May 9
Early Mornings at Home Farm
Posted in Livestock by David Wilson
People often want to know what a typical morning is like on the farm. You could say no two mornings are the same, but generally I get up at about 6 am, have a pot of tea and then think about what I'm doing that day. I regularly bake my own bread with the wheat from the farm and enjoy giving the dough a good knead. I look on my laptop at the BBC world weather site to check the rainfall and pressure charts on the Atlantic and then I read. My current book is Jules Pretty's, The Earth Only Endures. Mornings are the best time for me to read because there is no-one else around.
I go up to the farm just before 7 am with Tim, a general farm worker. Between us, we bring the bales around and bed up the cows. The bales weigh about 200 kilos so that's my aerobics exercise for the day. By about 7.30 am I can literally be steaming! I bring a fork lift around and start feeding the silage into a forage box. The cows eat around 44 kilos of silage a head every 24 hours and each consume about 12 tonnes a winter. I then feed the beef cattle while Tim feeds the calves. By 8 am, the other members of staff join us (we have 13 in total) and we plan what we're doing that day.
