Snow causes havoc on roads

The weather has been pretty awful over the past month with both the rain and the snow, two weeks in a row snowing heavily and causing havoc on the roads.

I thought we were in Lockdown but the roads seem very busy. Is this the reason why the roads were so poorly gritted and ploughed?

Trying to get to the sheep at York on the Friday when the snow came seemed pretty impossible, cars and vans stuck up any hill and abandoned at the side of the roads, we had to give up because the roads were that bad.

We rang the man up at York that we have the land off and he said that he didn’t really have any snow and that everything was fine so we decided that it would be safer going on the Saturday rather than trying to dodge all the cars on the Friday.

We went on the Saturday and it was grand to see all the sheep at Ouseburn content and still in the field because we were worried that the snow might have flattened the electric fence and find all the sheep had escaped, but they were fine.

There was about five inches of snow at Ouseburn so we thought there must be some snow at York, we got to the village near the land there was still snow, so we thought well it must have snow since we spoke to him.

But we got just out of the village and there was no snow, all the sheep had green fields still and weren’t taking any fault compared to the ones at home that had about a foot of snow to contend with and the wind filling about every wall back with snow.

Then it had to rain again and by Sunday morning it was thawing and had pretty much gone by the Monday night. Then it had to do the same the next week, but managed to not snow so much this last week.

We have been scanning the sheep at Ouseburn and York over the past couple of weeks, the Mashams at York scanned at 198 per cent with more triplets than last year, 63 triplets and a quad this year, compared to about 45 last year.

The Dalesbred ewes scanning at 168 per cent with nine triplets in them. We were happy with both lots that we scanned and won’t be scanning the rest of the ewes until the middle of February.

This Lockdown hasn’t really changed much for us as farmers apart from the drop and go policy at the auction, but the lockdown has affected others around us and will have an impact on the Environment too.

Due to lockdown shooting days were stopped meaning that all the pheasants that have been put down and reared to be shot are still running around the fields and woods around us.

At the moment the pheasants aren’t having an impact on us because we haven’t started caking the sheep and the pheasants are being fed in the woods but once the shooting season is finished the pheasants don’t get fed as much, meaning they spread out and try to find food elsewhere such as the cake we give to the sheep.

We want the gamekeepers to try to reduce the numbers of pheasants around this week because once the shooting season finishes they can’t be shot so become a problem for the whole year. Pheasants scrat nests out so will have a damaging effect on ground nesting birds and also can carry diseases that can be passed on to sheep which can lead to abortion, so we need to reduce the numbers while we still can.