Blogs

Cheshire dairy farmer Andrew attended Harper Adams university and went on to manage pedigree and commercial herds. He secured a job with breeding company Genus, where he became sire analyst. He has now returned home to manage the 350-cow herd.

Sadly, the world has certainly changed beyond recognition from a month ago and, with coronavirus restrictions looking set to continue over summer, we seem to be living a very different life.

This month Roger Evans reveals that he will never be afraid of media trolls, tells us why HS2 will be out of date before it opens, and finally fesses up to the fact that he is not a doctor after all.

In theory, it should be fairly easy to farm while staying two metres away from every other human being. Open fields and solitary tractor cabs mean arable farming is fairly self-isolating at the best of times. There are clearly fewer face-to-face meetings than, say, being Prime Minister.

The lockdown of most of the nation’s population will hopefully have the desired effect of slowing down this hellish virus.

There is no doubt that beating the Covid-19 pandemic will require a sustained, collective effort unknown in this country since the end of the second world war.

We certainly are living in strange and scary times. At the beginning of the month, I had a decent amount of bookings in the diary for the bed and breakfast.

With all of the wild weather, March appeared to enter like a pride of ferocious roaring lions, but as I write it appears to be changing into something that resembles a lamb. Let’s hope it stays that way for a while.

During turbulent times farmers are always grounded, with our feet firmly on the earth and rational thinking caps on.

Block calving 430 cows means a lot of calves have to be attended to all at once, and to ensure full attention a strict colostrum protocol has been adopted on one Welsh farm. Debbie James has the story.