winter and if it had not been for the fortuitous sale of thirty bullocks I would have run out of feed a while ago and I have had to suspend our mutton production since January as the sheep needed all of their calories just to stay alive and were no where near fit enough to slaughter. This year I will be a bit more cautious and save a bit more hay and silage.

Still, hope springs eternal, and one thing I had forgotten about the old harsh winters was the profound sense of relief which the warmer weather arrives and the days start to draw out again.

A couple of unexpected opportunities have come up in the last month and so we have brought forward are plans to replace our aging campsite loo block.

Built for our grand opening for the total solar eclipse in 1999, our trusty toilet block was already second-hand when we cobbled it together from the remains of a couple of old builders sheds. While they had served us well, they are now really beginning to show their age and can’t compare with the swanky new shower block we erected a couple of seasons ago.

The first opportunity was that as a direct result of the credit crunch, Brian - an old school mate, neighbour and builder of the shower block - had his order book dry up and so was at a loose end and able to give us his undivided attention (a real bonus when it comes to building work) and secondly an email popped into my box from an unknown farmer looking to buy some “native breed, TB free herd, organic yearlings.”

To bust some of the farming jargon for you;

Native Breed: Most of the beef you buy in a supermarket will be a crossbred animal using what farmers term ‘continental’ bulls. These are bigger, leaner animals who get their names from the regions of Europe they hail from – e.g. Charolais, Simmental and Limousine. Supermarkets like big animals as they are cheaper per kilo to slaughter and butcher (a sort of economy of scale), and they like lean animals as they say consumers don’t want fat on their meat. Farm shops and smaller butchers prefer our own native breeds as they are smaller (making for more reasonably priced joints), and fatter (which is where the flavour comes from).

TB free: Tuberculosis is still the number one worry with beef and dairy farmers, and farmers are naturally very wary of buying from herds which have experienced problems in the last couple of years. Badgers and cows cross infect each other and to date the only solution the government has been willing to undertake is to removal and slaughter of infected cows from each herd identified through a program of annual testing. Interestingly this week a couple of new initiatives have been announced. Wales (where there is still a large rural vote) is to undertake a mass cull of Badgers in the worst affected areas, whilst our own urban-centric parliament (who would never consider a cull of wildlife) is going to introduce a badger vaccine – good luck!

Yearlings: a catchall phrase used by farmers to describe any bullock that is older than a calf but not fully grown.

As it happens I have built up a bunch of about 35 such beasts that had turned almost feral whilst grazing on the moors and I thought it would be a good idea to thin them out a bit so I rang up the mobile number on the email and arranged a viewing.

He came and (despite them running around the field like deranged loonies) he liked them and he wanted to take 30 off of my hands. We agreed a price per kilo and after another TB test (a new stipulation for any animal moving between farms) we loaded them in his trailers and he drove away promising to weigh the trailers on the way home.

Their weights were good, the price was fair and the unexpected lump of cash was passed straight over to Brian with instructions to start building. Result!

Global Warming – if ever there was a misnomer set to confuse people, this is it. Climate Change is the preferred description at the moment and a changeable climate it certainly is. The first two weeks of the New Year saw some of the coldest nighttime temperatures that my children have ever experienced. And thanks to my decision to convert our heating from nasty oil to environmentally sustainable local wood they got the true experience! Minus 13 was the lowest recorded temperature on the moors and bloody cold it felt too.

Now whenever they get some poor farmer to talk about the freezing weather on the local news, he or she always comes up with the lines that a couple of weeks of frost is ‘good for the ground’ and ‘kills all the bugs’. Well as Cathy could testify from the full to bursting wards at the local hospital where she puts in a couple of shifts a week – the bugs have nearly killed off half of Cornwall and I can only add as the farmer that the whole experience was a right royal pain in the butt.

For the first few days of frost, it was simply a matter of going around the farm and breaking the ice off the tops of the water troughs as you fed the animals. By midday the pipes had warmed in the sun, and water would trickle in again.

