Life on the Farm

early summer in pictures and a rant about the weather

This post contains lots of photos—if it’s too long and your email truncates it, you can click through above to view online.

Land and livestock demand my full attention these summer days. Rising early to beat the midges and the heat, I wake to sunlight pouring in the eastern window, flooding our little home with sweltering warmth, and the rising dawn cacophony of stonechats chatting, swallows squabbling, magpies cackling, ewes calling for their lambs and our farm ducks quacking for their breakfast. The bustle of the growing season. I roll out of bed and into boots to feed and milk the goats, lead them out to their browse, hike across the hill with a bucket of beet and water for the sheep and then cut browse for the bucks who’ve been penned up away from the female herd because they’re already rutting and their constant harassment of the ladies was getting a bit much, all before coffee.

Leading the goats out to their day’s browse this overcast morning, before the sun climbed high enough to dissolve the cloud and any whisper of rain. I lead, they follow, often to the point of infuriation—only electric fencing will keep them where I put them without me staying too, without them following me back to stand around waiting until I take them out again. At least I know they won't stray without me.

Sometimes I sit and while away the hours watching them browse, or lead them to the lushest places and try to sneak stealthily away when their ears and eyes, always on me, are buried in the forage, rather than spending the hours dragging out rolls of electric netting across the rough terrain. If anyone needs me, I'll be somewhere on a mountainside soaking up sunbeams and watching clouds roll across the blue with a herd of goats.

Days are long, sun-soaked and thirsty, yet weirdly cold. The land is dry, whipped into swirling dust by an unrelenting north-westerly with a “hard bite” as described by a neighbouring farmer that sucks the dew off the grass and dries the air, and now we haul water and buckets of sugar beet to sheep on parched slopes of overgrazed scrub. Occasional spatters of rain do nothing to moisten the hydrophobic dust that the dry conditions have made of our thin, exposed soils. We’re grateful for our wetlands and scrub during times of drought (although this isn’t so much a drought as slightly dry with an unseasonal flux of extreme temperatures)—heather and gorse rooted into cool, damp rock and clay subsoil can tolerate the lack of surface moisture; thick purple moor grass and a dense canopy of bog myrtle hold moisture and keep growing on low-lying flood pans, while the higher and much drier, exposed slopes of sheep fescue and sweet vernal have come to a worrying standstill: no growth in weeks.

For a month or so of late spring into early summer, rain and warmth combine for lush, rapid growth and there is too much grass and not enough mouths to munch it. But our season of abundant grass is brief. Purple moor grass, Molinia caerulea, the dominant species on our rank, old, wet grasslands, vigorous and swamping in habit, races ahead of the sheep and grows too tough too fast for them. The goats, happy with the coarse forage, get their turn on it now while the wetlands are dry enough to walk on without wetting their feet, the moor grass is high and there are fields of bog myrtle for them to lose themselves in. But for the sheep grazing rotations are stalled until the “good” grasses get some proper rain and milder temperatures and start into growth again.

I don’t generally get caught up in alarmist climate conversations, nor buy into greenwashed, business-as-usual “solutions”—in fact those conversations tend to get my hackles up, especially when they mention cows and emissions in the same breath. We simply do what we have to do to adapt and keep living the best we can in accordance with what we know to be real and true on our little patch of wild land. But sometimes I can’t help feeling a little bit despondent. Airliner jets roaring overhead are a regular interruption to our days of birdsong and bee hum, and the constant, grinding churn of the wind turbines cutting the air above us and keeping us awake at night are a niggling reminder of the world they partially power: a world far, far removed and insulated from the experiences of those of us who live and work on the land, dependent on the proper order of the seasons for a simple, frugal, low-tech livelihood. (The irony of my typing this out to you on lithium-ion batteries and servers powered by those same wind turbines is not lost on me). Yet we are on the front line, hands in the soil and brows beaten by the weather, and the seasons are shifting, unreliable, each year bringing unpredictable and unprecedented challenges. I know the land we’ve chosen to make our living on is particularly challenging, but I also know from my conversations with other farmers that we’re not the only ones struggling with changing weather patterns. I don’t know what the answer is, but I am pretty sure it lies in the land, in reconnecting with our place in the natural order of Creation and not some technological salvation. And I’m sure taxing livestock isn’t it.

The ewes are kept content for now on sugar beet, gorse, and whatever creeping forbs they can find beneath the scrub, held for too long on a piece of ground that desperately needs rain, a sacrificial tactic to save what other ground we can.

