POSITIVE EARLY SIGNALS FROM THE COWS WITH REGARDS STRIP GRAZING

While checking the dry cows on the hill this afternoon and also making use of my time up there, in that remote cloudy realm, to find the perfect brambled burrow to serve as my hermitage of failure and shame (see yesterday's harrowing post), I realised that I was perfectly placed to spy on the milking herd.


I had seen some confused/forlorn/agitated faces at the gate to Rick field when down on the farm earlier in the day, and feared the worst: that the herd had rejected my attempts at sustainable dairying by strip grazing them through a lovely new herbal ley. They clearly wanted the Quavers and Mars bars of set stocking, instead of the herby pesto and side salad of mixed leaves that I had prepared for them!

HOWEVER!

From my lofty perch I had a good view of what they were actually doing (see photo, centre).

Thoses faces at the gate were just three or four idiot heifers feeling tragic about their herby lot, while the rest of the herd were spread about their little block of luscious grazing, stuffing themselves full of biodiversity! Ha!

I descended the hill in full human form and rejoined polite Somerset farming society. My hovel of thorns and toad companions shelved; for the time being.

PREPARING WESTCOMBE DAIRY'S COWS FOR STRIP GRAZING

This afternoon, as I left the cows to wander from Shoots field into the collecting yard for milking, I was in the neighbouring field – Rick field – doing something that feels like I last did a lifetime ago. Having bound a pile of fencing stakes, a reel of fencing wire and an electric fence power unit to the quad bike, I was setting it all up for Westcombe Dairy’s first foray into strip grazing cows. 

Although it feels like a lifetime ago, it was only seven or so months since I last did this in the rolling, mountain-shadowed, rain-kissed hills of Wales. 

If all else fails tomorrow, when I launch the herd into their first strip of herbal grass ley, I at least proved to myself that I can still string up a beautifully straight electric fence. That is a thought which I have been holding close to my heart as I spent afternoon milking torturing myself with self-doubt over whether this dramatically different approach to grazing will go down well (or not) with the Westcombe cows, used, as they are, to the set stocking grazing method. 

If you never hear from me again, it will be because tomorrow ended-up as a terrible failure. I shall have gone to live the life of a hermit in a hollow within the dense scrub that cloaks the dark side of Creech Hill and, when I have sighed my last breath, my ghost will descend the hill and haunt Rick field. Futuristic people of the future far will feel a chill up their spines as they hear the eerie sound of a squeaky electric fence reel being unwound and the occasional spectral wail as the ghost Nicholas says “Goddamnit!” when he snags his sepulchral fence wire on a particularly large stalk of supernatural chicory from the Hereafter that has gone to seed much too early and is being very annoying. 

A COW CALLED PIXIE, part the third

Two of my very favourite animals in all the world came to say goodbye to me/see me off out of their territory as I completed my Friday night Night Check of the Milton herd. They are, on the right, the gentle sweet Ayrshire heifer Sheena and, in the middle, the ever quizzical-of-expression and soon-to-be-dried-off Pixie.

One cannot get near Pixie to lavish behind ear and under chin scratches upon her, because she is soon to take flight and toddle away. She is full of questions, however, and will shadow your every move over field or through shed. Sheena is a sweet rose of a red cow, whereas Pixie is a corpulent little enigma.

Both are most rewarding characters to have in my life and, if it were permissible, I would keep them in my back garden and allow myself the exquisite, timeless delight of hand milking their silken endeavours into a bucket each morning.

A COW CALLED PIXIE, part the second

Giles and Phil, two of the foot trimmers from Delaware vets, were at Milton Farm to trim the feet of 27 cows. As she is nearing the end of her lactation, our new bovine hero, Pixie, was one of those cows requiring a routine pedicure. Here she is, looking indignant in one of Delaware's special foot trimming crushes.