Then as it got colder the pipes would remain freezing and each day the levels in the troughs was dropping ‘til eventually there was no ice left to break. Bemoaning to my father-in-law he said, “Well you don’t have any problems – you do have a river!”

And of course he was right. So the next day saw me and the dogs shepherding the flock onto the moor and across to a wide ford in the river to drink. They must be thirsty – I thought. But no…the sheep stood with their backs to the water and looked at the dogs and me while we looked at them. You can take a sheep to water – but you can’t make it drink!

To be fair, the only ewe that did try to get a drop, slipped over on some waterside ice and promptly gave up. So we rounded them all up and headed back to the field.

Fortunately the next day it started to thaw and the water problems resolved themselves. That is until a couple of days ago, when we opened our campsite boiler room to find that a burst pipe had been spraying water all over our plumbing and dry storage for the last three weeks! As the temperature starts to drop again we find ourselves up to our necks in builders quotes and insurance claims while we huddle around the stove, waiting for the snow to arrive.

Just before Christmas I had a request from a teacher at our local primary, wanting to bring all her Infants to the farm for a morning so that they could learn a little about food and farming – one of their topics for the year.

No problem I said. Our excellent village school only has about 25 kids all told and so the infants would only be about a dozen at the most. These would all easily fit into our ‘schools’ trailer with several bales of hay and we could take a tractor ride around the farm feeding the cows as we passed.

It was a cold (but fortunately dry) day and having let out and feed the chickens & ducks I loaded up 8 bales of hay, 14 kids and the 2 teachers into the trailer and off we went.

Up in the first field the cows obligingly crowded round the trailer with the children looking right down their nostrils. “Now children, before feeding the cows it is most important to count them and make sure they are all here – how many can you count?” Several minutes passed and after a lot of shouting and arguing a general consensus of 12 was reached by the noisy congregation. “Ah” I said knowingly “I thought you would find this hard – are you sure you haven’t missed one of the calves?”

At this point I caught the eye of one of the teachers, who was gesturing with her head to the far corner of the field where there was the unmistakeable outline of a dead bullock with two legs sticking in the air – stiff with rigour mortis.

“Oh no – that’s right. Twelve it is – well done”, and I quickly chucked over a couple of bales and hopped back into the tractor. I drove smartly round the edge of the field (as far from the poor recently deceased as I could) and had nearly reached the next gate when one sharp-eyed youngster started shouting and pointing “Dominic…look…over there…in the corner!”

There was no hiding it – so I swung the tractor round and parked a respectful distance from the corpse. As you can imagine, this was going to be the highlight of the trip, with the cherry on the cake being the fact that a fox had eaten away some of the calf’s nose in the night!

I always like to give kids the plain facts if I can, but I was quite unprepared for the barrage of questions coming from the trailer. I imagine his is what it must be like to be Prime Minster in a time of national crisis – emerging from Number 10 into a wall of microphones and cameras.
“Why did it die?”
“Well…it’s a bit hard to tell really”
“Did a fox creep up on it while it was asleep and bite his nose off??”
“Well…no – a fox couldn’t kill a great big calf like this. It must have been dead already”
“Won’t his mum be very sad???”
“Well…I expect so. In fact yes here she comes over now.”
“Won’t his dad be sad as well????”
“Well, no…not really. You see, he’s in the next field now with another 20 cows and…” at this point I looked up at the two teachers who were leaning against the remaining bales and smugly giggling to each other as I dug myself deeper and deeper in.

“We didn’t know when you were going to stop” they confessed to me afterwards. To be honest – I wish I had never begun!

Apologies to any regular readers who were hanging on the result of our TB test for the cattle. We were (thankfully) given the all clear by the vet and (unlike some of our less fortunate neighbours) do not have to suffer the rigmarole of retesting ‘doubtful’ animals or worse actually losing some of the herd.

Our cows are predominantly Galloways – a wild and woolly breed from the South West of Scotland – and they are well suited to moorland life and more importantly met the criteria for attracting the old Hill Cow Subsidy which used to provide most of the profit on a cow in these Less Favoured Areas of the uplands.

