Farmer focus, livestock:Charlie Armstrong

More than one week has passed since buying ewe lamb replacements and tups in Wales. Luckily, no speeding tickets have arrived in the post yet. As with everything, ewe lambs were expensive, as were Roussin tup lambs bought at Carlisle and Beulah shearlings bought at Llandovery auction. However, you only get what you pay for.

Fortunately, we’ve got about 200 home-bred Texel tup lambs that were born in March and these will be used to tup all our commercial ewes. Once they’ve done their job, they will be sold as fat lambs. This isn’t what the text books say, but it gets our tupping costs to nearly zero.

The ewes are undergoing their annual MOT – teeth, tits and toes are all checked, then they’re tailed and dosed for fluke and worm. Any sheep failing the above criteria can’t be booked in for a retest and they’re straight off to kebab city via Acklington Mart.

Most month’s there’s always some problem and this month it was with the Highways Agency. Without asking, its crews started to put fences up along the A1 motorway to direct otters though our underpass.

After a short discussion with one of the bosses it turned out these otters could dig under fences and were black and white with stripy faces. I informed the chap we call them badgers in Northumberland. He agreed with me and agreed to remove the fences. But why is money being spent in one area to save the badgers and others to kill them.

Recently, when unpacking a bag of four tennis ball-sized white-stubble turnips, home delivered from Asda, I calculated they cost £1280/t – way to expensive to fatten lambs on. I think there’s a need for supermarkets to supply proper neeps, turnips or bagies not 100-day turnips.