Meanwhile, some of the pastures we’ve been working to restore, grazed hard last year and off limits to the sheep this year. And trees we planted early this spring. For all the challenges of the season, we’ve got more grass this year than we’ve had in previous, we’re not putting out hay this summer, we’ve tuned our grazing rotations to the cycles of flood and drought as best as we can predict them, and most of the land is still green and flourishing despite the difficult season. So, we think we’re getting something right.

You might not believe it at a glance, but I counted sixteen plant species in one square metre of this field (not counting the heather or gorse), which apparently is enough to qualify it as a “species-rich semi-natural grassland”, and over thirty species across the whole field including spotted marsh orchids, tormentil, milkwort, lousewort, butterwort, devil’s bit scabious, ribwort plantain (which probably came in on our sheep), several types of sedge and rush, and four or five types of grass (one or two of which probably also came in on our sheep), all creeping up beneath the browse height of the goats. This taken a month ago; it’s all much higher and greener now (see above).

I can feel the season turning though, as I write, as the Earth tilts past midsummer and the year rolls on. The sky is overcast and the wind is changing, coming more westerly, with warm, Gulf Stream currents from the North Atlantic Drift that gives us our usually mild climate softening that hard, northerly bite and bringing flurries of damp. July is always a wet month, and we’re ready for it.

Shearing sheep is the order of the season. I work through the flock by hand as their fleeces rise through these dog days of high summer. It’s a mission to get through them before the month passes and the weather breaks. One of these years we’ll have the infrastructure to run the whole flock in and get the job done in one hit over a couple of days, but for now it’s a matter of catching whichever ones I can as the days permit, penning them for a couple of hours to ruminate and digest their morning’s forage so they’re not too full when I come back to shear them, a couple at a time.

Little Lady seems pleased with her first woolcut. The yearlings are always my favourite to shear: they’re small and light, usually well handled and happy to get all the cuddles and scritches that come with being sheared for their first time, and the delight when they find themselves free of their heavy, itchy winter coats. And I get to reveal the colours and quality of their first fleeces and find out what fine little bods they are underneath. It’s tell time on the year’s keep—fleece quality will reveal a lot, as will the condition of their little naked bods (hand shearing doesn’t clip as close as electric shears so not quite naked—they’re left with a bit of cover as Little Lady here shows). I’m really pleased with condition this year, especially considering the difficult season. We put a lot into getting their minerals and supplements just right—and also a hard culling regimen—and it’s paying off in beautiful fleeces and a strong, healthy flock.

Kids are coming late and sporadically this year, thanks to our young buck being slow to mature and having some trouble reaching the target. His kids are beauties though, worth waiting for, all ears and legs and waggling little tails, if a little bit slow to get up and go—for that reason we’ll use a spunkier buck on our first fresheners this year and keep Prince for the mature ladies who know what they’re doing with newborns. There’s nothing quite as frustrating, or as rewarding, as teaching reluctant new mothers to feed slow babies, but I prefer to be a hands-off kind of midwife and let them figure it out themselves so I want lively kids that come out kicking and bounce right up onto the teat without my help on first-time mothers. (I love my Shetland and blackface sheep for the same reason—lambs that almost literally land on their feet and know right where to go for the good stuff).

I may be a tiny bit biased—he is, after all, the accidental son of my best doeling and I am his doting nanny—but I’m sure there’s never been a more handsome buck kid than Chewy Duke. He’s naturally polled (hornless) from his mother’s side (I would never disbud a horned kid but I do love my pollies, there’s just something softer and sweeter about their nature) and with both his parents’ gentle, friendly temperament. Temperament is inheritable from both sides and mine is a closely handled, hand-milked herd that I want to enjoy, so it’s an important consideration when I’m selecting bucks as well as does. You may notice Chewy Duke is wearing a collar. Only keep goats wear collars. Watch out, Papa Prince, the illegitimate heir is set to usurp the throne.

We seem to have a running theme of handsome, illegitimate heirs. This is Toffee, also known as George the Second, accidental son of last year’s accidental son, George the First. We make no promises on ram lambs but if he’s lucky he might (purposely) get a few ewes this year because, well, he’s so handsome, but also he’s a couple of generations removed from most of our younger ewes and it would save us buying in fresh blood this year. We’ve got away with running the same two rams for the past three years but there are a few daughters/neices of breeding age now that are too close to put back to either of them.

And lastly, what would summer on the uplands be without the orchids? They are spectacular this year, I can hardly walk across the heaths and grasslands without stepping on them. The sheep eat some, that can't be helped, but there are many, many more. It is a wonderful year for wildflowers.