Very early this morning, my phone rang. A nearby farmer was having farmyard flooding issues. His cows were in 6 inches of water, and he could not move them to his fields because of flooding, too much danger that the cattle would hurt themselves. Cows are not very agile.
We have tons of room on the farm. The weather has, so far, been kind to us, and so he asked if he could ship his cattle to some of our unused pasture (everyone is aware that we purchased the new farm in the area). Jennifer suggested one better. Our new farm has three large steel buildings that are empty as they are scheduled for demolition. Granted they have concrete floors (not the best) but enough sawdust and straw will be fine for a week. There's a lot of ruined hay around because of the terrible weather. Bad enough that it cannot be used as feed, but good enough for bedding.
Three of my lads and I have spent the morning, with several other farmers, moving his entire herd into the buildings. Cows can be hard on steel buildings, but everything is going to recycling anyway. The steel is too old to be re-used in its current form. So even if the cattle are rough, it should be fine. There's even an outdoor area that they can use to get out. At one point eight trailers were working together. Thankfully, today the weather really cooperated, not a single drop of rain.
The farmer is hoping, and the Met Office seems to agree with him, that flooding should dissipate quickly, especially in our area (lots of chalk, which is porous). His farm is about 10 miles away, so our cattle foreman and our team will supervise his herd while he stabilizes his farm. One fewer problem.
His farm is far younger than ours, it was first developed a few years ago...in the mid-17th century. Yes, that was farmer humour!
Anyway, over the space of about three hours, the herds were moved onto two of the empty buildings, the third was loaded with feed, bedding and hay bales. Our neighbour was lucky because he lost very little hay, and the bedding was bales that had been left a little too long in the field (for lack of storage space).
Considering his flooding problems, I asked Jennifer to send two hands to inspect the entire farm and keep track of any risk of damage.
So a busy morning on the farm.
Comments