News

December is upon us and having decided the Summer holidays was a terrible time to launch a new business, here I am in the run up to the busiest season going launching a new business. But as a friend said to me this morning, sometimes you’ve just got to eat the frog.

Everyone inside on a very wet day, enjoying a brief burst of sunshine with a rainbow

All the cows are well and truly in, a week or two earlier than intended as we had a couple of damaged cattle grids to repair. Combined with a hot, dry summer this means silage will be tight for the winter so we have sent a few animals off to market, but I am pleased to announce the next animal is going to be returning to us for our first ever Adstockfields beef boxes. These will be available to order later today, and will be ready in the middle of January. A perfect meaty treat for those dark days of the new year when all the Christmas leftovers have run out, as a gift or just a gift to yourself.

When the grass is jewelled, and the silk inside a chestnut shell. Dum, dee, dum, dee, dum, deeeee. Etc.

The video of festival goers singing hymns from the Come and Praise book at Glastonbury, along with the discovery that those hymn books are going for around £80 on Ebay currently, reassures me that I am likely not the only one who spends the majority of September with this song stuck in my head.

One of many rainbows we’ve seen recently as the weather swings wildly from rain to sunshine

Another season has passed and still no meat boxes, however there has been butchery. As well as selling our own beef through boxes we always planned to do some private butchery so we have had a gentle start to the endeavour by processing two pigs for a local friend, a deer shot locally, and a steer for another local friend. It’s all a learning curve still and the main thing I have learnt is computers get everywhere, so I have spent far more hours trying to sort out label formats than actually butchering. But apart from a few little hiccups (little being the right word, some of the labels were only legible with a magnifying glass) progress has been made and with the summer holidays over and a strange silence returned to Adstockfields after the fun filled chaos of the summer holidays, watch this space for beef boxes.

A topic which has been prompting much discussion around Adstockfields over the last few days, as the sun has finally appeared. Is it spring? Meteorologically yes, the 1st of March heralds the beginning of spring, but after a debate prompted by the children’s questions as usual – why do you say meteorological spring, what other kinds of spring are there? – we looked at astronomical spring (determined by the Earth’s tilt as it travels around the sun) and phenological spring (looking to the behaviour of plants and animals in response to the changing weather as a marker). We agreed this was more how we used to think of spring – when bluebells start to appear, and frogspawn is first seen, but global warming means this could lead to some interesting definitions of spring. Anyway, I like neat segments so we have agreed we will be sticking with metrological definitions.

So, after a lot of preamble, spring has sprung and the grass is growing. The cows are looking keen to move outside, but another thing to remember about spring is the saying about March; “in like a lamb, out like a lion”. We will enjoy the sunshine but not count our chickens yet, to continue with the idioms. Calving continues, mostly successfully, despite one uninterested mother – that calf was introduced to another mum who had lost one twin, and was completely accepted.

Over the winter we have been working hard on getting the butchery up and running (well Ben and I have, Jo is busy with his own big project, a distillery, which is also rapidly progressing https://aeddasfarmdistillery.com/), and all being well we will start butchering later in March, with beef boxes ready in April. In the meantime we are off to market on Friday to sell some stores (teenage cattle to be raised on) to make some room and reduce the amount of silage we need to feed.

Things have changed quite dramatically since our last post and we have had to bring the cows in a few weeks earlier than usual, following 300% more rain than average in September. It got very wet, very quickly, and even the stone we did get spread around the water troughs wasn’t going to help this time. So everyone is warm and dry back in the barn, and hopefully we may have enough dry weather in the next couple of weeks to open the doors out into the next field and enjoy some late autumn sunshine. Maybe.

In the mean time we have a few calves due, and the first one arrived yesterday. Mum is doing a quite frankly terrible job at the moment so baby Willow (a departure from our normal system which is Mum plus the next number, so she would be Fir 3, as insisted on by our children) is currently being tube fed until we can hopefully convince Mum to start making an effort. Sometimes it does take a few days, and some encouragement (we will put them in a pen together so that she can’t wander off and leave the calf, and put the calf onto her teats), and sometimes they don’t get the hang of it first time but once they have their second calf they figure it out. And sometimes they are just terrible mothers and want nothing to do with their calves, kicking them off every time they try to feed and leaving them abandoned. Fingers crossed not this time as that means a calf to be hand fed twice a day for the next few months, which is a sweet job the first few times, but rapidly turns into a big, hungry, calf head-butting buckets of milk everywhere.

Autumn has definitely arrived on the farm and we are all, cows included, making the most of the days of good weather whilst they are still with us. It won’t be long until we have to start thinking about preparing the barn to move them inside, as our land is heavy clay and doesn’t lend itself to being trampled by heavy cows – one wet spell and all the heavily used areas (around water troughs, gateways and such like) turn to quagmires and we risk problems for the cows and problems for the soil. In fact I’ve just learnt that the foot pressure of a standing cow is around 27 psi.   In comparison, the standing pressure of a human is 14 psi, and a 50-ton bull dozer is 16 psi.  We are always looking for ways to extend the outside season so there is currently a big pile of stone waiting to be spread around the water troughs, which should help. At the same time work continues on the butchery unit, which arrived at the beginning of the summer. Now that school has restarted there is some likelihood of the paperwork and physical work required getting done, so we can confidently announce, meat boxes will be coming soon!