GOOD EVANS

GOODEvans ‘Life will go on as before’

This month, Roger Evans writes about life after selling the majority of his family’s milking cows, what the short-term future for the farm looks like, and the importance of attracting young people to the industry.

For the first time in 58 years we are not selling milk. We are milking cows every day but there is not enough milk for a tanker to call so we are giving it to calves.

The first milk we will sell will go into a vending machine. We will probably get back to proper dairy farming but there’s no rush and we will take this break and make the most of it.

As an example, all of our family were down at the rugby club to watch our two eldest grandsons on Saturday. They scored three tries between them and did all the place kicking. The younger of the two was only there to do the eldest boy’s tackling and he, the eldest boy, didn’t do any place kicking in the second half. When I asked him why, he said his hamstring was tightening up and I said: “We don’t have hamstrings in this family.”

This loss of land, traumatic as it is at the moment, may look quite different in years to come. The real problem has been the price of milk, it’s been too cheap for too long. Everything we did was expensive, the rent had more to do with the Basic Payment

Scheme (BPS) money than the price of milk.

We used to bring grass for silage home and for the cows to eat if grazing was short. Now I’m not so sure that the acreage we have left is viable. My son is milking part-time elsewhere and we are trying to create a living for our eldest grandson.

Calves

Over the years I’ve met lots of farmers who have given up milk production. It may sound very obvious, and it did to me at the time, but as time goes on what they really miss is the calves. When the cows go, so also do the calves.

There is something of the self-perpetuating about a dairy herd. You get used to all those calves turning up.

What really focuses your mind is that you have to buy livestock to replace them and usually you are not used to having to do that. Suddenly you have to know all sorts of things. You have to know the price of cattle and sheep and how much it costs to grow an arable crop. What you don’t know is how much all these things will be worth when you sell them.

Farming has always been like that. We have had the BPS payment to give us a start into the New Year but that will disappear.

We don’t yet know what all those trade deals will do to the value of what we sell, but the signs are not good.

Food security

It’s true that events in Europe have made food security climb the agenda but folk don’t have any spare money to spend on food so I can’t see it getting to prices that will cover the rise in the cost of inputs.

Looking on the bright side, which I occasionally do, we kept two cows back when we sold the rest, because they were close to calving. They calved the next day so we are away again. That’s two calves we didn’t have before.

Then there’s a bunch of heifers that we will put to sexed semen when the time comes so we will have some heifer calves in the pipeline.

Life will go on as before. We will be farming a lot less ground but in the years yet to come we might look back on this as just a blip in life’s rich pattern.

It’s not as true today as it once was but there used to be dairy farmers about that hadn’t missed a milking for years and years. I have never been in that category. I have had holidays with my family and I was lucky enough to have a friend who took me around the world.

I’ve met dairy farmers wives who haven’t missed a milking for years either and I have often had the thought ‘I wonder what he was doing while she was milking?’

I think that milking all those hours will be a

“We might look back on this as just a blip in life’s rich pattern

thing of the past. It’s possible that it will still occur but it’s something not to be proud of.

Future

I’m not a big fan of huge herds. I like to see cows out on grass, but if there is some scale there’s probably a team involved in the milking and people can get proper time o . It’s the only way our industry can a ract new young people and if you don’t do that what sort of future is there?

So we have a le er from the Ministry to say that because we didn’t have a TB test in the rst week of March like we should have, we are now under restriction until we do. We phoned back to say that we had a whole herd test at the end of February, it was clear and they organised it. And the nice lady on the phone says ‘so you did, sorry about that’. If TB wasn’t so serious it would be funny.

If the Ministry don’t know what they are doing, who does? I suspect that they are being told that an e ective vaccine is close at hand and until it is available they are just going through the motions.

Still, what do I know? As much as the Ministry apparently. But she was a very nice lady on the phone, very apologetic. Isn’t life so much be er if people are nice.