winter visitors

The cold weather may bring it’s problems, but one positive has been the welcome arrival of several flocks of Lapwings in North Devon (also known as Peewits or Green Plovers).  When I was as shepherd in Kent during the eighties, I’d see these birds in their thousands during the autumn and winter, taking up residence on newly sown fields. Sadly their numbers have been in decline ever since, so it’s really good to see flocks numbering several hundred in the fields around the farm

Snow again

January saw a week of snow at Borough farm and although only a few inches actually fell, it froze hard and turned the farm drive into a sheet of ice. The sheep flock were completely unconcerned. The Romney ewes are a hardy breed and scarcely seem to notice the cold. They gather around the bale feeders and await their next bale of silage, fortunately all of the sheep were in easily accessible fields and feeding wasn’t difficult.

On the coastal ground at Mortehoe, the snow hardly settled, so they carried on grazing as usual

a new sheep shed for Borough farm

The beginning of the year saw the arrival of ’swing-shovel’ excavator to prepare the site for our new sheep shed. We’ve been short of shed room for some years, with enough space to house little over half of the ewe flock, so this year we’ve decided to erect a new shed (nearly 5500 square feet) which will be big enough to house a further 350 sheep.

It’s always a bit sad to see the digger starting to work, knowing that it will change the look of the farm for ever, bit the resulting shed will be a great asset for the sheep farming

winter feeding

By the fourth week of December there is little grass on which the ewes can graze, and I certainly don’t want the flock to go hungry in mid pregnancy, so most years the Christmas week is the week in which I start to feed the ewe flock with silage. However when I offered the first flock their first silage of the year they walked away hardly giving the bale a sniff. It’s easy to detect  good silage with the human nose, but it’s sometimes hard to predict what sheep consider to be unpalatable. The bale that I had offered them came from the second cut of silage during the summer, and had been well and truly rained upon, and although it smelt ok to me the sheep had other ideas!

This leaves something of a problem as I know that the first batch of silage that we made during the fine June weather is so good that the sheep will gorge themselves, and in all probability finish the lot with half the winter still remaining. It’s also highly nutritious so it will be ideal for feeding over the lambing period. What’s the answer? well before I resort to buying a months supply of silage I think we’ll have to try a few more bales of the substandard stuff, it might just be that they were being over fussy at the beginning of the season… After all it smells alright to me!