Farmer musings on fodder, food security and foxing

Firstly, a postscript about dogs. I know two people who have bred litters of puppies over the past few months. They are not puppy farmers, but bred puppies for that most understandable of reasons – they both had superb working bitches and wanted a bitch puppy to keep so they could keep the line.

In both cases other people had said “if you ever have some pups out of that bitch, I’ll have one”. So a home was waiting for three or four pups from each litter before they were even conceived.

But so much dog theft is going on they were afraid to advertise the remains of each litter by conventional methods. Their reasoning was if a potential dog thief knew they had a litter of pups then they could lose the bitch and all the pups in each case. It was a dilemma.

Lawlessness in all its forms has an impact on society, even if it’s only worry. It’s impossible to quantify worry, but it’s a negative people could do without in their lives. These people ended up feeling vulnerable and wishing they hadn’t bred a litter of puppies, which is a shame.

Changing seasons

If you live in the countryside – and in particular if you are a farmer – all the seasons are different, and in particular they are usually different to the same season the previous year.

If I had to describe this season and its difference I would readily say it is spring where a lot of fodder is on the move. Every day, including Sunday, we see tractors and trailers on the road moving silage and straw about – sometimes we see several loads a day. This is because in our area we had two seriously dry spells last year.

I can use my lawn-mowing activities as a sort of yardstick. We have a fair bit of lawn to cut and I am head lawn mower. I don’t pick the clippings up and I don’t like to see a swathe of cut grass left behind, so I make a big effort to cut them twice a week. It keeps them tidy and there are no clippings that you can see.

Last year, two occasions occurred when the lawns did not need cutting for a month. They were brown all over and only needed the mower then to knock the daisies off and spread the mole hills.

The droughts then are manifesting themselves now in people being short of fodder. It’s strange really because last year will be remembered for its grassy autumn, but that was just used to extend the grazing season for as long as possible and delay using conserved fodder.

We have had to buy silage for the cows. We thought we had located a supply that would last several weeks; winter can last until the end of April around here. But last week another dairy farmer took 100 tons. Then last Friday, when we usually fetch three loads to make sure it lasts all weekend, we fetched two and were asked to hang back a bit as two big artic lorries were due.

What about animals?

We hear a lot about food security, but that always relates to food for humans. As a country we import a lot of our food because there is such a lot of people to feed. If there were to be an international calamity that jeopardised that food supply then food security would be a real issue. No politician would like to be in charge when there was a food shortage. The food security would be a serious issue.

But what about food security for animals? I don’t doubt for a minute that enough fodder in the national store exists to feed the nation’s farm animals, but fodder is expensive to shift and that expense only increases the further you have to move it. That might be stating the obvious, but we need to remember that.

I once saw a documentary about a drought in Australia where some farmers gave some fodder to those stricken with drought and it was moved by a long convoy of huge lorries. At no stage did anyone mention money. I can’t see something like that ever happening here. One person’s shortage is another’s opportunity.

Only today I heard about a farmer who had 500 cows and only had three days’ silage left. He will make a big hole in someone’s silage clamp every day when he starts buying for that lot. It makes me wonder if enough fodder is in store to feed the nation’s cattle when someone starts buying on that scale, and he could easily be buying it well into April.

My late father-in-law used to make a lot of hay in those small conventional bales; he used to make lots of bays of hay. But he always liked to have two bays left untouched; it was a sort of insurance policy in case a dry year was coming up. Lots of farmers are like that and if all the clamps are emptied now, it has a sort of knock-on effect that will have repercussions next year as well. The grass will grow, let’s hope it’s soon.

Fox watch

We never draw our curtains; our nearest neighbours are a mile away. On Friday night I see, from my armchair, the lights of a vehicle going up the fields of a hill in the distance. It’s about 7:30pm. Just after 10pm I see a vehicle returning down the hill, but by a different route. They have been “foxing”, I tell myself.

A friend is one of the foxing fraternity and he comes in for a cup of tea on Monday morning. “You go foxing on Friday night?” He seems a bit disconcerted that I know what time he went and what time he came back. I ask him if he got any foxes and he says three. I ask him if he saw any black and white foxes. He tells me they didn’t, “but we saw lots and lots of deer, about 40”.

Species partiality

Twenty years ago, the sight of a deer would be so unusual that it would be a worthy topic of conversation; it would often warrant a trip to the pub to tell everyone there.

And so I wonder what role deer play in the spread of TB. Their lifestyle is not so conducive to the spread of TB as that of badgers. They graze the fields at night and hide in the woods in the daytime. They don’t go down a hole and breathe all over each over. But if a deer has TB I’m sure its urine is just as infectious.

The biggest difference is that you can, should you will, go out and shoot deer and no one seems to mind. This has always intrigued me; I call it species partiality. A deer can look at you with those big sorrowful eyes whereas if you were to try to stroke a badger, its first inclination would be to bite your hand off.

I was once in a large game dealer’s and it had just taken delivery of a big load of deer from Scotland. It had started to skin them and I couldn’t believe how many warbles were on them. There were so many that there was hardly room for any more.

I questioned this because warbles on cattle is something we have eliminated; I was told they were a different species of warble and didn’t affect cattle. I still find it strange; you would assume a warble is a warble and would lay its eggs where it could. Perhaps species partiality goes with the insect world as well.