Farmer Writes: there is pleasure in keeping busy during the winter

The four winter months after the autumn drilling are obviously a quiet time on a farm such as ours. There’s nothing happening in the tillage fields and with nothing waiting to happen, which is good and unlike this time last year. While we have cattle housed, feeding is quick, particularly this year as we’ve reverted to pit silage. And I’m glad we have – it’s cheaper to make, nicer to feed and much less stinking plastic.

Now if I may digress for a moment. While we are very much a tillage farm with some livestock, we are ever so slightly reverting to being a more mixed farm. I put down 34 ac of multi-species swards last spring and it has been grazed continuously with sheep since last May. They’re not our sheep because I detest sheep, but I do think they fit very well into the arable rotation and a programme of soil improvement.

However, lest there be readers of this column with obligations to the Office of the Revenue Commissioners, I must point out that this sheep business is not very profitable.

There are obviously costs like expensive fencing, a legacy of 50 years of prairie tillage farming.

And the income received is negligible because I like my sheep man and I’m not in the woolly world necessarily to make money but more to cover costs and soil fertility enhancement. Nonetheless, I’m excited by this project; it gives me a buzz and I feel like a proper farmer again.

But to return to my opening thoughts of this being a quiet time on the farm. It would be very easy – all too easy – to semi-hibernate and live the life of a bumble bee and surface when the sun is shining and temperature’s over 13°C.

I could rise when it’s bright, have a leisurely breakfast, walk the dogs, maybe load a truck with wheat and retire for the evening once Maura (and Daithí) are beaming into the fireside. But I’m not really made that way.

And, in fact, the last three winters have been the complete opposite and Man Friday (Jason) and I have kept fully occupied and productive. This three-year period coincides with buying a 5t Kubota digger and adding more accoutrements than there’s room for on Mrs P’s dressing table. It is the most useful machine on the farm, between annually cleaning our many deep drainage ditches, driving posts with a super Vector post driver and, this winter, digging out old cracked yard concrete and replacing with Ready-mix.

And we’ve planted lots of trees and dug a field pond – or Jason did. I’m far too uncoordinated to drive a digger. Hydraulically, two spools are as much as I can handle.

‘Year of the Gutter’

Apparently, this is the Chinese Year of the Snake, but last year for us was the Year of the Gutter. We replaced practically every gutter in the two farmyards, a job I’d been putting off for years but we needed to separate rainwater from dirty water.

The concrete repairs are the second phase of this project and related to the return to pit silage. There is pleasure in keeping busy and it’s good for the head having something to show for the quiet time. And as if we were looking for something more to do, storm Éowyn uprooted eight very large Leylandii evergreen trees in the garden. I don’t weep for the loss of the trees but it’s made a bloody mess and created a heap of work.

The timing is not good either with my second daughter being married this summer at home. But it could be worse. Were it to happen in the first week of July, the marquee would be flattened. No pressure then.