Murray Garrett
Murray Garrett
Murray Garrett farms 96ha
(240 acres) at Rowden Farm,
near Leighton Buzzard, Beds.
The whole farm is permanent
pasture on heavy clay land.
He runs 100 spring calving
South Devon suckler cows
and a flock of 200
Friesland milking sheep
AFTER last months article, in which I catalogued our disasters with relief milkers, I can now add yet another to the list.
Out of the blue, I received a phone call from a lad keen to work on a farm for the summer. After a mere three days in post, he handed in his notice. Apparently, he had not envisaged gazing at sheeps backsides for three hours a day when he applied.
As we stutter on through silaging, I feel I know exactly how Sven Goran Eriksson felt last month in Japan. Just like his team, our silage equipment promised much before the event, but has disappointingly failed to deliver.
Too many items were nursing injuries from earlier encounters and when the time came their lack of fitness let them down. The Krone baler, despite its German pedigree, like Owen Hargreaves has limped off twice already. It would appear to dislike the wet conditions, initially shearing a drive shaft and then parting company with one of its bearings.
The Vicon mower has also been stretchered off after one of its conditioning rollers finally gave up. It had a liaison with some fly tipped concrete last season and never fully recovered.
A fractured metatarsal can mend, given time, but a drive shaft on a discontinued implement is either terminal or terminally expensive. A phone round the local dealerships revealed a complete absence of any possible replacement machine.
The heavy and wet crops of grass across this part of the country appear to be decimating the national stock of mowers. A working model is as rare as a goal for England in the second half.
My 16-year-old nephew Ben is undertaking major surgery on the Vicon in the hope that we can at least mow some grass, even if we are no longer able to condition it. If he succeeds, I shall forgive his earlier Seaman-like misjudgement when the wrapper lobbed a misshapen bale off the turntable at him, demolishing film tensioning rollers and wedging itself behind his tractor. *