Our Berkshires

The paperwork for the Berkshires arrived in the post this morning, so we’re now the official keepers of three pedigree gilts.

They’re all Styberry Mermaids out of Moorsholm Mermaid 19 by Hollybrook Freight Train and were bred by Stephen Green in Higham, near Burnley, Lancashire. Their date of birth was 20 June 2005.

We’ve now applied for membership of the British Pig Association and hope to secure the herd prefix “Stonehead”, so that when we start breeding our own gilts they will be known as Stonehead Mermaids.

Time to boycott the supermarkets

Now that’s a heading regular readers of the blog will have come to expect from me.

What they might not have expected is that the message did not come from me, but from a Scottish national newspaper.

The Scotsman has run a provocative article, Every little helps the farmers’ fight, that looks at how the supermarket chains abuse their power over the producers in their supply chains, and particularly the disastrous impact their policies and practices can have on farmers.

Books for smallholders

TonyB over on the ACL forums asked what three books people would recommend as essential reading for prospective smallholders.

Well, asking a smallholder to stick to the rules is almost impossible for a start so most of us quickly went well beyond three.

My own recommendations were:

It doesn’t rain, it pours

We’ve had a bit of rain lately with very heavy cloudburst leading to flash flooding down the road and deep standing water in the steading.

On top of that, we’ve had a JCB working in the field followed by a bit of slippery 4WDing in the Land Rover.

The result is a long, slick section of mud out in the field and, to the boys’ delight, I let them play in it for 20 minutes.