ONCE again the first day of the week was wet and miserable, with a rainfall of 13 mm. The days to follow brought with them a mixture of sunshine, clouds, breezes and some rather violent storms, with thunder and lightning included in the mix. It has become noticeably cooler with breezes coming from a northerly direction taking the roar of the motorway away from our farm. Autumn has arrived, particularly noticeable with the shortening day length.

Hedge-cutting on Manor Farm, Stowell Farm and Chuggaton Farm in North Devon continues whenever time allows. Here Nathan and James, our two farm workers, are also cultivating fields to be planted. On Stowell Farm, Kevin has put some nitrogen fertiliser on his stubble turnips, which will be grazed by some of the sheep in the months ahead.

He also had two fields of lucerne which were showing signs of age. They have been sprayed with a herbicide before being ploughed. These fields will then be cultivated to prepare them for growing a crop of winter wheat.

Lucerne, or alfalfa, as it is known, is a perennial pasture legume with deep roots penetrating the soil to depths of up to two metres. It provides additional green feed at the start and end of the normal growing season, fitting well into a crop rotation system. To make growing the crop cost effective, it needs to be left for at least four years following sowing, after which time it is often replaced with a crop of wheat, as will be the case on Stowell Farm. Lucerne has the ability to fix nitrogen in the soil, so the wheat crop to follow will need far less (up to 70 per cent) nitrogen fertiliser during the growing season. Two more of Kevin's fields, which are in his arable rotation, have been cultivated and sown with grass. This year one of the fields produced wheat, the other barley.

The calving season is now well underway, on Manor Farm and on our daughter Adele's farm in Devon. On Chuggaton Farm there have been over 40 calvings. At the start there were more bull calves than heifers, but now the numbers are more or less even.

Here on Manor Farm we have calved about the same number, producing 22 heifer calves. The heifer calves on both farms are reared in much the same way. For the first five or six weeks they are in individual pens bedded with straw, where the calves have access to forage, fresh water and weaner pellets. They are given milk twice a day, made up using a specially formulated milk powder mixed with warm water. This year we are giving each calf a handful of a supplement each day containing soya, whey, vegetable oil, oat flakes, vitamins and minerals until they are weaned. Feeding this supplement has been shown to help appetite, rumen development and growth. It reduces growth check at weaning and importantly reduces incidents of nutrition scours.

On Stowell Farm some of the sheep have been moved to fresh pasture. The problem of fly-strike seems to continue with the damp and sometimes humid conditions we are experiencing. The sheep are checked regularly to spot any signs of strike, as it only takes a few hours for the hatching maggots to injure the sheep very badly. During the week the 100 ewe and ram lambs, born as a result of artificial insemination early in the year, have been gathered for weighing and scanning using Signet Breeding Services, a branch of the AHDB (Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board).

An ultrasound scanning machine was used to determine the depth of muscle and fat in the lambs, which involves parting the wool at the third lumbar vertebra at 90 degrees to the backbone and then applying liquid paraffin oil to give contact. The results were good, with a typical range of fat depths being between 0.5-8mm and eye muscle depths from 20 to 36mm.