Farmer Writes: saturated land and a nail in the foot

Most of us assume a farm accident or injury will never happen to us, yet it doesn’t take much to temporarily lay a person up. In this case, a simple nail through a board has left my father with his feet up on an unwanted holiday.

Our annual herd test is coming up shortly so, thinking we were being smart, the cattle on our out-farm were being trained to come into the holding area, eat some ration from a trough and be released again.

Outfarm cattle are trained to come when they hear the quad. Very useful on a wet day ??
On the left you can see flappy ears Mini Noo ?? pic.twitter.com/DU9wc7MLbV

— Karen McCabe (@LadyHaywire) September 5, 2019

It was working quite well until the cows broke the end board off the trough. This remained hidden under grass until my father found it with his wellington on a dreary morning last week.

One tetanus shot and a course of antibiotics later, he’s thankfully well on the mend, but trying to keep him inside and off his feet was more work than taking over all the farm jobs.

The worst of those jobs has been trying to keep a bit of dry ground under the cows. As most of our land gets saturated fairly quickly, we’ve been giving the cows larger areas of grass to graze on. I know some other farmers would choose a completely different way of doing it, perhaps a smaller grazing area with a reduced time frame in those fields.

With our method, the cows might only traverse an area once in 24 hours as they move around between fields. If we closed our cattle into a smaller space for that length of time, we could probably start thinking of reseeding it without any need to plough the ground first. It’s less “cut your cloth to suit your measure” and more “graze your field to suit your soil”.

Our fields are between two hills with a river running through. They grow fantastic grass but can be quite wet/peaty.

I’ve been following the current events at meat factories with interest. While we rarely slaughter stock, bar a cull cow or two, it’s the feeders and finishers who keep our little herd going.

Seeing farmers of all ages and backgrounds protesting together at the factory gates, it’s a great example of what we can do if we show a united front.

It’s certainly no harm to have the plight of beef prices highlighted on a national level either, with the growing disassociation between the public and farming becoming increasingly obvious in recent times.

Farming in the public eye

I have to commend RTÉ for continuing its Big Week on the Farm series.

While it can be slightly cringeworthy at times, it also presents an aspect of the countryside that many would not have thought about before. Although with some of those machinery prices, it’s unlikely to change the general opinion that all farmers are loaded.

At this stage it’s impossible to ignore the fact that certain types of farming can no longer keep going without the support of schemes, though I found the restrictions to eligibility in the new BEAM scheme to be quite rigid. It will be interesting to see if they will change the requirements for entry, especially as it’s looking likely to be undersubscribed.

It’s a stark reality, one which was highlighted in this paper last week, that forestry could be the more profitable option for some farmers in Leitrim. It’s all very well to promote a cut in stock numbers and plant more trees, but I doubt there are many farmers who would be enthusiastic about going to check their trees each morning.

A stroll & a chat to them all on this lovely Sunday morning ??
Very content cows today as it's not raining! #IrishFarming pic.twitter.com/8qA97ivLsT

— Karen McCabe (@LadyHaywire) September 8, 2019