so, when will you be starting stockpiling I wonder?

Gilly, I meant I wasn’t being unkind not you x

they complain every season every year. I feel smug, when we discussed the snow last winter I posted that we were in for a very hot summer, they work the land surely if I could see the signs they could.

Apologies if I misunderstood Annie and thought you meant I was being unkind to farmers.

You are right! I remember as a child having really cold winters with plenty of snow and ice followed by proper springs and lovely warm summers. Isn't that the way the seasons are meant to be?

Alice in Wonderland, gillybob. 'I can believe in three impossible things before breakfast'!

It has been a dreadful year for farmers, though. There are a lot of sheep in our area and many farmers lost far more lambs than usual because of the cold and very wet weather at lambing time. And cattle were late going out to grass because fields were too waterlogged.

Now there will be a shortage of hay for winter fodder because the lack of rain meant the grass didn't grow as much as it should have. We have wonderful hay, but not much of it.

I'm wondering about the cereal crop yields too, no rain to swell the grain...

I think the impression that farmers are always moaning about the weather is misplaced. In good years they just keep quiet and thank heaven for a respite! But there haven't been many good years of late...

Not misplaced Maizie, they do complain every year, I do think they have cause to over the snow last winter it was bad for lambing but why do they no longer bring the ewes down

Maybe because winters have been very mild over the past few years.

Some do lamb very early, though, which doesn't help.

If your livelihood was intimately linked to the weather I think you'd probably talk about it a great deal.

Mind you, one person's 'discussion' is another person's 'moaning'. Think we'll have to agree to disagree on this.

they complain every season every year
It's anxiety! Until the crops are in or the livestock successfully reared they can't relax at all.

And they can tell more by looking at the sky than looking at the weather forecast.

There has been nearly two years without much rain in some NSW sheep/cattle farming areas; the situation is critical.

Some do lamb very early, though, which doesn't help

Maybe looking into later lambing could be the way forward MazieD Although I have no idea about the productive cycle of a sheep and whether this could be altered in any way.

I think that Adam (Adam's Farm) said something about that on Countryfile, gillybob, some of his sheep were lambing at a different time to give them a better chance I think.

Well there you go then, later lambing is the way forward.

Although I do love seeing those little lambs gamboling around the fields in their little carrier bags.

I don't know how anyone could eat them and I would never have lamb in the house.

We could all stockpile a couple of lambs/sheep to keep the garden grass short and for woolly jumpers.
I'd need a spinning wheel though, not sure I could handle one of those.

For a while the subsidies on lambs made it worth lambing early, but then the system changed and most lambs now arrive a bit later in the year.

Gilly The ewes come into season in October/November and the tups are put in with them for three weeks or more at that time ( their cycle is about two and a half weeks, so any who were missed the first time get lucky second time round) The tups have a marker block strapped to their chests, which rubs a coloured mark onto the back of the "done" ewes, so the farmer can see which ones are still white and possibly barren. Sometimes the colour is changed after each week so that the ewes can be separated into "due this week, so watch her" or "due next week," or "not due for a fortnight".

Gestation is five months and a week. The timing of the births can be predicted to a certain extent.

Jalima An acre of grass can provide food for four ewes and their lambs, with some hay added in the winter, plus access to water. They need a bit of shelter from the worst winds and heavy rain, but not elaborate housing. Some breeds are better than others at roughing it.

We'd have to build a fence around our garden though.

The fence would also keep out next-door's tup if he was a bit quicker than you at sensing that Tonight's The Night. It would keep the ewes from sneaking over to join him too. They have their own ideas about suitable genetic partners and the timing of their pregnancies.

We used to keep two Jacob ewes on half-an-acre of fairly tatty rough grass, We got two fleeces a year, and in Novenber they went for a nice holiday with a flock of aristocratic Jacobs at a castle a few miles away, producing cute black-an-white Jacob lambs in due course. I am sure they looked forward to their hols, they never objected to being rounded up and transported off.

