Livestock Farmer Focus: Charlie Armstrong’s temper is tested at lambing

Lambing has take up a lot of Charlie’s time this month, so this week’s entry is written by daughter Daisy:

Daddy’s temper is below average at the moment and it’s all due to lambing sheep.

My two brothers and I are learning a few new words from Daddy. Mostly he uses them on the sheep, particularly after chasing them for two laps of the field. Occasionally Dick the dog gets called them too, but last week when it rained and rained he used them on the lambing man.

He left very soon afterwards and Daddy’s temper has improved dramatically.

Once the rain stopped we put plastic jackets on all the lambs in the shed before they were taken outside. All the men that work for Daddy have worked really hard. Mummy feeds most of the men in the house which means we get chased out of the kitchen into the toy room.

The men skin any dead lambs and put the skin on the pets. It’s very different from the lambing I watched on television.

The Blackface ewes have started lambing outside and they are not being fed any more because the fields are green. Every day Daddy has a different problem; sometimes too much milk, sometimes no milk.

Just before we went back to school Daddy started sowing fodder beet. I don’t know why when he still has a heap from last year that nothing will eat now the grass is growing. He’s also started planting potatoes, rolling grass fields to remove horrible bumpy wheel ruts and putting cattle out.

Daddy tagged nearly 2000 lambs so we could move them to another farm. There is a lot of paperwork that Mummy does for this.

He has used batch tags because the fancy electric ones we used last year dropped out. These are cheaper and, if we save enough money, he might take us on holiday. I don’t think he will though as the petrol he buys every day for the motorbikes costs £70.