Julian Ellis reassured at pneumonia meeting

I’ve recently attended a pneumonia meeting organised by our vet, which I found useful but also reassuring that I am not the only one that seems to be struggling with it.

Although at the moment things are a lot better and despite trying various injections and vaccinations, I believe the biggest improvement we’ve made is feeding twice a day and making sure the milkbars are not mounted too high.

With the straw all squeezed into every available space and the grass seed drilled, we have been turning our attention to getting the cattle housing ready.

After much contemplation about investing in mats or sand for our cubicles we have purchased some 1.8m-wide second-hand rubber belting which we are laying down on the beds in the hope we will save some straw. This idea was a lot cheaper than mats, so you can be forgiven for thinking that I’m a tight-fisted good life farmer. Especially when I tell you that the scrap men turned up the other day and I really had to hold myself back from offering them a tenner for a piece of old machinery in their truck that caught my eye.

On top of this, I seem to be drawn to wild food foraging at the moment including mushrooms and picking sloes of which there seems to be an abundance of this year. Roll on Christmas, when the cows will be content on their new beds and I’ll be enjoying our nicely matured sloe gin.

Farmer Focus: Julian Ellis