It's all in the way you get in the way

I've found my role in life.  Did you know that an important part of farming is standing around?  Not non-specific standing around, but carefully co-ordinated standing in the middle of the road to direct (delete as appropriate) sheep / cattle / cars / tractors / horny bulls.  I seem to do a lot of this – and apparently am quite good at it. 

Chewing grass at a junction, I idly wonder if perhaps I am slightly over-educated to be a traffic cone in North Devon (although the now-automatic reaching into the hedge for something to put in my mouth to chew probably indicates otherwise).  However, having watched Ian M running down the road after a (delete as appropriate) cow / ram / lamb (that one was my fault) that has bucked the trend and taken a new direction in life, I can conclude that standing is a vital function for farming.  It can be undertaken in a slapdash manner, or elevated to a noble and brave art.

  

You need poise (so you can jump out of the way when something big runs towards you), intelligence (to know when to jump and when to stand your ground to turn the tide), courage (not to take off in a sprint in the opposite direction), and humour (so you can laugh at yourself when all dignity flies out of the window as you leap around making funny noises and flapping your arms in front of assembled onlookers who are being inconvenienced by the Carnival of Animals passing by … of course, you are not facing the onlookers as the whole point is to chivvy along the stock, so they get the back view, which must be even stranger).

So I enjoy my standing (and chewing), and take great pleasure in knowing that without me the sheep or cows would end up all over the countryside.  It also gives me time to notice things that were before unknown.  For example, I'd never realised that udders are covered in hair.  Of course, I hadn't given much thought to udders, but it surprised me nevertheless.  Reading that back, perhaps I need to get out a bit more often.

Mules mules everywhere

We've just become the proud owners of 40 of our own sheep, all mules.  In the interests of educating myself, I turned to the dictionary – and who knew there were so many uses for such a humble word?  A mule can be a backless shoe or slipper, a stubborn person, a spinning machine, or any hybrid animal.  Aussies use 'mules' as a verb, to mean surgical removal of folds of skin on a sheep's butt to reduce blowfly strike (ugg).  And a more conventional mule is the sterile offspring of a male donkey and female horse.  Meanwhile, the offspring of a female donkey and male horse is actually called a hinny (I'm making no comment on why it is that northern folk call their wives and girlfriends hinny, other than I assume it is derived from honey rather than something more equine!)

Our girls are Exmoor Horn x Blue-faced Leicester crosses, so are pure white, quite smiley, and have sticky-up ears (that's not the technical term I am told).  Here they are with their friends: Blackface x Blue-faced Leicester 'Scotch mules' (spotty faces) and Suffolk crosses (Suffolks crossed with a mule, and they have the black faces – you think you're confused!)

So, another month to go and we'll have these lovely ladies knocked up – and as the rams are of several breeds or crosses, the lambs are going to be a real mix of things.  Hybrid vigour.  In the meantime, Sonny is having a great time 'herding' them…the quotes will remain until he and Ian M have gone on their dog training course.

Farming 101 – describing a sheep

The sheep are the white ones, right?   Hang on, some of the cattle are also white, so sheep are small and white…except that there are also white ones with black faces, and one completely black lamb, and some that are sort of spotty (in the Dalmatian sense of the word, rather than hormonal teenage yobbo sense).  And some of the calves are small too.

So we need to find something else to define them.  How about  - sheep are the ones with two udders instead of four?  Great!  But what about those without udders?  Yes, they have something dangling underneath, and there are two of them, but it's quite another set-up down there.  Some of them look like they need the ram equivalent of a sports bra, as running is quite awkward and not at all comfortable.  Timing your gait with the swing of your money-makers is probably as difficult to perfect as patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time.  Lambs don't have udders yet either (I know, I turned one over to check).

What about wool?  Hooray, sheep have wool!  Apparently so do mammoths, but they are in short supply in Devon, so no likelihood of mixing them up.  The only trouble is, sometimes sheep don't have wool.  It's all in big bags at the Wool Marketing Board.

Well, we all know what a sheep looks like, right?  So just call a sheep a sheep.  Unless of course it's a mule (a type of cross-breed) or a hog (a second-year).  I have a sneaky suspicion that this can lead to a lot of confusion. 

Apparently, not a sheep.

