Mrs Down's Diary

JOHN is soaking his aches and pains away in a hot bath. The sheep have been clipped again for another year, and, as usual, he is considering whether it is a task he wants to be involved with next year.

According to Farming Today, our wake-up call each morning at a quarter to six, sheep shearers are in short supply. "No wonder," said John. "You get paid a pound a fleece and it is hard work. Unless you are regularly clipping like the travelling gangs from the Antipodes, the money is just not in the job." When John was a younger man, he was in a clipping gang. They travelled all over, four of them, and had a regular round of sheep farms. If things were set up right with the sheep all in under cover and dry, with a team to feed the sheep to the shearer and then take the fleece and sheep away after the clip, he could get through up to 30 sheep an hour. Now he is down to ten or 12. And unless I am involved, he is catching the sheep himself and rolling up the fleece and stuffing it into the wool sack on his tod as well. Mind you, his hands are lovely and soft after clipping. All that lanolin.

Over the years he has gradually stopped clipping on other farms. Now he only does it for a few friends who keep hobby sheep and for whom the clip is more of a social occasion than a job. Their fleeces are added to our wool sack. The price of wool has risen slightly this year, from a laughably small amount last year, but it does not defray the cost of clipping if it has to be paid for. Hence the shortage of shearers. Who wants a job that is so physical, seasonal and poorly paid unless you are really skilful and fast?

Tomorrow morning two of our oldest cows are off to market. One is the cow who gave birth to the dead calf a fortnight ago. She has not accepted any of the suckler calves in the field so John says it is not viable to keep her any longer as she may throw another dead calf next year. The other cow is the mother of the twins calves who were born in the spring. One of them died; the healthy, strongest calf, but we still have our special needs calf, the other twin called Freddy in the yard, in his own little pen.

In the last three or four months he has steadfastly refused to be weaned off his milk and onto a calf mixture. John has persisted with him almost out of curiosity to see just how long Freddy would be prepared to hold off solids and stick with his milk diet.

Then last week he started to nibble and graze in his bucket of calf mix. Not exactly keen, but definitely progress. And I think he has started to put on weight and grow. Without the other calves in the yard it is difficult to make an accurate judgment of his relative size to other calves born at the same time, but he certainly looked a scrawny little chap. Now he even looks a little chunky. Not a lot. But a bit.

Added to this is the fact that he is starting to take more notice of his surroundings.

He will even give a mini bellow when you walk past his pen, just to gently remind you he is there. When he starts to rattle his bucket, we will know he has made it.

This first appeared in the West Sussex Gazette on July 2