You Doing Anything Nice For Christmas?

“Are you doing anything nice for Christmas?” Everyone gets asked this question, it’s one of those go to, easy to inquire things that folk ask without waiting for or really caring about the answer.

My usual reply and I'm sure that of most farmers is, “no, I’ve got to stay and milk/feed/muck out/look after the cows/sheep/pigs (delete as appropriate).”

The one time I did spend away was Christmas ‘94 on Bondi Beach, 25 degrees C and raining, real damping Cumbrian rain, the next few days were almost 40 degrees, proper hot, but it seemed only right that someone had arranged Cumbrian rain for the Cumbrian on the beach. I was half way through a backpacking tour of Australia and New Zealand, fulfilling one of my life’s ambitions up to that point by having a festive barbie on the beach.

But every Christmas morning since December 1994 I’ve spent in the milking parlour with dad, that’s almost a quarter of a century of working together to get finished as soon as possible and get back in for bacon sandwiches.

Our normal workday runs from half five in the morning until half six at night, weekends are whittled down to about 7 hours in total, but we somehow shave another hour off both the Christmas day milkings by spending all Christmas Eve bedding up, bagging feed, opening bales and generally doing absolutely everything conceivable to prepare for the following day. But things don’t always go to plan. Never work with children or animals they say, or with machinery that seems preprogramed to breakdown at 7.24am 24^th December!

We’ve changed tyres, thawed frozen water pipes, calved cows and once even milked in the dark after an overnight storm cut the power, but we’ve always finished everything before we went and had them bacon sarnies.

Nothing beats that early morning milking, me and dad setting off down the yard at 5am, half an hour sooner than the normal day so that we can spend more of the day inside with family. It’s always incredibly peaceful, a muted still until the calves hear the dairy door scrape across the small stones trapped underneath. They begin to ball for feed, then the milk cows stretch and yawn, almost cartoon like as they move nearer to the collecting yard. A push of the starter button rouses the milking parlour into life, twelve half ton ladies saunter in, checking each feed trough for remnants of feed left from the night before. 12 cows in, 12 cows milked, out they go. Repeat 9 times.

And that’s it, there is something magical about the simplicity of dairy farming. Almost everything is routine, even on Christmas day.

I certainly don’t want anyone to pity a farmer or even to ‘Thank a Farmer’. I can honestly say that I wouldn’t want to have a lie in before I watched our boys open their presents, I feel great having worked up an appetite for the overindulgence which is almost mandatory. And it’s not that I feel smug or noble about working whilst most are relaxing, I just love the fact that Christmas day is still a farming day, a very special farming day.

So, the next time somebody asks me “Are you doing anything nice for Christmas?”, I think I’ll reply “yes, I’m milking with my dad.”

The Delicate Harmony

“He’s blasted well run over it!”

Grandad never swore, blast and beggar was about as strong as it got. His Methodist beliefs prevented him for drinking alcohol (I never once saw a single drop pass his lips), it also meant his cursing was extremely mild, although the words still had quite a resonance when they came from his farm size 6ft 3” frame.

 “Blast him”, he added whilst pulling himself out of his chair at the kitchen table to look up at the banking in front of the house. Although to be honest it’s a wonder he could see anything out of the kitchen window anyway, its six small panes constantly clouded with a thin film of farmyard grime on the outside and an equally obscuring mix of Aga dust and finger smears on the inside.

The nest which the silaging contractor had just run over was a curlew, the last curlew I remember nesting on the land around Strickley. I was 17. That’s 27 years since a curlew nested here. 27 years hearing them fly overhead in the spring, the iconic rising crescendo call of ‘curl-eee’ in the early morning mist as they passed us by to get to their nest sites higher up the valley, pushed there by a change in farming methods on our farm and on almost every farm in the parish.

Cattle need to be fed though the winter, and a winter up in Cumbria is half the year. (A cumbrian year consists of 6 months of winter followed by 6 months of bad weather, the dour, glass half empty types tell everyone…..)

50 years ago, through those winter months the cows were fed hay in small bales, hay which was generally made in July and occasionally June. (The June hay was always considered the best stuff as it was younger, sweeter and more palatable to feed to milkers.)

But to make hay requires at least 4 fine days of perfectly fine hot weather, preferably blowy as well to fluff the grass up and dry it faster. The labour needed to move thousands of small bales was huge, not only in terms of workers, although most farms got folks in to help, but labour in terms of the physicality. Imagine lifting tens of thousands of numb cumbersome 25kg bales from field-onto trailers-onto an elevator-and then finally stacked into the barn until winter. Repeat this for every available fine day over a two-month period in a fickle area for sunshine and It’s no wonder farms were quick to take the more mechanised silage route.

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So why the brief history of winter forage? Well, hay was cut on our farm from late June through July and August, meaning the curlew could nest in peace, undisturbed in the tall uncut grass, protected from hungry predators and sheltered from the savage Cumbrian weather.

For my tenth birthday I was given a fishing rod, nowt fancy because we had very little money, probably a second hand one bought from the auction or an advert in the Westmorland Gazette. I was born June 1974, but I was given my present early that year so that Dad could take me out fishing on our beck that weekend, as he was expecting to be making silage on my birthday, the 16^th.

Fast forward 12 years and rather than cutting the grass for first crop silage mid-June like I remembered it had been on my tenth birthday, it was now mid-May. We’d brought it forward between three and four weeks in just over a decade. Great for winter forage quality, great for milk yields, bad for the ground nesting birds, bad for the curlew.

The change from hay to silage in modern livestock farming has had the same disastrous effect on the plight of the curlew as the invention of the mechanised mowing machine had on the now very rare Corncrake. Important developments in farming which are designed to improve the lives of the farmer and their workers, and help build a sustainable enterprise, can quite easily have unintended consequences on the wildlife which share our fields.

So, do I feel guilty?

Should I feel guilty?

Should we all share collective guilt?

I’ve written this short blog just as I began to read the excellent Curlew Moon by Mary Colwell. I hope that by the time I’ve finished the book I may have some answers to those questions.

Farming has created the rare harmony between food production and the living natural environment over thousands of years, so when a revolution happens which fundamentally alters that balance, something will inevitably suffer.

Farmers created the original harmony and farmers are probably best placed to remedy it too.