First thing this morning we were lamb catching. Three of the lambs we had brought over last night were not with the right ewes so we rounded them up, put them in the boot and drove them back to the field to be reunited with their mothers.
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There were three ewes waiting though – two went on one ewe, the third on another and the last ewe carried on looking lost so we knew we had another lamb here mistakenly. Pete later identified it, we caught it and that one went back to the field too.
The ewe we had thought was the mother of the twin lambs turned out to not have any milk (or any teeth) so will be mutton this time next week but needed some attention, as did another ewe in the barn as both had the start of foot rot, so we caught them, trimmed their hooves, sprayed them with iodine and gave them a shot of ABs.
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Our next task was catching the three hens which we bought at market yesterday and putting them in a crate, then mucking out the container they had been stashed in as a chicken shed. It had what appeared to be years (but would have at least been months) worth of old bedding and waste, nearly a foot tall. It was very stinky! Ady mostly shovelled while I mostly barrowed it to the muck heap but every so often he came out to breathe and I had a go. Scarlett quite enjoyed emptying the barrow so she came along and helped for a bit declaring it ‘fun!’, where can she get that attitude from I wonder?! ;), then both kids helped with the chucking buckets of water in to sluice it out.
Ady and Pete moved it into the field with the tractor and then Ady and Scarlett built a run around it and made a start on moving chickens and ducks over into it.
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Davies and I donned our white coats and headed into the cutting room to pack meat, except Davies wasn’t feeling too well, he’d been floppy all morning so in the end he retired to the van for a lie down. He did actually manage an earlyish night tonight so hopefully it was early mornings and late nights finally catching up with him and knocking him out rather than anything more sinister.
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I packed and priced various bits of pig, went through the existing meat and repacked and redated some that was in messy bags from going out to market several times. Then I managed to catch Pete up with his sausage making and packed and labelled up all of those. Somewhere in there we had lunch too but I’ve lost track of at which point!
After dinner Pete rang his neighbour who was cutting silage to see if we could go along and watch as it is a real feat of manpower and machinery and a big part of farming. Silage is the cut grass with moisture still in covered and left to dry then used to feed animals. It was indeed a very slick operation with a tractor and attachment cutting the grass, another tractor with massive attachment raking all the cut grass into rows;
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Then along comes a machine which picks up all the cut grass and shoots it out of an arm into a tractor with trailer attached which runs alongside;
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There were four tractors and trailers operating for this purpose, one alongside the tractor, one arriving to take over as that one became full and the other two coming to and going from the farm loading and unloading.
We watched for ages to get our heads round the different parts of the process then followed a trailer load to the farm to see what happens next.
Each load is tipped onto a massive heap which is then constantly worked with a couple of tractors / diggers to roll it out and get all the air out of it, flatten it down and compact it before it is covered to ferment.
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This is the first cut of the year, they will get three or possibly even four in and each cut will be spread in a layer on top of the one before with the plastic covering replaced each time so that there is a multi-layered year supply for next years feed.
We also learnt about slurry (waste poo and wee) which is kept in pits on big farms and used to spread as fertlizer to get the grass growing again asap for the next crop of sileage in a couple of months time. The liquid is pumped out of the pit and sprayed, the solid muck goes in yet another tractor attachment and is spread. Very efficient the way the animal waste goes to help grow the animal feed.
Back at the farm we had showers to wash meat, animal poo and various other assorted stuff off ourselves before retiring to the van.