112 BY JULIE REED
A
s I write this near the end of February, we are being
teased with a few days sunshine, which is desperately needed to dry out the ground. After spreading slurry all winter our fields are in need of some extra attention.
With spring upon us, Chris has been busy working out our forage stocks, measuring our pits to see what we have now and working out how much we need for the coming year. With only 125 acres on our farm and 250 cows, we have to find fodder elsewhere to fill the gap and are fortunate to have surrounding neighbours who are happy to either rent us extra ground or grow crops for us.
Back in the autumn we failed to get 40 acres of rye grass in on time before it got too wet, so to help avoid this happening again, we are going to grow an earlier crop of maize this year. We recently had a classification visit and were thrilled with five out of 10 of our heifers scored going VG, the highlight being
a Bossman two year old going VG87. Chris suggested since we have such a nice heifer, whether we should be taking her to a show. For me that is the thumbs up, so I will be digging out the first local show entry form for the beginning of May at North Somerset Show.
Chris recently came into breakfast to tell me he had some sad news. Our oldest cow ‘155’ Fiveways Lily Pear had passed away in her sleep in the dry cow cubicles. This cow has been a legend in our herd, since we bought her back in March 2009 as a GP80 fifth calver. At the time we bought her purely for ‘milk in the tank’ and never expected her to last seven years. She was a real character, bossing all other cows around, never looked her age and leaves an impressive lifetime yield of 131,368 litres and an EX91 classification.
I’ve been wondering whether to mention anything regarding milk prices, as it can be controversial. However, I decided if I didn’t
then it would be ‘ignoring the elephant in the room’. As an industry as a whole, we are going through a desperate time and at the moment there doesn’t seem to be a light at the end of the tunnel.
The sad truth is, it doesn’t seem like there will be until a proportion of farmers are forced to make the difficult life changing decision to cease milk production or something else drastically changes. In this dyer situation, we realise how incredibly fortunate we are to be one of the lucky ones who are receiving an above average milk price and compared to so many, we have little to complain about. On a lighter note, as I write this I am just a week off my due date. Chris keeps telling me how now would be a good time to have baby as he doesn’t have many cows to calve in the next couple of weeks so he could fit me in. Hopefully by the middle of March at the latest, baby Reed will have arrived safely.
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