January 2008

The presents have all been opened, the New Year seen in and we’re now wondering what interesting, unusual and bureaucratic things will be thrown at us in 2009. 

 Like many farmers across the country it was still work as usual over the Christmas period, albeit in a shortened form. In between opening presents and getting Christmas dinner there were still livestock to be seen to (followed by a swift shower when everyone refused to share a table with Simon smelling of pigs!).  

As the cold winter winds whip across the fields, straight off the Irish sea, it seems as though spring is a long way off. But the sight of a few new lambs in the fields reminds you that for some farmers, this is a hectic time of year.

Cold nights spent in the lambing sheds, little sleep and a lot of hard, physical work are all that sheep farmers have to look forward to over the next few months. There’s nothing to beat the sight of the lambs though, when they get in the fields with a bit of sun on their backs, and start to literally skip about and play. You sometimes wonder how it is possible that they eventually turn into something as sedentary and steady as a sheep.

With dark, damp mornings  being a feature of the last couple of weeks it's not been easy to drag ourselves out of bed. However the opportunity to spend a day looking at machinery had Simon positively leaping out at 5.30am. On Thursday 22nd he and Alan headed off with a farming friend to Newark to the Lincolnshire Agricultural Machinery Manufacturers Association show, where they spent much of the day getting up to date with the latest ‘bits of kit’ on offer.

The house is now littered with a variety of leaflets with nice glossy pictures of very new and very expensive machines. The leaflet is probably the closest they will ever come to getting on our farm, that’s for sure. We've also got a bagful of freebie pens, hats and tape measures all of which were quickly grabbed by the children who whisked them off to some secret store somewhere. Which means that once again, we'll be searching high and low for pens when we need one.

That's all for this month.