La vie à la petite ferme: Oh no, we are mad aren't we?

Wednesday 20 February 2013

Oh no, we are mad aren't we?

We have been trying to identify some animals that can help us gain and keep control of our land. We don't want to spend all our time strimming and chopping things down. The grass hopefully can be dealt with by the horses (when we get some) and the sheep, but a lot of other stuff such as brambles, bracken and tree saplings grows equally if not more enthusiastically. Goats seemed a possibility, but they need very good fencing as they are escapologists, also people tell us that actually they are not as good at eating everything as they are supposed to be. They will eat a little bit of everything, but generally don't prefer the stuff you want them to eat and just leave it, or escape and eat something else (your veg for example).Having seen a report on Countryfile about some conservationalists using Dartmoor ponies to clear scrub land and keep it clear, I started reading a bit about conservation grazing and it seems that Highland Cattle are also good as they eat pretty much everything and trample down what they don't eat so it doesn't thrive. It happens that there is a couple who breed them just a few miles from here, so we made an appointment to go and have a chat with them and see their cows.

They are only 150 meters higher than us, but it felt we climbed and climbed up a road that started narrow and got narrower.

There were a couple of little villages along the way, the car only just fitted through the gaps between houses.

This is the valley where the coos live. They have 30 of them, a number of them they imported from Scotland, a few from Germany and the rest were either born here or come from elsewhere in France (but their parents came from Scotland).

Their mud makes our annoyance with it look trivial. The cows come down close to the house over the winter so it is easier to feed them hay, which means there are a lot of them in a small space with a stream running through. I got stuck in the mud twice and had to be extracted by the nice man! Oops how shaming.

We chatted away with Sebastien who is very knowlegable about the cows and we just loved the look and nature of them. They have two female calfs at the moment, one is ready to leave its mum this month (February) and the other in September. It just happens that my birthday is February and Doug's is September. It was clearly meant to be and we have reserved both of them!
I can just imagine Lorna saying 'Is this one of your most sensible plans?' as she often did, but always meaning it in a nice way, just that she was laughing at us...
I am not sure it is, but I am sure it will be fun. Hopefully they will be as useful as we hope.

They will be ready to have their own calfs when they are 3ish at which point they can go back to a different bull at the farm they came from. I have some dreams about being able to milk them (people do) but it is a while away and we will see how we are getting on with them then. The horns are mighty big when they are full grown and you wouldn't want to piss one off. Highland cow beef is meant to be very tasty, it is leaner than other beef as they keep warm with their shaggy coats rather than with fat. Apparently the first one to arrive will be happy with the sheep as company until the other one turns up. This does limit the ground we can put her on to start off with though.
Their names at the moment are Hainoa (the older one) and Ilona but we are thinking of renaming them (they can keep those as their official names as they are in the records like that). We are thinking names of single malts for them but we haven't thought of the right ones yet, or perhaps we will decide we like those names anyway - we are worried they sound too similar and we will be confused. Hainoa colour is called yellow and Ilona is red (other possible colours are black, white, dun and brindled).