Our family farms are located only a few miles away at High Weetslade, and High Barns Farm at Seaton Burn. Weetslade is a traditional Northumbrian mixed farm, with cattle, sheep, pigs and arable on site. The abattoir is only a few miles away from the farms, so that you can be assured of the high welfare standards of the livestock, and the full traceability of the pork, beef and lamb.
Things are quieter again for us now that Christmas at the Farm Shop is done for another year. It has been a lot easier for everyone weather wise – both livestock and the team on the farm are much happier without the snow and ice to slow things down. It is amazing how much longer it takes to do simple feeding routines when everything is covered in snow – hopefully we won’t see any before the spring arrives.
Although there is actually more grass than normal around this year, all of the store lambs and pregnant ewes are still being supplementary fed to make sure they have a high enough nutrition intake to keep them in top condition. For the ewes this is especially important – if they don’t have the correct energy and protein levels during pregnancy then we will have smaller and weaker lambs at lambing time. All of the ewes will shortly be vaccinated with a 7 in 1 injection which will cover them against all of the common sheep ailments during the coming year. It also helps pass some of this immunity to the lambs they are carrying so that they will have the best start.
We also start to feed extra to the store lambs as well to make sure they continue to grow and achieve the right condition ready for the butchery in the farm shop. We select the lambs by both size and condition – I assess their condition by feeling the levels of fat cover over the back and at the top of the tail – once you have done a few thousand you just know which ones are “right”. If you are interested, click here have a look at Adam Henson from Countryfile explaining what to do. He is looking at ewes but the same principals apply to finished lambs for meat.
All of the cattle are still indoors and doing well. They are busy eating their way through all of the silage and whole crop wheat which we prepared earlier last summer. The whole crop wheat has been particularly successful this year – it has fermented nicely to produce a sweet and very palatable product – the cattle certainly wolf it down as soon as it appears in front of them. We took advantage of the frosty weather last week to get some mucking out done – having the ground hard means we don’t track the fields up too much when we are driving across them to the muck heaps. The manure will stay in these heaps until we spread it later in the year after harvest.
We have a big cattle inspection coming up shortly which will mean loads of work. Every individual beast (cow, steer, heifer and calf) has its own individual “passport” which details its parentage, date and farm of birth and any farm movements it has made after that. This must tally with the individual identity each animal carries in its ear tag.
These rules were all brought in after the BSE scares in the 90’s making UK cattle
some of the most closely regulated in the world. Once in a while DEFRA makes random
inspections -
