Tracks Across Fields 177

    On the old American cowboy films that I like watching, they always seem to have an Indian tracker, to follow the hoof prints from which they seem to know, how many horses, which direction they are going and how long ago they passed that way, and even if one horse is carrying two people.

 My self watching these movies I always notice the horses themselves, how they move, the "gait" , or if one is lame, and always wonder how all the bullets only seem to hit the riders and rarely ever the horse.  How when a rider is shot and the horses head is brought round sharply, it falls to the ground without ever being hurt. 

The cattle stampede for miles and miles, when in fact they tire after only half a mile, then slow down, and when moving a large herd you could not expect them to do any more than three miles per hour. As in every herd there are always leaders, as long as they are pointed in the right direction the others follow by instinct.

Just a few of our April born calves picture taken end of September

This is our "leader", she is a Simmental cross Frisian cow, the cross bred suckler cow has a tendency to produce more milk than the pure bred beef breed. Her Hereford calf  as you see came out a  pale red colour. I have always noted the width of her muzzle, almost as wide as her eyes.   

The wagons used in films when they are in a wagon train, how rusty and dull the iron hooped wheels are, from my own experience of iron tyred wagons used at harvest time they are bright and shiny metal, but then I am only being picky, the film wagon trains perhaps will only do a few hundred yards while shooting takes place then parked up to continue going rusty again.

Back at home here in the middle of the UK I have become a tracker, just by default. If an odd one of the cattle get out of their field and onto the road, the first thing they do in a strange place is to lift their tail and let go some droppings as they walk, and from that and the hoof prints on the grass or in the mud you can see whitch way they went and what size of animal you are looking for, or if more than one how many. In our case if an animal gets out its either just one , who maybe in season, or if more than one, it most likely all of then get out on the herd instinct they seem to possess. 

Its the same with tyre marks that have recently driven out of our yard, in wet weather its fresh wet marks down a drying road or its dusty tryes marking the road, I can tell if some one has driven up my yard and how long ago and can recognize the tyre prints of most of my friends and neighbours vehicles and tractors.

In the fresh snow its the easiest first thing in a morning, all the small animals and bird that burrow and roost all looking in vein for food.           

                                                             Tracks Across Fields

                        

Tracks across the fields, and tracks off down the lanes,

In the snow in the mud, fresh tracks still it rains,

Paws, feet, hooves n’ boots, wheels with grippe tyres,

Big and small, heavy and light, not long then they expire.

Every print has a tale to tell, on who has crossed your path,

See the direction that they went, and if they’re causing wrath,

Follow to see where they go, and if they came back that way,

Intruders can see, up to no good, or if they’re out to play.

All the prints tell a tale, the pattern they leave behind,

The claws on paws and the gait of the stride aligned,

There’s webbed feet and long toes, belong to who knows,

And there’s birds that land, and take off like the crows.

There’s cows and there’s calves, and horses with shoes,

See how many have passed, that way from the clues,

Tyres leave prints be it bikes or cars, tractors and all,

Speeding and skidding, or getting stuck when they stall.

You can read every where, who’s has been up that way,

Prints and tracks tell a tale all every day,

You may be alone, but someone’s been up there,

A crossing of tracks in the lane be aware.

Owd Fred

One who walks in another's tracks leaves no footprints.

Proverb.

Of all the things that we have changed

When you take on land or even a whole farm for the first time, there are a whole lot of things to be changed or improved to bring it round to your own way of thinking and farming. When I took this farm on we piped in some mid field open ditches, made wider gateways between arable fields, save taking the header off the combine when moving to the next field. Water troughs and mains water pipe pulled under with a mole plough across to grazing fields, which had been watered by springs, which dried up mid-summer time.

 A great heap of soil along the lower boundary where the headlands had been plough out of the field off the top land, had to be pushed down further to form an extra acre or so out onto the peaty edge of the fields involved.

Lower branches of hedge row trees were lopped to get machinery under, with the coming of cabs and mirrors on tractors and the combine it was essential to utilize the whole of the field.

My father used to send two of us lads out with a tractor and a single furrow horse plough to get that two extra furrows closer to the hedge.   

Sheds for loose housing cattle were all made so the tractor and front end loader could get in to clean them out, and back in my father’s day when I was a kid, he changed all his cowshed from the old oak stalls and blue brick floors to new pre-cast concrete stalls and smooth concrete floors that could be scrubbed.

In my own period of modernization cows in stalls gave way to cow cubicles and self-feed silage the cubicles being invented around 1960  and it would be almost 1970 when my own cows were introduce to cubicles. Along with this the milking parlours came in and bulk milk tanks, in my first abreast parlour we milked directly into churns until the road milk tank collection started.

And so it is that now I am retiring, the new young and keen farmer who is taking over the land I have farmed for the last forty five years, he will modernize and model the fields to his pattern of farming, in his case milking cows in a big way. I started with twenty six cows on ninety six acres in 1960 building up to seventy two cows plus followers by 1985, then in the village the first ninety cow herd and now 2013 a 350cow herd building up to 400 this next year. I can’t imagine where it will all go in the next lifetime of farming up to the 2060’s. 