To say Pixie felt put-out by being held back from the green, green fields of Somerset is to couch her rage in the mildest terms. As she swaggered her capacious rump down the Milton Farm cow handling race and into the crush, the trimmers wondered aloud at her breeding: "Dad's an Angus is he?" All I know is that Pixie's dad wasn't a beef breed - such as an Angus - but instead a tall, good-footed Holstein called ALTAEsquire; his daughters noted for their high cheesemaking milk value.

Well, either him or a breeding record-keeping error.

But why trim at this time of the year? Well, it fits in with cow production levels. Trimming at drying-off finds the cow not quite at the very heavily pregnant stage and also finds her low in milk, so her body is just about at the lowest level of production it can be. Although routine foot trimming is generally pain free - much like clipping one's finger nails - it is undeniably still a stressful, confusing process: having feet winched-up, the noise of the angle grinders buzzing away, combined with the change to the routine.

And so, the indignant Pixie bustled off on her newly sculpted feet into 'Tank' field to join her friends, with their heads down, hard at work, turning grass into milk so that it may be turned into cheese.

WISE FARMING SAGE

Westcombe Dairy had VIP visitors yesterday: retired dairy farmers Stuart (pictured) & Linda  (not pictured) Hodges. 

Having moved from Cambridgeshire to Buckinghamshire aged nine, I became best friends with their son, Edward; the family dairy farm, Briar Hill, was our weekend and school holidays playground. Edward and I would make Airfix models into the wee small hours and then trundle off to the milking parlour with Stuart in the morning, our stomachs filled with a heady dose of Weetabix and raw milk.

Having not hailed from a farming family, it was the Hodges who got me hooked on dairying, but not coming from a farming family meant a farming life seemed an impossibility for me to pursue, so I went off to muddle about with musicians and old road dogs for a while. 

Then, about 10 years ago I broke the news to Stuart - by then retired, the farm sold - that I was off to study agriculture at university. After the blood drained from his face and he looked at me with profound pity, he said: “Right, we had better get you some proper work” and so began the real farming apprenticeship, with Stuart and a dairying friend of his called Tim. If it hadn’t been for the patience of Stuart putting up with the boy Nicholas scrabbling around at his heels, eternally getting in the way, I wouldn’t be doing what I am doing today (which is: make my Mother cry). 

I’ve come across one or two people who claim to be “cow whisperers”; well the only true cow whisperer I ever met was Stuart, who is a picture of calm and patience with animals. He walks into a field of cows and they all deferentially bow their heads: their Aslan returned; I walk into a field and they either ignore me or suck on me like I am some cheap boiled sweet (like Plodkin the Younger is doing to me in the photograph). Without a doubt, the best stockman I ever did meet. I was most fortunate to have him as the first of the many Wise Farming Sages who have enlightened and continue to enlighten me over the years.

LES NOCES, STRAVINSKY

Here is a bucolic picture from the top of Westcombe hill this morning, a picture of curious in-calf heifers beginning to cross the road to the yard of Westcombe Hill Farm – our youngstock rearing unit. 

As Raymond (the Herd Manager at Manor Farm) and I stood blocking the road while the heifers drifted up the side of the hill, we shouted a game of cow Top Trumps to one another. The Dairy Shorthorns one the game-cum-argument of course. 

All was ruddy faced good cheer until Tom the vet read the runes and then that cruel fog of TB descended upon us gathered on the hill. 

Afterwards, as I stood glum faced in the Milton Farm milking parlour pit, beginning afternoon milking, I found much solace in the music of Stravinsky, in particular his ballet Les Noces. Written in 1917 and premiered in 1923, it is a work that is scored for four pianos, percussion, mixed chorus and four solo singers (soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor and bass). Les Noces is a great, writhing tussle of a spirited work which ends, following the closing words of the solo bass voice “Dearest flow’r and treasure of mine, fairest flow’r sweetest wife / Let us live in happiness so that all men may envy us”, with a piano and percussion finale of magnificent calm and poise.

