I am probably blogging too much here of late, but I enjoy sharing the more refined aspects of my life with all of my friends on FWi.
I don't know if things are always perfect on your farms in the UK, but they hardly ever are on mine. Sunday I fed the last silage. The wind blew hard from the north all day, as it had the last two, and the cattle were miserable. This time of year the cool season brome grass in the road ditch is the best feed around, so our cattle spend all day with their heads through the fence. Add to that the fact I shut them off the triticale across the road from the house because it was muddy, and I have at home 140 very unhappy cattle. Toward evening I noticed the entire bunch around the gate looking across the road at the triticale, and suspected they were plotting an escape. I had fed them extra hay that day, so I felt somewhat encouraged that they would not implement their plans. About bedtime I decided perhaps I should make a patrol, to see what the old girls were up to. I drove down my drive to discover the road from my garden to the corner was full of cattle, peacefully bedded down in the ditch, with the gate blown to pieces(it is a barbed wire gate,your American cousins can afford very few real gates). As a Kansas lotto commercial once said, "black cattle are awful hard to see in the dark". It was impossible to get a count, I returned for my Arctic Cat. The sound of my Arctic cat means one thing to my cattle, get your sorry ....... back where they belong, and before long I had a parade of cattle coming back from the farm of mine to the south. Not smart enough to go through the gate they had destroyed, they headed to the end of the dead end I live on and blew through that gate, then for good measure a few went down past the silo and wrecked that one as well. By midnight I had all three gates back together and had driven the cattle across the river into the pasture, where they sulked all day Monday(or perhaps gloated) until evening, when they returned for a repeat performance, but I let them on the triticale and fended off another escape. The amazing part, with all the shouting and swearing, the gunning of the 4 wheeler past the bedroom window and through the garden, my wife was completely unaware I was even out of the house, it disturbed her sleep not one bit. Things like this amuse the neighbors, it is always fun when you see others having a bit of a problem, to know their lives are not perfect, which brings me to this.
Yesterday was a perfect afternoon, the best in 2 weeks. Hardly any wind, just light from the north, and about 60F, with bright sunshine. A perfect day to burn pasture. Everyone had their guard down. I spent my day grinding feed and rearranging my equipment, putting the feedwagon in the back of the shed, etc, of course this was after feeding these hungry cows. I left my pager inside, thinking there would be no out of control fires because of the light wind. When I went into the house to get a drink at 4pm, the pager was alive with action. The wind had changed, and was still weak but from the south. There was hay on fire, and one of my neighbors had caught his barn on fire, no one had noticed until it was burned completely down, hay, combine header, and all. No one noticed because of the smoke everywhere yesterday. So, while everyone makes fun of me for my cautious attitude about burning fireguards against buildings, even when the wind is blowing the fire away from them, and the grass against them is green, I can smile silently to myself and gloat in the fact I did not burn down my barn, yet.