Next door to us they had sometimes kept sheep (ordinary white type) and they still had an nice old tup with arthritis, kept on as a pet. He could hardly get up if he lay down, and they kept saying they would have to get rid of him soon, he was so old and doddery.

In mid-October one year, one of our Jacob ewes was discovered to have somehow got through the wire, and was peacefully grazing beside the old boy. "No harm done", we all said, "He is too old and too decrepit for any shenanigans."

Come March the evidence appeared - two lovely pitch-black lambs. To old my eye!

I haven’t eaten lamb ( or much red meat at all to be honest) for many years and to settle an argument with my DH I once (very naively) asked the village butcher in Rothbury ( Northumberland) what was meant (age wise) by the “spring lamb” he was advertising on his board outside . He pointed to the fields across the way where little lambs were happily jumping around and very proudly said “them next week” I was quite upset .

What a lovely story Elegran thanks for sharing

Gily I thought you might ask why the lambs were black, when Daddy was white. Apparently, Jacobs are basically black with white patches, not white with black patches, and if they are crossed with all-white sheep, the all-black gene dominates the all-white one, so the lambs just have the basic black.

I didn’t like to show my ignorance and just assumed it was a genetic throw back but thank you for explaining it Elegran there’s something extra sweet ( and I don’t mean the taste) of a little black lamb .

And moving on ..... would any lambs that those lambs produced ( and so on) always be black then?

Elegran - there was life in the old dog sheep yet!


I may stockpile alpacas instead as the fleeces are lovely, soft and warm.
But they can get a bit frisky.

Gilly I don't know the answer to that. We used to sell on the lambs, so we never knew what their descendants were like.

Jalima He remembered what was what, anyway.

Welsh lamb with mint sauce is excellent.

Aaaah I couldn’t lemon although I do have mint sauce on new potatoes .

What do you say to a sheep which is baaing (sic) your way in a field?

'Mint sauce, mint sauce'

Below is a report from the Guardian in regard to the security of Britains food supplies in the event of a "no deal" Brexit. As I have not reproduced the full report here, I have made some slight changes to the report to allow for easier reading and understanding. However, the full report can be read by following the link at the end of this post

The edited report starts here:-
Last week, in evidence to the Brexit select committee,Dominic Raab stated how the government would secure Britains food supplies in the event of a no-deal Brexit, which could impede the free flow across our borders of the 30% of our food currently imported from the EU.

No, the government itself would not be stockpiling food. That he stated was Quite right, It doesn’t have a way of doing so. Instead, it would be up to the food industry to deal with it.

They are comments that have left the entire British food supply chain – farmers, producers and retailers – utterly baffled.

“There isn’t warehousing space in this country,” Ian Wright of the Food and Drink Federation, which represents the interests of UK manufacturers, told me. “There doesn’t need to be, because companies do not hold huge inventories. It’s massively financially inefficient to do so.”

Only 49% of the food we consume is produced in Britain, he said. The rest comes from abroad, and most of that is in the form of ingredients to be turned into the foods we eventually eat. It arrives on "Just in Time delivery Schedulesto be processed, after which the finished goods are immediately dispatched. “I don’t think the government understands that,” he said.

Or, as the head of one of Britain’s biggest food manufacturers put it to me, “That lot couldn’t run a fish and chip shop.” :- Report ends here

Well, with such reports becoming now widespread, Carol my wife and me have genuinely decided to begin stocking up. Tinned vegetables and meats will be the main commodity drawing on our experience of camping with our three young daughters many years ago.

In those days with sufficient tins of potatoes, peas, green beans accompanied by a large tin of minced beef and onion I could knock up a meal for five on the camp stove in next to no time.

It would appear that those times may well be about to come again.

Full Guardian report can be found here:-
www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jul/29/no-deal-brexit-food-supply-chain-crisis