Why I hate farming

I have been thinking about Farming recently, I grew up on a farm. It was a little one in Devon that was run in an organic way before organics had been discovered. It only had one aged tractor that was addicted to Quick start (Which is like smack for tractors) and most of the work was done with horses.

Ooh, that sounds lovely I bet you are thinking. Well you are wrong, real small-scale organic farming isn't all Mills and Boon covers.

I'm trying to think of the best place to begin, so lets start with the with New Year's Eve. While everyone is nursing a hangover you will have to get up first thing in the morning to chase some cows who have escaped into a neighbour's field. These naughty cows will have been doing it all winter so you will already have had to chase them about while wearing your new pajamas on Christmas day. Cows don't observe religious holidays.

After the cow catching starts to calm down a bit you get into the lambing season. Sheep are crap at giving birth, really crap. Some of the wilder breeds are pretty hardy so you can leave them to it but the normal ones are terrible. This means that 'Spring' (although really winter) is spent surrounded by the smell of afterbirths and the kitchen floor is covered in cardboard boxes full of lambs at various stages of death. You get to nurse them, hand feed them warm milk on your lap and then most of the time they just die for no reason at all. If by a miracle they do survive then you let them outside to join the other sheep and some neighbour's dog will come and savage them in the night.

Late spring is a slightly calm time as most of the things that will die have already gone, ideally in your arms for maximum effect so you are left with fields of moderately healthy animals and at least it is warm. With sheep you have to cut their coats which causes them complete terror and means you have to try not to snip off anything vital while this hot snorting body flails against you as if it's life depends on it. Oh and after you give them a hair cut some of them die because it is too much of a shock for them. Think about that when you next get a bad 'do'.

As summer approaches the hell of hay making draws closer. The weather reports become of vital importance and there is a lot of fretting over the right time to do it. Then you cut the hay, with aged machinery that was last used in the dark ages of course. After the hay has been cut you have to get it to dry out, so it has to be turned twice a day, partly by machine (The old crack-addict tractor mentioned earlier) and then by hand for the bits the machine misses. This is of course done in the blistering heat.

While this is going on if it rains the crop will be ruined, completely ruined. At the first hint of rain the bailing must begin even if the hay isn't completely dry yet. For the bailing you need to get the crop into nice rows for the even more temperamental baler to turn into small scratchy bales full of thistles. This machine some how manages to break down even more than the tractor and occasionally explodes as a bit of baler twine gets caught in something it shouldn't. The first sign of this happening is when it starts to give birth to deformed bales that warp when they hit the ground and then explode in a shower of thistles.

Provided you get through this stage the bales need a bit more drying out and then you need to get them into the barn. The horses trundle around the field as you sling bales onto a trailer (Which is like repeatedly chucking a full suitcase over your shoulder), one person receives the bales and stacks them. Once the trailer is loaded the horses normally try and shake a few bales off and then when they have been replaced you go over to the barn where you load them in. The barn stage is the hardest because you are starting to get tired by now and you are doing this heavy lifting inside surrounded by dust. It's worth mentioning at this point you should be wearing gloves, good strong gloves that cover your arms otherwise your skin will be flayed off after about five minutes of handling bales, sadly this isn't an acceptable excuse to get out of bailing, nothing ever is.

This continues until the bales have gone, if it starts raining it happens faster and with more shuoting, by the end of it you just want to lie down and die. I think only people who have never been bailing day-dream of having a tryst in hay, for anyone who has being around something you hate that much would be a distraction.

The rest of the year is spent repairing fences, and taking very reluctant animals to market. Occasionally you get to sleep for a full night but usually only because the sheep/cows/chickens have all been murdered by something. This something is usually the star of a Disney film so when you tell people you hate foxes they go on about how they are really nice citing the cartoon version of Robin Hood as an example.

And you wonder why I became a fop?