Monday February 24, 2014

Farm Duties..

Today was mine and Phoebe's scheduled day of farm duties so we arrived at Home Farm and started by helping Neil and Simon herd two Lincoln Red heifers in to the cattle crush so they could receive an injection (not sure what for - but they had not long given birth to some really cute calves!). We fed the next batch of Lincoln Red mums in the next barn with a concentrate feed and Neil went off to feed the cows at Durdham.

Our main task today was to prep the old parlour collecting yard ready for the lambing pens. There are two straw lambing yards constructed just outside the building and this is where the ewes will start to give birth before being brought in to the lambing pens with their lambs. Of the first lambing batch around 55 of the sheep are already in one of the straw yards - these are the triplet and twin lambers, so that they can begin their creep feeding regime. However, this may have to be rationed slightly to ensure that the lambs do not grow too big and cause problems at birth. The ewes will then be given an increased feed when the lambs are born to ensure she can produce enough milk and feed them.

Preparation including sweeping, tidying, fetching, carrying, relocating, binning, moving, cleaning, stacking etc etc basically the building and surrounding area is used as a store during the rest of the year and therefore needed to be made back in to a lambing shed!

After lunch we bedded down the Lincoln Red cows at Home Farm, new hessian bales were brought in and we moved the cows along the pens while we split the bales up leaving big slabs for the cows to rough up when they were let back in.

We then carried on in the lambing shed and started to fix the pens - but there were a few gates and pins missing - so we went off to the workshop to make some new pins! Neil cut up some lengths of metal and we used a bending machine to make the handle parts which was groovy and the ends were filed off so there were no sharp edges. Hey presto! these fitted perfectly and we put as many pens up as gates would allow before finishing for the day!