In your field

I would like to start with a heartfelt apology to the people of Scotland. Last month I mentioned that an Englishman, an Irishman and a Welshman travelled to Scotland and achieved their 400-a-day shearing goals.

Just a few days ago ‘Desert Dorset’ was a dust bowl. The milking herd has been on a full silage diet as there was just no grass and no growth as it has hardly rained for more than a month.

During my early-teen growth spurt I had skinny, matchstick legs and gigantic size-12 feet which I could barely control. This made me hopeless at football – this was in the1980s and Peter Crouch had not surfaced yet.

With the Roundup now applied to some of the spring barley crops, we are on the short countdown to harvest.

Well, as per usual, July has flown by. All silage is baled and although it has been a catchy and frustrating time, we have ended up with plenty of decent crop.

We are only a few months into our venture and after setting up the milk hut in a morning, I get on with my regular farm jobs, such as calf feeding and the like.

An Irishman, a Welshman and an Englishman travelled to Scotland to shear sheep and this month the young shearers hit their goal, each shearing 400 plus sheep in a day. Well done lads.

It has been a funny old month. At the last time of writing, early second cuts were being clamped while we still had a week or so left of growing.

This year is turning out to be a bit of a weather rollercoaster here in Dorset. The decent amount of rain we had a few weeks ago did us the world of good, but has quickly gone and we are again desperate for rain and struggling for grazing grass.

Being food producers, farmers know there is no such thing as a free lunch. Someone somewhere has worked hard to provide such generosity.