FROM A DARTMOOR HILL FARM
Topical Comment from Anton Coaker
|
|
Anton and Baldric the Bull
|
So
winter has arrived. Those of us with livestock to tend have entered
the seemingly endless
round of ‘feeding up’. The list of daily
chores ranges from keeping one eye on any extreme weather, which
might drive the hill ewes and the ponies back down off the common,
through to the
total
service provided to animals housed around the yard.
In
my own case, this includes the weaned calves from last spring, a
group of autumn calves with their mothers, a bunch of weaned foals,
one or two bulls that need to be under ‘close supervision’, and a
few odds and sods that’ll need some TLC. They come inside before
Christmas, and will stay in until early April.
They’ll
need hay or silage, baled in between the ‘showers’ last summer,
bedding up with straw, and given a handful of cereal-based
supplement, both lorried in from arable counties. The water troughs
need to be checked for detritus – and you can be sure that in each
group there will be an animal who leaves a little something in the
troughs every day.
This
said, the daily grind is a two-way street.
|