 Figure 1. Old redundant farm buildings with the old stable door on the right housed three shire work horses, then large loose box for rearing calves, the large drift house doors where loads of loose hay (by horse and cart) were pitched onto the lofts on the left and right for feeding the calves, and down to the shire horses in the stable and the cows in the cowshed to the left  

Figure 2.  On the left of this picture is the cowshed door with another pitching door for hay into the lofts

 Figure 3 This is the oldest section of the farm buildings, as we find nowadays modernization and extending cow housing must have taken place a hundred or more years ago

 Figure 4  Door on the left was the modern flat roofed dairy where milk was cooled and measured into churns, door in the corner was the engine shed where an old open crank engine worked the barn shafting and latterly an electric motor installed to do the same job and later    still the milking machine vacuum pump, also the coal boiler for steaming and sterilizing the milking utensils. The double doors with the loft above was the feed shed with all the barn machinery, in the loft driven by the loft shafting was a straw chopper a cake crusher, linseed cake and ground nut cake came in big curled up slabs and had to be ground or crushed down so cows could eat it. At the back of the feed shed was a root pulper, to slice mangols and turnips mixed with chopped straw and fed along to the cows in the stalls

This shows the low sliding door on top a churn stand where the milk lorry/truck would pull alongside to off load his empty churns and load the full ones, behind is a continuation of the cowsheds, in all there was stalls for 45 cows. These building have now 2013, stood un-used for cows now for almost thirty five years, it is expected that they will be converted into three or four houses, (for people, god help them).

Memories of how the farm,

Looked when we first arrived,

Of all the things that we have changed,

N’ things for which we strived,

The gates the fences fields and sheds,

The land we plough for crops,

Of all the weather hail or rain,

The work it never stops.

Owd Fred

Retirement kills more people than work ever did.

Malcolm S. Forbes

How do you define a working farmer’s car? 154

How do you define a working farmer’s car?

Pulled out all parcels and shopping and stood back, while the old Austin Montego finally cremated itself in the middle of the road.

The old Austin Montego Estate Car, it was a farmers car, or life before we had a Landrover 1970’s / 80’s ( The demise of the Land Rover blog  http://bit.ly/k0C2mG )

How do you define a working farmer’s car, a car that can pull almost anything, a car that you can chuck anything that will fit in it, a car with a drawbar that is good and shiny not the one with the plastic horses head knob cover.

A car that when the dirt gets thick enough it will peel off in the sun, a car that is always at the ready for the umpteen short journeys be it lanes or fields, and almost invariably low in fuel, no time to go into town to fill it up.

A car that when a big bullock walks up the tailboard it lifts the ass end of the car off the ground, and when he walks to the front of said trailer it almost bury the drawbar in to the mud, (good suspension).   

A few years ago we had an Austin Montego car, a five door estate model, bought it second hand never having seen mud or cow muck, it was in mint condition. It did good service for us but as always it would be almost its last home.

The first thing was to have a drawbar fitted so it could pull a caravan and the stock trailer; the caravan was a nice stable steady pull although only just up to the job.

The stock trailer was another kettle of fish, it all depended on how many beasts were loaded into it, on odd occasions it got positively over loaded, heaving up and down on the drawbar when loading and unloading, and then on the road it weaved as the speed built up to 30MPH.

As it happened I bought the standard drawbar fitment for that make of car, the arm reaching under the car just bolted with four bolts to the tinwork under the spare wheel in the boot.

There was a lip that reached up to carry the weight of the drawbar going up behind the plastic bumper again bolted into tinwork.

As you can imagine after a couple of years work with intermittent use to pull the stock trailer these bolts holes cracked in star fashion round the holes and eventually pulled through to tin bodywork. To remedy this we welded an angle iron to the carrying bracket so as to spread the load all across the back end of the car, if it pulled out again it would take the whole of the back end off.

I got to know when things were getting dangerous when you could hear a continuous creaking coming from the spare wheel housing.

After the beefing up with the angle iron, the long arm that reached under the spare wheel with its four small bolts started to creak and these were washered up with large round washers, but still it creaked under load.

The car then started to over heat intermittently as though the rad was blocked, they did not have a fan belt, but a thermostat connected to an electric fan, and it turned out that this thermostat was faulty , not switching the fan on when it called for cooling.

Everything worked normally when travelling along briskly, the wind blowing through the radiator did its job well, but this one bank holiday weekend we went out into the Derbyshire hills and got stuck in a great line of vehicles mostly stationary, on the run up to a road junction.

As we kept moving up so the car got hotter, we had the heater on in the car (on a hot day) to try to help cooling the engine, then to our relief we got past the junction and onto open road again, the snag then was we had a long two or three mile climb, working the engine hard, and although the wind was blowing through the rad it was not enough to cool the already hot engine.

Then on a long down hill where we cracked on with speed and not too much work for the engine when a cloud of steam burst from under the bonnet and we coasted to a halt in the mouth of a quarry, looked underneath to find a pool of oily water, the car had expired in a cloud of steam.

After getting a lift home we collected the car a few days later, towing it home on the end of a chain.

As it happened we did get the engine going again and sold it on to a family as a “second” farm car, another rough lane for it to negotiate and a bigger family of kids.

Some months later we heard the they were travelling home from Christmas shopping, loaded up with kids and parcels, going along a remote lane when the engine burst into flames,

The mother pulled out all the kids and parcels and shopping and stood back, while the old Austin Montego finally cremated itself in the middle of the road.

It had not done a big mileage with us or the folks after us, but it had worked hard, pulling the stock trailer, and after us we found out he was pulling a double deck sheep trailer, so it had earned its keep over those few years. This is why we always say “It’s come to its last home when it comes to us”     

If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would
today cost a hundred dollars, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside."

Robert X Cringely, Info world