The Life on the Farm column with Frances Graham: Time spent keeping water troughs in operation

I think we all feel better when it warms up and we have a bit of sun on our backs – maybe spring is on its way?

The freezing wind in the last few days of the cold spell was the worst.

We managed to keep water going in some of the buildings before it came bitterly cold on the Thursday/ Friday then we only had one water trough running and that took some getting going first thing in the morning.

We knew that if the cows stopped drinking at it that it could soon freeze up again.

Moving the cows around the sheds to drink was the best option to keep it going because running water doesn’t freeze.

All we seemed to do was carry buckets of water around the yard to water the stock that we couldn’t let out of the loose boxes and the cows that were to calve or had calved.

When it’s frosty it is nice to get around the land because it is so frozen and you didn’t make any mess, but it can make things more difficult to do.

The scales that we weigh the lambs on kept freezing up and the bikes kept freezing buttons and keys.

We finally finished scanning on Tuesday at home. We scanned our mule hoggs at York on Saturday before it started to thaw.

It was grand being able to ride around the fields and not make a mess and gather a packet of sheep up, and for them not to make a big black puddly mess.

They scanned alright for gimmers, we didn’t have as many twins as last year.

We only gave them three weeks with the tup because we didn’t really want them the lamb to late into May, with them due around 20th April. With the lamb price being so high still we might even sell some of the geld ones because they are worth so much – we might never see the prices again for them.

We scanned the sheep at Greenhow on Monday, it had warmed up but the ground was still frozen so it was still nice to be with the sheep, they didn’t make too much mess.

We couldn’t believe how well the Swaledales had scanned, we have 188 twins and six triplets out of 330 sheep.

We were hoping for a few less twins so then they can go back onto the moor sooner but they have to lamb yet so anything could happen.

Our Dalesbred ewes scanned well but are maybe better for moor sheep in some ways, the shearlings haven’t got as many twins as other years.

Shearlings don’t really want to have two lambs. They can sometimes end up small lambs or one ends up dying.

We are happy if the moor sheep have one lamb. With them we’d rather have more singles than twins, but with the sheep kept at home you’d rather have sheep with two lambs.

All the ewes are still to jab with Heptovac P and split into twins and singles, but these sheep are about seven weeks off lambing so we are leaving them another week or so before we jab them and split them up.

On Saturday we sold our first lot of feeding bulls. Normally we would keep them as bullocks but because we had so many bulls we thought we’d see how they would do as we had 28 bulls and 14 heifers.

So far this years calves there is two heifers and three bulls, a better start than last year because the first few last year just had bulls.

The bulls did well and averaged £943, I keep wondering how much more can the prices keep going up because they don’t seem to stop.