Farmer Focus: Sheep foot-baths just aren’t what they used to be

With harvest fast approaching, we have had a mad rush to get all our livestock jobs done.

Ewes and lambs have been wormed and fly sprayed and I can’t count how many times they have been through the foot-bath. We have been plagued with lambs with sore feet.

I feel the chemicals in foot-bath solution, such as the spray we use on our cereals these days, are as much use as a chocolate fireguard. But like the good-hearted farmers we are, even though these chemicals don’t work, we just carry on and pay. I was talking to a local builder the other day and he said if they had a bad batch of concrete that didn’t work and would not set, there would be uproar with no payment. Why is our farming sector different?

We are now in the process of grain store cleaning; everybody’s favourite job. But this year we have an extra pair of hands: “low-cost” Luke, our new apprentice. As everybody says in the village, he’s a dead ringer for Harry Potter, so he should be quite handy with his broomstick. To give him credit, he never moans about mucky jobs.

We have had a good crop of hay and haylage, but I probably shut a bit too many acres up and ran the sheep a bit tight, which hasn’t helped their foot trouble. Lessons learned.

Tom, our young baby, is doing great. Only eight months old, he already wears the clothes of an 18-month-old baby. You could call him a good doer.

The way he pushes his soft football around, I think he will soon need a silage bale to push. This time next year we will have him shearing!

Dad reckons it is all the high-quality protein food that’s produced in this country that makes youngsters so big nowadays, not like in wartime. But farmers never get credit for the food we produce, just rubbish prices such as the current ones, with each sector’s prices on the floor. So, come on fellow farmers, let’s stand up and fight for fairer times.

James Read farms in partnership with his father, in Louth, Lincolnshire. They farm 400ha of mainly arable land, run 200 breeding sheep and a pack of working/trialling sheepdogs.

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