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.
No comments:
Post a Comment