Minette Batters has a busy week of catering
I’ve just completed my busiest catering weekend of the year so far. With five different functions on it was a challenge, and I worked virtually round the clock to get everything finished.
I’m lucky to have a great team working with me and between us we got through it without a hitch, and the compliments afterwards always help and numb the pain of exhaustion. We’ve managed to get 24ha of silage in, with yields and quality looking good. We still have another 10ha of square baling to do, but I’m hoping this has benefited from leaving. We sprayed it with ForeFront in March and although this sorted the dock problem it also knocked out the clover. ForeFront was responsible for allotment problems in some areas and for that reason muck can’t be moved off-farm. It has also been banned in some counties but luckily not in Wiltshire. It does what it says and kills all docks, but it’s expensive and losing the clover in the short term is a nuisance.
Work on the new cattle barn starts at the end of July with someone on site to record what, if anything, is found in the various holes dug. I can only live in hope that this person has a degree of common sense, and is not a clone of some of the other inspectors who have been on this farm.
Minette Batters farms 120ha on a tenant farm on the Longford Estate in south Wiltshire. The farm carries 100 continental-bred suckler cows, with males finished as bull beef, some sold as stores and the others finished and sold to local butchers. The enterprise also includes a catering business and horse livery. She is NFU county chairwoman for Wiltshire and founder of Ladies in Beef.