A LOVELY sunny warm week has really given us the feeling that spring has arrived. The days filled with sunshine have given way to rather chilly nights , but it has been a great week for the new born lambs, now enjoying themselves out in the fields with their mothers.

There are now only 60 ewes left to give birth and the recently born lambs all seem to be doing well. For the last two weeks Laura, a veterinary student, has been helping with the lambing as part of her work experience, so today is her last day on the farm. Laurence, the night lamber, also finishes his month of work here this weekend. Hopefully everything from now on will be straight forward, so that Melissa, Kevin and his parents will be able to relax a little. As the number of ewes and lambs in the buildings has decreased, some of the individual pens temporarily used to hold ewes with their new born lambs have been dismantled, cleaned and stored for next year.

One day during the week I helped Melissa feed the orphan lambs. These are a group of lambs, mainly from multiple births. It is always better to try and find foster mothers for these lambs, but this is not always possible, so the lambs join the bottle fed group. The lambs in this group very quickly get used to being bottle fed three times a day with reconstituted powdered ewes milk, which is balanced to give them all the nutrients they need.

Ian has been busy applying a second dressing of nitrogen fertiliser to our winter wheat and barley. This is the last application required by the barley, but wheat is rather hungry for nitrogen, so a third dressing will be needed. Richard had to finish spreading the last pile of manure onto a large field due to be planted with forage maize and at the end of the week hitched the cultivator onto a tractor to incorporate the manure into the soil. Kevin has also been cultivating arable fields on Chiverlins Farm, preparing the ground for the planting of spring barley and peas.

One day in the week Ian and Richard weighed our Aberdeen Angus beef cattle. Ten animals had reached target weight and condition, so our agent was called to book a lorry to take them to a selected abattoir. They left Manor Farm during the week, then the younger Anguses were turned out onto pasture next to the buildings. The gates were opened so that they could exit the barn. On reaching the edge of the field they all stopped, but it was not long before the first animals hooves touched the grass and the rest quickly followed. They set out across the field with hooves flying in all directions, thoroughly enjoying being out in the sunshine.

Our Friesian/Holstein heifer calves cannot be turned out yet as they were only given their second dose of lung worm vaccine at the end of the week. They will have to stay in the barn for 10 days to ensure that they have adequate protection against lung worm (husk ), which in certain conditions will badly infect young cattle. Husk is caused by a parasitic nematode which is ingested in it's larval stage, before passing through the intestinal wall getting into the blood stream. It then migrates to the lungs where it matures into the adult before the eggs are coughed up and swallowed by the infected animal. The eggs travel through the intestine from where they are excreted in the faeces further infecting the pasture.

It has been great to hear skylarks flying above some of our fields recently and buzzards making use of good thermals, as they soar high above us.