Skip to main content

Sunday on the farm

Every day at 6 am, our milking cows are fed and milked, every day of the week, the same occurs in the evening.  Meat cattle are fed once a day when we bring new bales for each herd.  Chicken and pig too, are fed in the morning  Someone, usually our cook, will check for eggs from our laying hens.  Rain, sunny, cold or wet it doesn't matter, a farm has a daily routine.  My wife and I will help where it is required, on weekends for a variety of reasons we are often short of staff, sometimes a planned holiday, or other times scheduling conflicts.  We bought a farm, we wanted this life.

After the morning chores, we will have breakfast and read the Sunday papers.  One of our Sunday staff always picks up the Sunday Times and the Mail on Sunday.  This weekend we have no guests, which is unusual considering we have four children, and several friends who always find a good excuse to come over.  But the truth is that February is too cold to be pleasant, it is an acquired taste.  

Today, is partly cloudy, and it is perfect for a ride.   We took my ancient Land Rover to the stables where we keep our horses (wife's and daughter's).   These stables are over the top and cater to the Ranger Rover brigade.  Today, we have a date with the stable owners, the four of us are doing a great loop (20 miles).  We will stop for lunch at a friend's estate, and return before dark.  It doesn't sound like a lot, but even in our setting, there's a limit to how much our horses can canter, never mind gallop. 

That's our Sunday.  Feed and ride...perfect!


  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ok so I lied...a little (revised)

When we began looking at farming in 2013/14 as something we both wanted to do as a "second career" we invested time and money to understand what sector of farming was profitable.  A few things emerged, First, high-quality, source-proven, organic farm products consistently have much higher profit margins.  Secondly, transformation accounted for nearly 80% of total profits, and production and distribution accounted for 20% of profits: Farmers and retailers have low profit margins and the middle bits make all the money. A profitable farm operation needs to be involved in the transformation of its produce.  The low-hanging fruits: cheese and butter.  Milk, generates a profit margin of 5% to 8%, depending on milk quality.  Transformed into cheese and butter, and the profit margin rises to 40% (Taking into account all costs).  Second:  20% of a steer carcass is ground beef quality.  The price is low, because (a) a high percentage of the carcass, and (b) ground beef requires process
Post a Comment
Read more

21st century milk parlour

When we first looked at building our farm in 2018, we made a few money-saving decisions, the most important is that we purchased our milk herd from a retiring farmer and we also purchased his milking parlour equipment.  It was the right decision at the time.  The equipment dates from around 2004/05 and was perfectly serviceable, our installers replaced some tubing but otherwise, the milking parlour was in good shape.  It is a mature technology. Now, we are building a brand new milk parlour because our milking cows are moving from the old farm to the new farm.  So we are looking at brand new equipment this time because, after 20 years of daily service, the old cattle parlour's systems need to be replaced.  Fear not it will not be destroyed instead good chunks will end up on Facebook's marketplace and be sold to other farmers for spare parts or expansion of their current systems. All our cattle are chipped, nothing unusual there, we have sensors throughout the farm, and our milki
Post a Comment
Read more

So we sold surplus electricity one time last summer...(Update)

I guess that we will be buying an additional tank for our methane after all.   Over the past few months, we've had several electricity utilities/distributors which operate in our region come to the farm to "inspect our power plant facilities, to ensure they conform to their requirements".  This is entirely my fault.  Last summer we were accumulating too much methane for our tankage capacity, and so instead of selling the excess gas, that would have cost us some money, we (and I mean me) decided to produce excess electricity and sell it to the grid.  Because of all the rules and regulations, we had to specify our overall capacity and timing for the sale of electricity (our capacity is almost 200 Kw) which is a lot but more importantly, it's available 24/7, because it's gas powered.  It should be noted that the two generators are large because we burn methane and smaller generators are difficult to adapt to burn unconventional gas, plus they are advanced and can &qu
Post a Comment
Read more