The world's best sheepdog

The world's best sheepdog yaps at the quad bike, barks at the tractor and howls when locked in the car to keep him out of harm's way.  He nips at the heels of sheep, eats crap and cools off in fetid green pools.  With pupils dilated from adrenalin, he overdoes it to the point of collapse and then has to be carried up the hill, stinking, wet and panting bad (dung) breath.  The next day he'll look very sorry for himself, muscles aching and coat matted, pathetic eyes beseeching a treat that will make it all better, or at least the next treat after next would possibly do it…please dad.  Butter wouldn't melt.

And of course, he learns from experience and does exactly the same thing the following week.

Meanwhile, others take life a little more slowly…

Perhaps both of them could learn from the new kid on the block, as Sonny joins the team?

Baaa humbug!

What a racket!  Moving ewes and lambs between the sheds and fields, you can hear us coming along the lanes long before we hove into view.  Entertainment for the stray tourist who watches the woolly procession amble forth, rubbing clean the side of the car as it passes by.  An annoyance to anyone trying to get somewhere quickly, as is evidenced by several faces that put me in mind of a bulldog licking a nettle – well, if you live in the country, expect country life.

A sheep's ass view of the proceedings.

Some of the ewes are completely unperturbed by the drama unfolding around them, and happily nibble on the passing vegetation with that strange mindless blissfulness that sheep manage to cultivate, but some of their sorority bellow out their angst at losing their lambs (who are a merely a few feet back in the throng) – great deep maaas that, if I were made of weaker stuff, would tug at the heartstrings.  And yet others appear to be baa-ing because it is expected of them, rather than paying any real attention to what they are doing – indiscriminate belly-aching.  Daft buggers.

The lambs are much more entertaining...  "Where is mum?  Shall I run forwards or backwards?  Oh, look, a nice bit of willow-herb, wait, where's my brother?  Yikes, a dog!  Maybe I can get away by climbing over the back of these slow-pokes.  That's not my mum!  Oh, look, a nice bit of willow-herb."  And so we progress up the hill.  Some lambs bleating continually, others stopping and putting every last bit of effort into a long baaaaaaaaaaaa, then piddling and rushing on. 

Suddenly, as if co-ordinated by some ovine conductor in the ether, everyone shuts up at the same time – a perfect second of silence – before cacophony returns.  I look at a particularly tiny lamb wandering along beside me, calm and chewing.  She looks back and says 'Bah!' and nothing more.  The lamb teenage equivalent of 'whatever'.  Indeed.

A mizzle a day keeps the shearers away

There is an Exmoor saying that seems to be particularly pertinent this week: "If you can't see Dartmoor, then it's raining.  If you can see Dartmoor, it's about to rain."  This morning as I walked across the heather, I could barely see Exmoor – and I was standing on it.

Reminding myself that the needles of horizontal rain are good for my skin tone and that the liquid running down my face is in fact not blood, I ponder on the weather.   According to common dogma, Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow (not actually correct, but never let the truth get in the way of a good 'factoid'), and so we have many ways of talking about rain: drizzling, mizzling (down here), pouring, sleeting, spitting, sheeting … and a plethora of incredibly inventive euphemisms: raining cats and dogs, or stair-rods.  Pissing it down.  And my personal favourite from my friend Kay, it's toad-strangler weather.

So here I am, trudging across the sopping landscape.  The sheep and cows are tightly tucked under the hedges out of the wind (common sense from inordinately daft animals), but I have to take three keen and bright-eyed dogs for a walk, twice a day, whatever the weather.  Bedraggled and dripping, oh the joy they get from finding the muddiest pool to roll in (then almost smiling, they wait until they are in the house before shaking themselves off, and for the rest of the day lie contentedly steaming 'aromas of the moors').

While they run around in naked abandon, I look like a walking tent.  Boots, leggings, waterproof jacket, hat – all to keep the rain out, while my trapped body heat ensures that I arrive home completely drenched anyway.  And it all has to be done right – the jeans go in the boots, the leggings outside (otherwise you end up with boots filled with water – see, I have less common sense than the sheep), and the jacket pocket tabs must go on the outside, otherwise you end up with pockets filled with water in which your mobile phone floats about (that day Ian M had even less common sense than me, but unfortunately, it was my mobile that died an ignominious death at his hands).

But hey, the good news is that by September, it may stop raining.  We can take out the garden table just in time for a BBQ before we pack it away again for the winter.  And we will be pathetically grateful for it too.