MY DREAM WAS TO MANAGE A TENANT FARM

I worked at Tesco’s as a manager and there were going to be redundancies.

My youngest had just started school. My dream was to manage a tenant farm in the middle of nowhere. I applied to do an agriculture degree. To get that degree you had to have so many hours of practical experience.

I’m not from a farming background, I’ve not got a farming name.

I’m a woman and not many farmers wanted to take me on, even when I offered to work for free. Luckily I did manage to find three that were willing to have me. They realised I worked twice as hard as the men they were getting.

It was something different, not like managing a farm. I mean it is kind of, but it’s different.

It was the job that attracted me. I had worked with cows before but sheep are my first love. We have sheep on here too.

We’ve got the Westwood and the Hurn, near Beverley racecourse - sheep on the Hurn because it’s fenced, cows on the Westwood. That’s 564 acres in all. I look after the land. There’s several bits of woodland on here too.

My main job in the grazing season is the cattle, to make sure they’re alright.

The first year when I took over, I was like oh my God, I’m responsible for all these.

Once you get into a routine, it’s pretty good. I’ll do my rounds and I’ll come back and say ‘So-and-so cow. Something’s not right’. I’ll keep an extra eye on it. It could have over-eaten or eaten something it shouldn’t. If it’s still like it the next morning then I would take it to get checked out. Things like that, things that aren’t visible but you just know something isn’t right.

It’s a great job, but it’s challenging.

Three roads run through the Westwood. We live on the main road entrance nearest town. I’m trying to get cattle grids put this end.

This season I averaged twenty-five hours a week just moving them from the road at our end. That doesn’t include I got calls to say they were down in people’s gardens.

They can head into town two ways or head out of Beverley. I’m always watching. We have what we call cow watch in our dining room.

If you see a cow on its own there’s usually a problem.

They don’t like being on their own but this year we had two that did. I realised, they just actually like being on their own. They would go join the herd, but then they would wander off on their own somewhere. It’s just being able to read them.

Because I see them every day, I don’t realise how much they grow.

When the stockers come to pick them up, they’re quite shocked at how big they’ve got. This year they did really well. Some of them were huge by the time they went off.

When the arrive they don’t get released straight away; they’re kept on the Hurn for a week. They’ve been in sheds all winter, they’re very frisky when they first come out. It gets their excitement out of the way before they’re released onto the open land.

It takes me about a month to get used to them all, to know what they’re like and the ones that I need to keep an eye on. I do a round in the morning and one in the evening.

I do a rough head count of the cattle. If they are laid down and cudding, you know that they’re quite happy.

We had a problem with quite a few lame ones this year.

It’s quite hilly, and when they first come they all get a bit excited and start mounting each other. After a couple of days they’re fine. If not, then I would take them over to the Hurn-side, so I can get a closer look at them.

My checks take two and a half hours, twice a day, driving round. It depends how many groups they’re in. Sometimes they’ll be in two huge groups; other times in twenty little groups. So I have to go searching.

When it’s raining, it’s a nightmare because they’re hiding in the woods. I can’t get my tractor into the woods.

We tend to name the naughty ones.

We had one called Baddie because he was so naughty. He was an absolute nightmare. The others, you just shout or whistle to move them on, he wouldn’t. I ended up quarantining him, Hurn side with the sheep, because every single day he would come down to our house and bring his gang
with him.

I’ll get a phone call, ‘There’s a cow down Seven Corners.’ I’d go get him and an hour later he’d be down in someone’s garden. This was every day. It’s my job, but it was just causing so much work, just this one cow.

You take that leader away and they just elect a new leader. That’s just as bad, so the next one comes, and they start being naughty again. It’s quite funny.

There was one, we called him Hummous. You couldn’t shift him. The only way you could was by pulling a branch off a tree with the leaves he liked and get him to follow you. We have a food van that parks on the Westwood and an ice cream van that comes in summer. He was a regular visitor to both.

I ended up quarantining him about two weeks before he was due to go off. He’d go sauntering up to people and nudge his head at them because he wanted a stroke. They thought this cow was attacking them. He got far too familiar with people.

We probably had about thirty different breeds this year.

The Continental breeds - Charolais and Limousins - are probably the wildest. They don’t tend to interact with people. If someone went up to them, they would run.

Cows graze twice a day. Once In the morning then they chill out and cud for the day. At Four o’clock-ish, they’ll go around grazing again, ready for their night time. They weren’t doing that to start with this year. They just seemed to be constantly wandering.

They were getting settled down but people would disturb them ‘Oh, look, there’s a cow. Let’s go take some pictures.’ These people have not been that close to a cow before.

We had a cow die this year. We think it had eaten a plastic bag.

It was behaving differently. It was struggling to breathe. It wasn’t pneumonia or something like that. They normally breathe from their stomach and you can see their stomach going in and out. This cow wasn’t doing that. It was as though it had got something stuck.