Ian Pye works a 250-acre dairy farm near Preston which also grows crops for the autumn calving herd. His is an open farm where the public can come and watch cows being milked, have a coffee in the tea room and buy an ice cream from the small farm shop. There's a strong focus on school visits. Visit the Old Holly Farm website here.
Ian says...
The warm start to the month did encourage us to make some extra cow feed and we cut grass silage for a fourth time this year – but the quality of the feed is poor to average. You just have to ask yourself one thing at times like this; is it better than not making it and then running out of feed because spring doesn’t turn up until June?
The farm has a small wood and we’ve taken (free) advice on how to manage it for the future, especially as there seem to be some Woodland Incentive Grants coming soon.
Now to me one tree looks like another, but an hour with an expert is great for understanding them and it’s almost a history lesson too. And our tree advisor said he wouldn’t know the difference between a brown or a black and white cow, so it was a lesson for us both.
Being told some trees were managed up until the 1950’s (trimmed to grow tall and straight with no low branches) before timber from elsewhere became cheaper has great parallels with farming. Some trees that looked healthy were not going to last much longer, only a decade or two- not long in tree terms, and the best managers have actually been the wild deer, which have kept unwanted things out. Maybe better to have a deer management grant instead?
The best bit about the session was seeing something you look at every day in a new light – ‘can’t see the wood for the trees’ was phrased for such a moment!
Hens have been swapped around this month. The ISA Warrens have been replaced with Redco’s (red) and Rhode rock (black). We have used the very old fashioned method of ‘all in, all out’ meaning all the old batch leave at the same time and the building is deep cleaned ready for the next so there is little chance of any pest or diseases establishing in the new flock. The black hens seem to be the first up in a morning and the red ones seem to be a bit lazier and more mischievous. Hopefully that will change for the better, but whoever said one hen looks like another should take note!
Team North West NFU asked me along to a movie night in Blackpool, which before you raise an eyebrow I can assure you was not about reserving the back row and sharing popcorn.
There was a reason - to gain a better understanding of the “fracking” that could be an issue facing farms in the region in the near future. Basically water is forced deep underground to crack the rock and natural gas gathers and is pumped out and sold. The anti-frackers filled the room to watch a film about the worst case situations such as borehole water becoming polluted, while three very brave souls from the fracking company answered questions in a breakout session.
As a neutral, the biggest concerns for me (aside from the pollution issue) were that the scaremongers were preventing a full picture of what would/could actually happen in the North West under our regulation and management systems, and the fact that the fracking company had done such a poor job of consultation. As a result, they were now having to not only answer normal questions but were also having to dispel myths and untruths before they even begun.
Change the words in the last piece from “fracking” to “dairy farming” and you can suddenly see the problems you can create by not having coordinated information that’s available to all. Would three brave dairy farmers turn up to defend their industry to a room full of antis? Fracking hell, you’re kidding aren’t you…unless there’s a free buffet of course!
No comments have been made.