Over the Farmer's Gate Read Online Free PDF Page A

cleared up every egg.
    Still, they know best. After all, we are only simple farmers.

    AS THE YEAR goes on there are milestones that mark the passing of the days. Now I can switch all the yard lights off before we finish milking in the mornings.
    Every year, the Canada geese arrive at dawn. You don’t always see them arrive, but you always hear them. They come to nest on the little island in the pond in front of our house.
    Sometimes, half a dozen come at the same time and they fight for two or three days for the nesting site.
    In goose terms, the island is a ‘one up, one down’, so there’s room for only one nest. This year, a single pair have arrived and I did see them fly in. They swept in with loud calls as though proclaiming ownership of the island, the field and the territory.
    Like the season itself, they are late this year. They usually come in mid-February, which puts them nearly a month late, but the spring around here is about the same.
    Our daffodils still aren’t out and it intrigues me that plant and animal life – or in this case bird life – is attuned to the same sort of timing that adjusts itself to the vagaries of the weather.
    The pair have been here only a couple of days and already thefemale is sitting on what she presumably calls a nest, laying her eggs. It’s all very interesting.
    In due course there will be the young gulls to watch, too, and then they’ll fly back to the lake a mile away, from where they came.
    But what we really want are some swans.

    I’VE ALWAYS categorised myself as being pretty ‘cool’, laid back, fairly unflappable. Not as laid back as my son, though. If he were more laid back he would fall over.
    But there are a few times of the year when I admit that I do become a bit more ‘on edge’, and as I write today, we are right in the middle of one of those periods.
    It’s the time of year to get our maize in. It’s a very important crop to us, it’s expensive to grow and it’s critical to get it right. Last year, we had to abandon 17 acres of maize to the wet weather and there was a very serious knock-on cost to our business for the rest of the winter. So that makes this year’s crop all the more important and puts me just that bit more ‘on the edge’.
    I have a date in mind of 11 or 12 May for drilling here. We are just on the margins of growing maize because of our height above sea level and we also suffer late frosts. Maize is a tall and vigorous crop but it won’t compete with weeds, bad weather, and even the shadows cast by the trees across the road leave their mark.
    We put a lot of farmyard manure under maize, it loves it, and we did that part of the operation ahead of schedule. So when I put the plough on, I was pretty cool about it all because I would be more than a week ahead of time to plough and work down the fields. I actually enjoy ploughing, if it’s going OK, and I was looking forward to a couple of days on my own surrounded by the beauty of the spring countryside and the opportunity to observe the wildlife.
    Being on my own is the best company I can have. The dog would come with me in the cab if I let him but it’s a long old day for him, bumping along on the cab floor. He would follow me up and down the field all day if I let him as well, but, then again, he might not – it’s springtime and at the moment he is much given to carnal thoughts.
    So off I go and, in my mind’s eye, I have a picture of endless shiny furrows falling smoothly away from the plough, a flock of seagulls following me up and down the field – an idyllic scene (I can almost feel a poem coming on), while on the radio the rest of the world is queuing up around an accident on the M6 near Birmingham.
    But life can let you down. There were some furrows falling away, but not many. Problems with the plough, problems with the tractor, there was more time spent with my hands on spanners than on the steering wheel. I had gone from cool to very tetchy in a short time.
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