Michael and Kathy Fordham are tenant farmers working about 700 acres at Little Horsted in East Sussex. It is a mixed farm, with around 500 acres of cereal crops and a beef suckler herd. The Fordham family has farmed in Little Horsted since Michael's grandfather started there in 1916...
'Well - wishing for warm April showers and warm sunny days failed miserably, as we have had very cold, windy but mainly sunny days and frosty nights and no rain.
'Consequently the spring crops all germinated well enough, but have not had much chance of growing and along with the winter cereals, nitrogen up take has been slow. Oh well - it will be just another one of those years! It’s just as well we are in farming for the long haul and thus able to take the good and bad years and our diversified income helps to keep us afloat.
'What will our new government bring us, I wonder? More market forces I guess and thus, more imported food, as we cannot provide it cheaply enough to give the supermarkets a good margin. They may all say they want us to provide more, but with the cost of production inevitably rising here in the UK, we will be not be, I am sure.
'Many of us believe that we have lost our ability to produce food without all of the agrochemicals that we all rely on at the moment. Many organic systems show very good results and we hope that good sound science is not pushed aside by the rush to have GM and thus lose control of even more of our own destiny.
'This leads me on to the reform of the CAP after 2013. Good work is being done by the NFU and other EU farming bodies to make sure that the changes are food and production focused, but still decoupled. We believe that it is right for us as farmers to get a payment and then be free to use that money as we see fit. However, the danger is that as margins are squeezed ever tighter by market forces, uneconomic production is then the result and farmers may start to take land out of production faster than is happening now.
'The reform should still have an environmental benefit, but if cheaper food is demanded then all we could finish up doing is exporting production, with ever more disastrous environmental damage elsewhere. The discussions will I know, be long and hard, but we as an NFU have to fight for the benefit of us all - not just the few.
'We thought calving was jogging along nicely after our few troublesome sucking problems, but with four cows left to calve 9 months after the bull left, we started scratching our heads. None had been seen bulling and only one was beginning to show signs of bagging up, so the vet was called. One was definitely in calf; two had some complications internally and one was pronounced empty.
'The two were given prostaglandin to help them get on and shift their problems - the very next day one delivered a cat like, mummified calf and then the second one spent a long time trying to shift hers. In the end we felt inside, only to find a breach presentation, but with no obvious legs - the vet was called again and after lots of struggling, one back leg was found, but no amount of pushing or shoving would bring the other leg up - at 10.30 our vet decided to call for more assistance and he too reached the same conclusion. In the end, at midnight a very mummified calf was delivered, but only after the difficult leg had been cheese-wired off inside the cow.
'This left one final cow. She started bagging up more and more and then, ten days overdue, spent a long time fidgeting all day, again to no avail. At 3pm we decided to investigate. Two enormous front legs were found and the head was enormous too. Again the vet was called. The calf was alive but not going to come out the normal way and she decided to call an additional vet and perform a caesarean. We then had to explain that we had 30 WI ladies arriving for a farm tour in the next half hour! No problem, the vets coped with an audience and the ladies all marvelled at this wondrous event - a big cheer went up when the big bull calf was born and straightaway started to bleat for milk and get up.
'Three days on, all is well for the mother and calf at the moment, so fingers crossed a happy ending will ensue. It just goes to show how uncertain farming is. We have not spent much on vets for the last ten years, but boy oh boy, these last three cows have made up for it and we are so glad that our practice vets have such strong large animal qualifications, because without them we would have higher losses.
'So, a big thank you to them. Just on that note, one of the senior partners had his leg broken by a bull on a neighbour’s farm and is now likely to be out of action for some time, as he too has developed complications due to an aneurism. We wish him well, but it just shows how fragile we all are when dealing with livestock. The ladies thoroughly enjoyed their tour and they all thought the vets were marvellous.
'As Guy Smith mentioned in the BFG about Countryfile, these ladies are all watching it and they come prepared to ask the questions that they have seen on Adams Farm or other stories the show has highlighted. We do our bit for British farming PLC - let’s hope the BBC and the new government will keep doing theirs. Michael & Kathy Fordham
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