The Hill Cow Subsidy was replaced (along with all of the other production subsidies) in the 2005 shake up of CAP (the European Common Agricultural Policy) and most of the incentive for keeping these less than commercial beast was gone forever.

However it was recognised by Natural England (the government quango with responsibility “to conserve and enhance the natural environment”) that some of these traditional breeds were vital conservation tools in looking after some of our more remote habitats and so they instigated a compensation package called the Tradition Breeds Initiative. This rewarded farmers for grazing sensitive sites with these native cows who have a deserved reputation for finding forage in the most inhospitable corners of scrub and wetlands.

So we duly signed up and kept our Galloways; and as there was no particular market I determined to keep the calves until they naturally reached their full maturity using nothing more than silage and poor quality grazing.

I can now claim to be a bit of an authority on this subject and can confirm that it takes over 4 years for a pure Galloway to reach his full potential in these circumstances. I can also tell you (we had one steer killed last week) that the result taste delicious and fatty and something for you to really get your teeth into.

There is however an unforeseen downside to my breeding policy. After several years we now have a gang of 35 Galloway youngsters of various ages who having spent one or more summers grazing distant areas of moorland out of sight of virtually any human contact have become more or less feral. And whilst the actual TB test was fine, our cattle handling pens (and ourselves) bear the scars of having to coerce this wild bunch through the ‘race’ (the post and rail corridor in which the cattle wait for their turn) twice in a week. To say that they had a smashing time would be understating it – by the time the last steer was tested there was a pile of splintered timber where the proud race had formally stood.

Still – I find revenge is a dish best served medium-rare with a béarnaise sauce!

Half term and just back from four days in and around Paris. Having managed to persuade the family during our French touring holiday in August it would be a very bad idea travelling overnight to spend one day in Disneyland, I had to relent and agree to a trip in the autumn.

My top tip for Disneyland is simply don’t go. However, if like me, you have failed to rule your family with a rod of iron and you find yourself outvoted, then I strongly advise you to pick up a copy of A Brit's Guide to Disneyland Resort Paris by Simon & Susan Veness. While I cannot share any of the couples enthusiasm for all things Disney – it proved to be a invaluable guide and we would have been wandering around like lost sheep without it.

I would like to say that the first two days we organised in Paris and Versailles were compensation for spending 48 hours chez Mickey & Minnie, but in truth we had to queue for an hour and a half to simply gain access to Louis XIV’s sumptuous palace (after first spending an hour and a half on the train getting there) and on the day in Paris we queued for a staggering two hours in order for the privilege of climbing up the first 375 steps of the Eiffel Tower. This meant that we didn’t have time for the Pompidou Centre and to cap a perfect day they changed the late night opening for the Louvre so that all that Cathy got in reply to her “Ou est la Mona Lisa” was “Sorry Madame, we are closed – come back on Wednesday.”

Still, this put us in good stead for the two days at Disneyland, where queuing is the order of the day. By the time they opened our first chosen ride (Thunder Mountain) there was already a 50 minute queue. 53 minutes later we staggered from our carriage with Cathy and I in mild shock and Churton screaming that he wanted to go home. The teenagers however were keen for more thrills and so the day developed into a routine of long queues followed by short burst of either excitement or disappointment. After about six hours of this I was grateful to sit down in the Silver Spur and, despite paying Michelin star prices for a Harvester style steak and chips, was sufficiently mellowed (after a bottle of Disneyland Merlot – who says they haven’t embraced French culture!) to face a couple more queues before retiring for the day.

Day two was saved by the lesser used (but in my humble opinion – vastly superior) Disney Studios Park, which instead of fairground thrills delivered its excitement through a series of experiences which were all linked to actual movie making. The stunt car demonstration was spectacular and the Sci-Fi Armageddon was so realistic that one child had to be let out of the simulation in hysterics. His annoyed parents obviously hadn’t read the warning signs on the door.

