Around this time of year, everything gets very settled and into a fairly mundane routine on smaller farms like ours.

Morning and evening feeding, cleaning out pens and general day-to-day repairs become the norm. It’s the pregnant pause, before our rather pregnant charges start to turn everything on its head.

A common sound lately has been the hum of our power washer in full flow around areas of the farmyard which have gone without a wash for many years. It is certainly a very satisfying job, lifting moss from a forlorn-looking front street and seeing the concrete come up sparkling again. As part of our farmyard dates back to the 1800s, it’s always humbling to think how many past generations of our family have trodden these same areas too, though I expect they simply kept on top of sweeping the yard.

Though these nights are long, there’s nothing I like more than to hear the tread of my old man coming towards the door, knowing he’s coming to see if I’d like to accompany him for a walk.

While I pretend to just humour him and keep him company, I do enjoy these walks of up to an hour. We put the world to rights on talks during these rambles, our chat varying anywhere between potholes to politics and back again.

There’s also a surprising amount of wildlife to be heard too; from the piercing cry of a fox to the battle calls of our resident swan defending his territory from the invading whoopers, the night air is alive to those who listen.

On occasion we walk without any chat between us at all, simply content in each other's company and our own thoughts.

Content cattle

In the shed, our cattle are finally content in the groups we split them into for winter. Though the young calf seems to have the best time of all, as she has five extra foster mothers all very glad to nurture her.

In one case we had to resort to some tar as a Salers was being a bit too maternal and allowing the calf to merrily suck away at her. Though I bet if I tried to get that to happen, it’d never work!

Some dung samples were taken from cows prior to housing, which showed we still have an underlying issue of rumen fluke. We normally wait until at least six weeks after housing to dose for it, meaning we only have to target the mature fluke.

After so many years at cattle together, Dad and myself work through drenching the cows like a well oiled machine. Whilst I wield the hook, Dad is in charge of the gun and this way we usually get everything done without much fuss.

Though if anyone happened to be walking past during the dosing, they’d probably be forgiven for thinking some form of clay shoot was going on, with calls of 'pull' echoing out of the shed every so often.

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