Willowford

By LiamMcNulty

New grass

Being organic farmers, one of our best defences against disease in our animals is to keep them on clean pasture. This means moving them from field to field regularly so that they are out of sync with the parasites' lifecycles, stopping them building up into a problem. However, hay-making doesn't always coincide with these rotations, thanks to the British weather, and so sometimes this gets tricky. The grass in the field the sheep are in now is a bit long for them - sheep like to bite short grass with their teeth. To counter this, I let the cows into the same field - they like to eat long grass, pulling it out with their tongues. But moving cows into a field full of sheep can lead to high excitement, which can be a little unnerving when the same field also has lots of walkers passing through it. However, after 30 minutes of frolicking and charging through the sheep, the cows seemed to settle down and were particularly fond of this bank of wildflowers. I hope they don't eat them all.

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