All in all though, the time passed pleasantly enough and that evening we were all aboard Eurostar for the long trek home. Our sleeper from London delivered us back to Bodmin at 6.30 in the morning and we were to be greeted at home by a letter from the State Veterinary Service stating that the farm from which we had purchased our new bull (see entry for 7th July) had gone down with TB (tuberculosis). We now await our routine TB test on Monday with some trepidation and our fingers firmly crossed – I have had quite enough excitement for one week.

When we extended our popular meeting room by knocking through into a redundant tin barn I had the bright idea of having a ‘living’ roof. Cathy, despite immediately correctly sensing that this would be yet another in a long line of green ideas that would be unlikely to save the planet but guaranteed to cost us a fortune, reluctantly agreed and we broke the news to Brian the Builder before he commenced work.

The barn that was being replaced had a nearly flat roof - which was ideal - and so the main requirement was to beef up the walls in order to take the weight of the sodden sods on top.

Building anything these days is expensive but I was quite please that the extra timber and the special membranes for the roof had only added a few hundred pounds to the overall cost and decided that we could save a few quid by doing the actual grassing-over ourselves. However, come the spring, when the building was eventually finished (barely three months over date) we had already started lambing and with the camping season nearly upon us I decided to put off the earth moving until the autumn.

All summer long people admired our new addition but wondered what the wooden retaining rail around the roof was. “That’s going to be a grass roof” I would explain looking up, and the more I looked at it the more daunting the task seemed to be.

The perfect opportunity presented itself a couple of weekends ago as Evan (the digger driver) was here ripping up the camping field in order to lay a new track and I had some unpaid labour in the form of an old army buddy. Roger had motored down on the Sunday and we had a very pleasant afternoon at the beach followed by a full roast dinner and plenty of wine in the evening. Once he was nicely mellowed I broke it to him gently that I had a small job for us the next day. “No problem” he said after his third glass of vin de rouge.

We soon gave up with the hired turf cutter, as this impressive looking machine was a pig to operate and the resulting turfs – though very neatly cut – were wafer thin and no use for this job. So we hacked into the field with the digger and hauled up rough and ready chunks of field with the aid of the tractor loader and knitted them together like some giant jigsaw. The actual roof is (thankfully) only nine metres by four, but even when laying clods of earth and turf that were less than six inches thick this equates to about six tonnes of material to hoist up. 

To say that we were knackered after two days would be an understatement. To say that on close inspection it was a pretty job would be a slight exaggeration. However I can say that I am exceptionally pleased and proud with the result – anyone for crochet?

Spent the weekend away from the farm at Lulworth Cove to attend a reunion that I had helped organise of some of my old army buddies.

I joined the army in September 1978 as a ‘boy’ soldier in the Junior Leaders Regiment at Bovington camp in Dorset. I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do after scraping through my ‘O’ levels (beyond a determination to leave school), and so when one of my best friends, Simon, suggested we join the army as bandsman as his older brother had done I said ‘sure, why not’ (much to the relief of my father – who was beginning to despair at that point).

So, along with twenty-odd other 16 year olds, we reported on that fateful day to Stanley barracks and began what was to be two years of training to become musicians in the army. Why Her Majesty required us to be harassed, bullied and brainwashed for quite so long and quite so hard, still remains a mystery to me. The job of bandsman (and I think even my comrades would agree) was not that hard – the ability to play simple tunes while marching in a straight line with shiny boots was about as difficult as it got. Yet we were subjected to all manner of tortures including log-runs and rope-courses and endless, endless moping and polishing and ironing all whilst being shouted at by a group of grown men who (now looking back) I can only believe must have derived some sort of sadistic pleasure from it.

However, this was our rite of passage and over those two years, in the face of adversity (especially the Physical Training Instructors) we bonded and grew together. Then - as abruptly as it began - it was all over and we were split up and posted to our regiments in different corners of the empire, and while most had kept in touch with one or two of the others, many of us never saw each other again until this weekend.