An emotionally cleansing work if ever there was one, notwithstanding the fact that the libretto bears no relation to TB testing heifers in Somerset whatsoever (as it happens, it is all about a rural Russian wedding). As I paused in my milking labours to drink in this musical balm, all was briefly right again and I was reminded once more of the healing power of music.

Alas! I then decided to listen to Tchaikovsky’s 6^th Symphony.

I had made the situation much worse by it being Teodor Currentzis’ recording, which is the most agonisingly heart-wrenching recording of all time. My heart was torn to pieces and I learnt my lesson: in the throes of TB despair, listen to Stravinsky. Never Tchaikovsky.

I AM A COW CALLED PIXIE, part the first

Here you see before you a tubby little splodge of a cow standing betwixt two statuesque Holsteins. This little cow – technically also a Holstein, but evidently cut with a lot of classic, stout Friesian – is called Pixie. 

I have decided that I shall garland each and every one of your lives with Pixie in the coming year, so that you may witness a year in the life of a Westcombe cheesemaking dairy cow. 

Pixie is a potty little thing and is similar in temperament to the other small Friesian-type cows in the herd, such as her good friends Imp and Hornetta. Despite their corpulence and short little legs, they move incredibly swiftly and are generally quite querulous in nature, much like their fellow diminutive creatures, the Ayrshires. This is in direct contrast to the megalith Holsteins who dope about much like I imagine the titanosaurs of many a yore ago might have done. 

In the coming year you will become at one with Pixie. In a sort of not very good virtual reality game in which you have no control and not very much happens, yous do what Pixie does. See what Pixie sees. Hear what Pixie hears. Prance about as Pixie prances about at terrifying unknown things that she does know but has forgotten all about because she is rotund little Pixie, possessor of a fantastically scatter brained outlook on the world.

THE GATE OPENING SPECTRE

Today's picture of the latest challenging situation that befell the simple, honest country folk of Milton Farm captures the moments following the reinstating of order on Creech Hill this morning.

This followed a night of awfulness in which some unseen spectre left a vital gate open between 16 dry cows and 27 young heifers. Quite incredibly, it took just two of us much less than an hour to right this wrong and we opted to employ the simplest method which was surely doomed to fail.

But it did not.

It seems there is not much that cannot be achieved with some buckets of feed, a pick up truck and an electric fence. Indeed, a tribute to the smooth running of the operation was the noticeable lack of extreme swearing clouding the air. Although the sky was blue, our tongues did not turn the air blue which, instead, remained as innocent and wholesome as the heifers.

WESTCOMBE BOOK CLUB 2nd ed.

A new eruption of intrigue occurred in the Westcombe Book Club today when I embarked upon reading a book that I bought a few weeks back while killing time in Wells.

It was while waiting for my partner, Anna,to  complete her annual clothes shop that I bought 'Wilding: The return of nature to a British farm' by Isabella Tree. A modest shopper, Anna bought one T shirt.

The book tells the story of a large Sussex estate that was run as a traditional mixed farm, which then specialised in dairying, before then consolidating its dairy farms into one big efficient unit, to shedding the dairy cows, to going to an arable-only estate. But, in a story similar to much of Britain's ever modernising, intensifying agriculture, searching for the pot of gold at the bottom of a crop sprayer tank, it still haemorrhaged money and the land was dying.
Around the turn of the millennium, the owners set about returning all 3,500 acres back to nature with apparently astounding results.

I  suspect that my relatively open farming mind will be challenged by this book but I also suspect that I shall find much common ground within it.

I begab reading the book in somewhat fitting surrounds, in that sun-dappled chamber of light and shadow: Landrace bakery. A small patch of south west England that does incredible, incredible things with heritage grains, plunders delightful tidbits from nature's larder and makes my mind race with sensational flat white upon sensational flat white.

Here before you you see the book a top my haul of wonderful loaves; feet trembling with caffeine.

