Breakfast Time On The Smallholding.

  That's the cattle and Shetland pony walking up to the trough for their beef nuts this morning.  I just shout:

"Sug, sug, sug. "

Po, po, po"

Also works.  Don't know why but the cattle always moo and respond to it.  Perhaps I am like Dr Doolittle? I can talk to the animals.  They also like it when I bang on the metal bucket like a drum.

'Bracken' shouldn't be eating the beef nuts but he always pushes in and helps his self to them.  We have four continental heifers and 4 dairy cross bullocks and a bull calf.  The bull calf lives in a paddock up at the farm.

I have also had to have to spread 'bag manure' (fertilizer) for the first time in 7 years.  A combination  of greedy cattle and lack of growth and ("don't say it") RAIN!  Means that yonder cattle need fertilizer to make the grass grow.

We also paddocked off a couple of acres to grow more silage.  It's supposed to be mad dear this year.  Cattle prices are very poor at the moment.  I heard of a farmer getting 2 Euros at mart for a Jersey cross dropped calf.  And (never start a sentence with and) he would have had to pay the mart commission to sell it.  Dairy cross cattle are only making a Euro a kilogram at the moment.   That's about forty pence a pound in Sterling.  I have decided I will keep my bullocks until they are really big.  It's the only way we will get anything for them.

We also set a field of fodder Kale this week.  Never grown it before.  Have you?