As it happens, another ex-bandsman now works there so we had full access to our old barracks (thanks again Olo), and as our collective memories began to piece together our shared experiences I was amazed at how well we all got on – almost immediately picking up where we had left off some thirty years ago. I was surprised at how fond I was of friends I hadn’t seen for decades. I had forgotten so much, and in an age of anxiety where many struggle with who they are and where are they going, it is a wonderful thing to rediscover where you came from.

A fantastic weekend, and the hours flew by in a haze of memories. It was an event that will stay with me for a very long time and I know that I wasn’t the only one to experience a surprising depth of nerves, then elation, then emotion, before the bar finally rang time on our humble gathering. Over the course of the evening many of the lads came up and told me how grateful they were that I had perused my initial idea and brought us altogether - but it wasn’t that difficult in these post-google times, and I in turn was just as grateful that they all travelled so far and taken time out of their busy lives to make it all happen.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

Not long back from a great ten days spent touring Brittany & Normandy in the camper. Our normal destination for a few days summer camping is Polzeath Beach (about 20 minutes away on the North coast) so this was quite a departure for us. Back in the winter when our good friends Bev & Jane (wonderful but foolhardy souls) offered to house/campsite/farm sit for the August bank holiday, we leapt onto the web a booked some ferry tickets before they had a chance to think it over. The kids were absolutely amazed when we announced that we were going to go “abroad” and the excitement was building all summer.

Now some of you might think that seven of us in a VW camper for ten days might not sound like much of a holiday and as the date approached I began to wonder if indeed it would be less a relaxing vacation and more a severe test of family unity. The kids said that was fine as long as it was hot and there was good surf. This I evaded with “Well it will certainly be hotter that here” - (not hard after possibly the worst summer on record).

And so we trundled off to Poole with every inch of the van crammed full of stuff and carrying a large tent and four surfboards on the roof. It was raining as we left and the crossing to Cherbourg (4 hours) was rough enough to give everyone a real sense of adventure (especially Cathy whose pallor by the time we landed matched the olive green paintwork of our van). But as we landed the sun came out and with minimal screaming as Cathy negotiated the first series of French roundabouts we were on the road and soon at the first campsite.

Having done all of the booking and planning I was going to be in for a hard time if the holiday didn’t live up the kids wild expectations and so I was a bit nervous as we approached. However, I needn’t have worried as it was a lovely clean campsite, with its own outdoor pool and footpath down to a secluded sandy beach where a handful of surfers were enjoying an evening in the waves.

I could go on and on about how wonderful the next ten days were but those of you who have already been to northern France already know it and for the rest of you I simply say – visit, it is a wonderful country. There seems to be so much space compared with our crowded Isle, you get a real sense of peacefulness. The roads are empty, the locals are friendly, the bread is always freshly baked and the butter is too die for…what more could you want.

By the time we had reached Carnac, my stock in the family had already risen appreciably. Here we had the inspired idea to hire some bikes to visit the various Neolithic megaliths in the area (always a high point in any Fairman Family holiday – just ask the kids!) and we finished the day on the largest sandy beach I have ever seen. It went on for miles and was only spoiled by the fact that we annoyingly had to share it with at least 5 other people, a dog and a horse.

How Newquay ever earned the reputation of the surfing capital of Europe I shall never know – if you like surfing then head for the west coast of France. Before we left I was worried that our latest eBay purchase (a nine foot longboard) would never get to see the water. As it was we had some of the longest cleanest surf we have ever experienced.

Back home and after two weeks of rain and wind and the holiday feel good factor is just beginning to wane a little. We have just reached the end of the stack of butter we brought back and I am suffering ‘moules’ withdrawal. Lets hope that Bev & Janes memories of the trials and tribulations of running South Penquite over a wet bank holiday begin to fade before next summer!

There is a modern myth that every farmhouse has an Aga in the kitchen; and whilst this might be true of the period farmhouses that have long since been divorced from their land and are now home to the rural affluent - walk into the kitchen of a real farmhouse and you will find a Rayburn.