 If my eco book-learning carries on apace then I shall soon lose the brogues and will be wearing handwoven wicker clogs, my feet at Zen with the cabbage tea that will be flowing through their veins.

RUNNING THE CALF GAUNTLET

We at Milton Farm decided to run seven recently dried-off cows down the young heifer gauntlet today. 

We have 27 smallish-to-medium heifers grazing the bottom of the hill and up above in the Gods are the dry cows. There is a sneaky side entrance to the upper reaches of the hill that avoids putting the cows through the heifer field - which would be an act of unspeakable madness - but this alternative path to the summit does mean running them down the road and then up onto a field-side track where all that separates cows and ditsy young heifers are occasional wooden posts and two strands of barbed wire. For this is Somerset and Somerset is - “be” in the local parlance - cow country. Thus no wire sheep netting on the fences around these parts with which to contain curious, excitable calves; just the austere and timeless severity of wooden posts and strands of wire. 

Here is an action shot of the cows trotting down the road with an excitable audience of youngsters shadowing our every move. 

Behind me I had a fancy 4x4 breathing impatient fire down my neck while I was using my entire canon of calf mind control powers to implore them not to come spilling through the hedge and down the bank onto the road. They didn’t, nor did they pour through the fence along the sneaky side entrance. Just a lot of mooing and jumping silliness, which is part and parcel of having anything to do with young animals. 

And so, the farming peoples of Westcombe Dairy and their beasts lived happily ever after, for a few hours more at least.

UNITED NATIONS REPORT ON BIODIVERSITY LOSS

Here is a picture of one of Westcombe Dairy’s tractor drivers, Beardy, mowing a herbal grass ley at Milton Farm two days ago. 

Today, this herbal ley will be picked up by the forage harvester and carted away to a silage clamp at Manor Farm. 

It feels timely that we’re harvesting these multi-species herbal leys on the day that the UN releases a major report on the catastrophic loss of Earth’s biodiversity, placing much of the blame for this loss on the intensive nature of post-war agriculture and an intensive way of farming largely practised to this day. Although this herbal ley only has 15 different varieties of plant in it and is therefore hardly some untouched Somerset savannah, rich in cheetah and elk, it is a significant improvement on the one type of plant per field that is still bafflingly such a signature of modern agriculture. 

After this cut, the ley will re-grow and I’ll let it grow longer than is the norm and everyone will question whether a Lunatic should have been given a job at Westcombe, before I then strip graze the Milton herd through it. Letting it grow longer will let some of the plants flower (food for pollinators!) and will let the rich variety of roots from these different species plumb the depths of the soil.  Deep rooting plants, like the chicory, will tap into mineral reserves in the subsoil while also building-up soil carbon with their large taproot mass, which will eventually die and rot and create food for the soil’s galaxy of tiny life forms. Clovers will work with subterranean bacteria to turn atmospheric CO2 into nitrogen in the soil, which will help all the other plants grow without the aid of bagged nitrogen and its accompanying carbon footprint. 

Any bits the cows don’t eat will get trampled into the soil and aid in the build-up of organic matter.  This will help to make the land more resilient to flooding (acting as a sponge) as well as making it more resilient to drought (acting as a moisture reservoir). 

Of course, as much weighty research - particularly that from those great cheese producing nations France and Italy - points out, we must also not forget this diversity of plant life will cause the cows at Milton Farm to produce a milk with a greater potential for complexity of flavour and aroma in the resulting cheese. Making the end product and more enjoyable food to eat. Instilling a sense of value in the food as not some throwaway item. A food to be cherished, as all good food should be. And, if we are to try and stem the loss of biodiversity, all food should be good food. 

For too long agriculture has changed the face of the planet but, on the heels of this report, agriculture MUST start aping nature’s ways, otherwise there’ll be not much of a planet left. Now, I can only hope that the Milton cows like this herbal ley, otherwise we’re all stuffed!