Oh How We Love the Land,
Each day that we wake
up, on the farm we love,
Seeing what the
weathers like, look at the sky above,
Breathe in all the
fresh air, as from the fields it drifts,
And hearing all the
bird songs, your heart it does uplift.
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| How the village looked when I was growing up |
In hindsight its always a bit rash to commit to new ideas
before they have been proven, so it was my fathers frowns and disapproval that
tempered my enthusiasm at some of the thing I wanted to try out.
Silage was just being “trialled” at college , this was hand
fed with a pitch fork into a chopper blower and blown into the top of a
concrete tower silo. This was reined back to a weld mesh circle with tarred
paper lining, the story of that is told here
http://yewsfarm.blogspot.com/2012/03/our-first-attempt-at-silage-making.html
Cow cubicles had just been invented, and we went on a farm
visit with the college to see the very first cubicles and the cows using them.
At home we were tying up cows by cow chain in stalls twice every day, which
limited the number of cows kept, and of coarse the milking parlour came in hand
in hand with cubicles
On my third year of farming on my own, I had four more
calving than I had got stalls for, and proceeded to built a timber block of
four cubicles, the pattern and dimensions were taken from the Farmers Weekly,
they published all the new ideas and up to date information of that year.
Sugar beet had never been grown in our immediate area, and
to my fathers credit he went for it, ( late 1950’s)
http://www.fwi.co.uk/community/blogs/fretaw/archive/2008/09/07/father-grew-sugar-beet-1950-s.aspx
the beet all being hand pulled (we did
have a lifter that lifted the beet a few inches enough to break it free from
its anchor tap roots) then topped and loaded and taken down to the local
station to be loaded into 20 ton rail wagons.
I recall that we were trained as students on how to
correctly pull and top beet to maximise the weight of sugar beet loaded for
sale to the factory, and while we students pulled and topped the entire
headland round the college field of beet. We were then told a sugar beet
harvester was coming on trial from a manufacturer. This was the first beet
harvester ever seen by almost every one at the college.
I grew a few acres of sugar beet for a few years until the
stock number grew and the land was required for kale and mangols for the cows.
Another new invention that first appeared around then was
the disc mower, up until then it was all finger bar mowers, which had
themselves had had a good fifty years run of unopposed monopoly of grass and
corn (wheat oats barley) cutting before that.
The funny thing is that the most up to date combines still
use the finger bar blade for cutting the crop.
A Good Old Way of Life
There are the wise
and the old, and the young who want to learn,
There’s the hard
working not so olds, their fortunes try to earn,
Farming’s got a grip
on them, they know no other way,
Come hail or rain or
sunshine, it’s just another day,
From early in the
morning, till after dark at night,
For crops and stock
their caring, they are their delight.
Working hard day by
day, in a green and pleasant land,
Don’t have time to
stand and stare, have a good look around,
Take in the beauty of
where they work, the fields the trees and lanes,
All the years of care
and sweat, well out weighs the pains.
It’s just a good old
way of life, their families there to rear,
Health and hope and
happiness, the harvest brings good cheer.
Countryman )Owd Fred)
A life spent making
mistakes is not only more honourable, but more useful than a life doing
nothing.
George Bernard Shaw
(1856 – 1950)
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