The Aga was designed by a Nobel Prize-winning Swedish physicist Dr. Gustaf Dalén and is revered amongst serious cooks for maintaining a constant roasting temperature.

The Rayburn was launched in 1946 and is loved for its ability to warm hypothermic lambs, dry socks on the foot, and run on a fuel of damp twigs and baler twine.

Interestingly, they are now both produced by the same factory in Telford.

When we first moved to the farm in the seventies there was already an old Rayburn in situ which ran on solid fuel (wood and coal). It was a full time job to feed it and empty the ashes, and our roast dinners were either well-done or rare depending on the vagaries of the weather. During the 1980’s a lot of these machines were converted to the cleaner and easier fuel of oil - however my Dad was having none of that. Whether it was some hangover from the war or just the memories of the oil embargo of the early seventies, he refused to “give any more money to those bloody Arabs”, and we carried on with a sooty kitchen and lukewarm baths.

When he passed away in 1997, Mum was only too pleased to cash in his secret collection of illicit wartime weaponry (Lugers and the like) and had enough to purchase a brand new oil fired Rayburn. Next door, we had already had our old Rayburn converted to oil and so for the next decade or so we were both happily filling up our oil tanks (at about 18p per litre) and had hot water and central heating on demand.

Last week we paid a chap £240 to have ours converted back to wood. I don’t need to tell you why, and the old man who came to do the work was supposed to be semi-retired, but has found himself run off his feet, ripping out the oil burners from Rayburns that he and his father had spent years carefully converting to oil.

I have bought myself a new chainsaw and a rather natty pair of safety trousers and am planning to spent the winter months stockpiling the forest of gorse and willow that have taken over areas of the farm and moor which are now conserved for wildlife. In previous years we would have paid contactors to clear this scrub which would have burnt it on site as a waste product. With oil now at 60p a litre it is now a criminal waste of a perfectly good fuel and so Cathy now spends a good deal of her day stoking the fire like some latter day Casey Jones while I’m a lumberjack (and I’m OK) – my old man must be laughing in his grave!

Regular readers might remember that last year we purchased a Beef Shorthorn bull to ‘work’ on our Galloway cows, which marked a change in direction for our beef breeding.

The Galloway hails from the South-West corner of Scotland and is renown for its hardiness and ability to shrug off the most inclement weather. It has a thick hairy black coat and an even thicker hide which can withstand the worst extremes of the winter with ease. To say that they are good mothers is an understatement – they are actually ferocious mothers and will happily chase you around the field bellowing at the top of their voice if you so as much glance at their offspring. This makes tagging (every calf in the UK has to be identified by a unique numbered tag in each ear before it reaches the age of 7 days) and castrating interesting work indeed.

As I get older the ‘fun’ of playing cowboy when dealing with these wild beasties has diminished over the years and with so many campers and school children visiting the farm I decided a change to a more calmer breed was in order. Hence the Beef Shorthorn which was a recognised commercial cross with the Galloway and promised a quieter life.

Unfortunately, whist the bull was certainly a gentler animal, the calves he sired were enormous and proved very difficult to deliver. In an ideal world, your average beef farmer would like to go out in the morning and be pleasantly surprised by each newborn happily suckling on its mum. With the Shorthorn we had to drag each calf out of the cow with the assistance of the modern equivalent of a medieval torture tool known as a calving aid. This device can exert great pulling power on the emerging calf, but can leave both the cow and calf (and indeed the farmer) feeling bruised, battered and drained.

So the Shorthorn has left and has been replace by a North Devon – known as a Ruby Red in recognition of it fabulous deep colour. These smaller animals are renown for being docile to the point of comatose and will quite happily put on weight merely looking at a field of grass. These are both qualities that are ideally suited to our organic system and as middle age approaches I can see that me and the bull will have quite a bit in common as we go about our business, gently piling on the pounds. Although - I should hasten to add - here the similarities end and only one of us is here to serve the old cow!