Gordon Capstick
Gordon Capstick
Gordon and Mary Capstick
farm 230ha (569 acres), at
Milnthorpe in south
Cumbria. Stocking is 100
suckler cows, with calves
finished alongside 100
purchased stores, and
1200 Mule ewes producing
prime lambs. About 10ha
(25 acres) of barley and
6ha (14 acres) of soft fruit
are also grown
THE T-sum is here, fertiliser is in the yard and the spreader is all greased up and ready to go. All we need now is a hovercraft to skim over the waterlogged fields. So we decide to do something else.
But we dont like laying hedges or building wall gaps with water running down our necks, so we seem to be getting nothing done at all.
The spring ploughing has not been done, the barley is still in the bag, raspberry plants are still waiting and now I hear that it has been the wettest February since 1900. Surprise, surprise.
All the lambing ewes we can accommodate are now inside. They have lost a lot of condition in the wet, so we are not looking forward to an easy lambing.
Mary and I have just returned from a nice, warm break in South Africa. It is a country with huge potential if they could irrigate and get over their internal problems. It is not a problem producing milk at 11p/litre when a cowmans wage is £25/week.
Its no wonder supermarkets stock plenty of their produce. It ran through my mind that here was another country where labour was being exploited for the benefit of supermarket profits.
Since I last wrote, the auction marts have opened. This has come as a relief, but DEFRA is not making it easy with all the stringent biosecurity requirements. I even had to buy a new pair of wellies the other day, when I called in on the way back from a meeting, because they would not let me into the mart without them.
We took a load of store cattle to market and prices were beyond my wildest dreams – the demand is certainly there. I keep looking at the sales sheet with disbelief.
We have just got a new computer with all the latest gadgetry. I am not computer literate, but I am told the old one had only 16 megabytes, whereas this one has 128. What I am secretly hoping is that I may be able to make it spread fertiliser from the office. *
Recently aquiring a new computer, Gordon Capstick wishes it could also spread fertiliser from the office.