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Well, it has been a long time since a diary entry was made here.

Further changes have happened on the farm.  We sold our flock of over 300 sheep in 2008. Sheep (and lambs) look lovely on green fields, but they can be a lot of hard work.  To get a good return from them, you have to lamb early so that the lambs are ready for slaughter when the meat is selling for a premium ie in the Spring.  It is a fallacy that Spring lamb comes from little frisky ones romping among the daisies.  They are born in barns in the depths of winter, and someone has to be on hand, not necessarily 24/7, but at regular intervals through the day.  Dave would get up about 6am and go straight down to the lambing shed and deal with whatever he found there before breakfast.  Breakfast therefore might be as late as 10am or even later.  At night he would go down there last thing, about 11pm, and once again stay till he had dealt with any giving birth.

Our neighbour's daughter helped during the last 3 winters, checking the sheep after school and giving them food and water.  She considered a career in Veterinary medicine, but is now applying for university courses in Animal Care.

Once lambing was over, the work was still hard.  Sorting through the lambs, weighing them, selecting the fat ones, then loading them up and taking them to the abattoir each week.  This would continue well into the summer.

Handling sheep is heavy work, and Dave's fledgling electrical contracting business was taking off, so the decision was made.  With no youngsters in waiting to take on the farm work, we have to manage the farm with as little effort as possible.

Since 2002, farm production subsidies have given way to the "single payment scheme".  This was worked out (in the UK) partly on a historical basis (on subsidies previously claimed) and partly on an area basis.  We lost out by going out of dairy farming in 2002, but there was no way of knowing.

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