MARCH 2003
There are one to two lambs about - earlier than I would desire - the result of a stray ram lamb last autumn.

Funnily enough no-one will accept ownership for such a nuisance.

But I cured it of its bad habits. I ate it!

Mmmm - a tasty cure for my stray ram problem

The cows are in good shape having come thus far easily. Some way to go yet, so I won't say too much.

We did lose an overly big bull calf - still-born to a precious heifer - a couple of weeks ago. Such is life. Luckily she's up and fine.

Silage stocks are looking ample, a situation common across the county if the trading price is anything to go by.

Dodgy DEFRA are frantically rushing around counting sheep to see if we all have the numbers we claim to have.

As I may have mentioned last month, the throttling new regulations being proposed will probably cure this annual nonsense. We'll simply stop keeping sheep and permit feral sheep to graze our grass. (If I wanted to fraudulently claim sheep subsidy I would do so very easily, as one or two scallywags have done over many years.)

A FINE MESS
Ironically I was recently penalised several thousand pounds over our 2001 subsidy claim. Not because there was any problem with the number of sheep we had prior to DEFRA shooting most of them, but because I later refused to supply detailed movement records for my sheep for the spring and summer of that year.

There were two reasons for this refusal:

Firstly, there is ample record of where the majority of my sheep went. The whole country watched the TV footage of my sheep being piled up and burned again and again and again.

The attendant DEFRA paperwork could hardly be clearer evidence.

The best place to file Defra paperwork?

I considered that asking my family to rake over the paperwork to provide additional documentation was a form too far!

The poor field officer who had to ask for this paperwork could hardly have been more sympathetic.

He'd been seconded to a slaughter team on a neighbouring farm, saw the carnage and drove past the smouldering remains.

But rules are rules and, on a point of principle, I refused.

Secondly, a number of my Scotch sheep were spared because no-one gathered them.

Some were simply too wild, others just contrived to be in the right place at the right time.

Some neighbours outside the "cordon insanitaire", had sheep stray into our farm the moment we created a vacuum.

All this went on under the noses of the State Vet Service.

To have provided a detailed record of the sheep movements onto and off my 'Form A' farm would've opened myself, several neighbours, and a number of SVS/DEFRA staff to serious charges.

(For the record, I cleared all the land I was instructed to clear on the day that I was instructed to clear it. But only once.)

There are more problems brewing, born of the same events, which I can't really go into yet.

As if just the time of year isn't reminder enough, they have to keep rubbing it in our faces.

Be assured, I won't let the b******d's grind me down.

Sorry to go on a bit but this is useful therapy for me.

Romance is not yet dead >>