IT has been a dull, rather dreary sort of a week. On Thursday evening the dismal weather theme continued with 5mm of rain falling overnight. It has, however, been unseasonably mild, with a daybreak temperature of 11.4 C as I write.

Last weekend Richard, Ian and Kevin dehorned all the weaned heifer calves.

Each calf is given a local anaesthetic injection adjacent to the site of each growing horn bud.

Once the area is numb, the horn bud is quickly and painlessly removed, much like having a tooth out.

Most bovines develop horns, except a few breeds which are naturally polled.

One polled breed is the Aberdeen Angus, the breed of calf that our remaining cows will give birth to.

The horn buds on our dairy calves are removed to prevent the horns growing as horned cattle can injure handlers and each other, find it difficult to access feed areas and would have to be transported with extreme care and in small numbers.

A group of 12 Angus cross calves was bought by a neighbouring farmer during the week, as we only keep dairy heifer calves. These Angus beef calves will be reared on to maturity for Waitrose supermarkets.

A routine vet visit mid-week was primarily to do post-natal checks on those cows that had calved earlier, to make sure all is well and they are coming into season.

The vet also did pregnancy diagnoses on two heifers that were showing no signs of being in-calf. It transpired that one was pregnant and the other was not, even though they had both been with the bull for a long time.

Richard then took the barren heifer and two free-martins to a local abbatoir for beef.

At the moment Richard and Ian are artificially inseminating cows that calved some time ago using semen from five carefully selected Freisian/holstein dairy bulls.

These bulls have been matched to the cows to improve overall conformation and longevity.

One evening last week David Scott, the managing director of TH White, was a guest speaker at our local NFU meeting. The meeting attracted a large audience who were told about the history of the company. TH White began in 1832 as an ironmongers in Devizes, and in the 1950s started to manufacture horse-drawn agriculture equipment, bringing in some of the first tractors.

The company expanded in the 1960s and 1970s, diversifying in the 1980s to take it into the future market place. In the 1990s seven divisions were set up, employing 500 staff. These are agriculture, grasscare machinery, lorry cranes, motor vehicles, construction equipment, handling and storage and renewable energy. A security and fire systems section is now included.

The present company operates with eight engineering divisions trading from locations extending from Frome in the south west, Reading in the south east and to Bradford in Yorkshire.

On Stowell Farm the family continue to prepare the barns in readiness for the ewes to be brought in soon, and grading more finished lambs for the meat market.

On a sunnier afternoon mid-week I checked all the sheep here on Manor Farm.

They were in a very playful mood, head-butting each other and frolicking around, jumping off all four feet and chasing large flocks of fieldfares which were constantly landing on the grass and taking off again.

It was a lovely countryside scene with long shadows created by the sun from behind the wood on the west side of the field.