All creatures great and small (From Gazette & Herald)

All creatures great and small

2004 is turning out to be a fascinating year already on the farming and countryside front; today, on May 23, I am sitting in the office in blazing sunshine and the farming weather forecast for the week ahead is for high pressure to dominate the country for another week.

We finished making silage on Friday evening, at least one week earlier than ever before and, for the first time ever, we have a crop of maize growing in the fields for fodder for the cows this winter in the hope of reducing our feeding costs.

But this has already been a strange season. Here in our little valley, we seem to have missed most of the rain, while other parts of the county have been suffering from too much water and land work has been very badly delayed with lots of potatoes still to plant as I write.

But, and this is something which I cannot understand, we have a little stream, which runs by our back door and this is slowly drying up. It rises from a spring in a little wood just above the house and often runs dry in mid-summer, but I have never seen it so low at this time of the year.

Of even greater interest is the fact that the Environment Agency is sending out bags of water absorbent gel to all its customers to put into lavatory cisterns in an effort to cut down on water usage. This must mean it is also expecting a dry summer. The cynic in me thinks this might be counter-productive, as things like this often turn modern toilets into double-flush systems, thus defeating the object of the exercise.

Out in the fields and the garden, all the wildlife has turned its energies into reproduction and the winter flocks of birds have turned into pairs as the leaves have turned the bare hedges into safe green havens for nesting sites. Already, the proud, hard-working parents are bringing their fledglings into the garden to feed.

The blackbirds and thrushes were the first to arrive with little ones, which they parked carefully under the shelter of the shrubs until they became street-wise and stronger on the wing. Today they seem to be almost fully developed and are feeding for themselves.

The latest addition to the garden flock is the willy wagtail, who has brought his baby onto the lawn to feed and, just now, a greater spotted woodpecker arrived for a quick snack from the nut feeder. This was the hen bird, which is not as gaudy as the two males who used to come during the winter months.

Out in the wider world of farming politics, there seems to be widespread dismay right across the whole of Europe about the state of prices which dairy farmers are getting for their milk, with recent polls suggesting that 23pc of UK milk producers will give up this year and another 20pc who are still undecided. This is due to some very aggressive buying by all the big supermarket chains.

Add this to the unrest about the rises in fuel prices and the poor returns which all manufacturing industries are experiencing, and this suggests that this could be a very interesting year, even without all the bad news currently coming out of Iraq.

Out in the fields and the woods, the birds and the animals also continue to dispute territorial rights and, last week, we watched a pair of roebucks fighting about which of them had the right to graze in one of our fields.

This continued for quite a while and was finally resolved when the weaker one decided that enough was enough and turned tail and ran away.

In these territorial fights to establish a territory, they seldom hurt one another very badly and their only real enemy is a man with either a gun or a motorcar.

The following morning, I saw a well-grown fox cub out on his own at about 6am, hunting the hedgerows, no doubt in search of grubs or baby rabbits.

The young badgers too are all out of the sett and getting braver and more adventurous and seem to becoming much more independent of mum and dad.

They are one of the animals which seem to like maize to eat, so, come the late summer, they will no doubt turn up for a free meal or two in the field next to our house.

As I found out when I was building our ponds, the animals and birds all watch what I do and take immediate advantage of anything which is beneficial to them.

Today, we have a much greater variety of animals and birds on our farm than we had 60 years ago when I was a boy. We also produce a lot more food to sell, and the quality of that food is much better and safer than it ever used to be. I wish that were also true of much of the food we import from overseas.

Updated: 11:50 Wednesday, June 02, 2004