Welcome to our September newsletter

Lamb & mutton boxes now available to order

Collect at this month's pop-up shop - Saturday 11th September 10am - noon.

Park Farm, Hook Street, Swindon, SN5 3NY

The old coat is needed now in the mornings, the power lines over the turkey paddock support a few more swallows each day, the swifts are long gone and Lindsay is talking about sheep even more than normal. All this can mean only one thing, summer has slipped into autumn.

A busy few weeks of sheep jobs!

With no showing last year Lindsay has been looking forward to taking 2 ewe lambs (Pictured above) and 2 ram lambs to Moreton-in-Marsh show this weekend. There has been much discussion about who would be taken but with halter training well underway and washing complete (assisted by Bev who helps with the pop-up shop) there’s just the trimming to finish so its too late to change the team line-up now! With the show now just days away the aim is to try and discourage the lambs from rolling in anything undesirable and to take them for a walk on their halters each day so they behave for the judge.

We’ve had a bunch of male sheep for most of the summer, this has been made up of the 3 ram lambs that are being kept for breeding and the last of their less fortunate mates who didn’t make the grade, 2 shearling rams (last years lambs now 19 months old), one older ram and Graham a vasectomised male. This bunch of 11 bachelors has now been disbanded as the 4 lambs have gone to the abattoir and of the three remaining, two are in show training and the third  has hopefully been sold to a young breeder in Yorkshire. One of the shearling rams has been sold to be used on a very interesting and prestigious breeding project in Hampshire – he just has to pass multiple health tests and a fertility test so fingers crossed. More about this next time. And Graham the vasectomised ram, which is known as a teaser, is in with the ewes (Pictured above meeting his harem for 2 weeks of fun!). We used Graham last year for the first time, his presence in with the ewes reminds the ladies it’s coming up to the breeding season and they begin cycling. This means when we swap Graham for the actual ram more of the ewes will fall pregnant in the first cycle and as a result lambing will be a 3 week flurry of activity rather than a long drawn out affair. With both cattle and sheep a short calving/lambing period makes all of the livestock management for the rest of the year easier.   

Turkeys

Some of you may have read that there will be a shortage of Christmas turkeys due to not enough processing staff. We are very lucky (and proud) that we process our turkeys entirely on farm ourselves with help from our loyal, local staff which consist of turkey pluckers and packers, so fear not a Lydiard turkey will be on your dinner table on the 25th December.

They are all doing very well and getting bigger, they’ve eaten 3 paddocks of stinging nettles and are about to go out into the orchard to eat the apples and other fruit.  

Available to order from the first of October.

Pop-up shop - Lamb & mutton

Our next shop will be on Saturday 11th September where we’ll have the last of this years lamb and mutton available. If you want to make sure you get your hands on some, a very limited number of boxes are available to order on the Lydiard Turkeys website.

If you’ve not tried mutton before you really must. The mince makes the best burgers you’ll ever have and the chump chops (equivalent of a rump steak) are as good, or dare I say better, than any beef steak!

Individual cuts of mutton will be available to purchase along with all the usual pop up shop goodies.

Talking of beef, fresh beef boxes are available to order now for collection from the farm on Saturday 4th September.

Visit Andy Rumming's website to view products and place an order.

A trip to the abattoir (details of slaughter process, skip this bit if you'd rather not know)

When producing top quality beef and lamb, welfare of the animals is always top of the priority list and this should remain so right to the very end. The most important link in this chain is perhaps the final one, the abattoir. In 1971 we had 1,890 red meat abattoirs in the UK. I can just about remember one in Hook just 2 miles up the road but now we have just 249. The result is animals having longer journey times and less options for the small farmer. We are comparatively lucky, we take our stock to an abattoir 50 minutes away. There is an abattoir closer but we like the fact that Broomhalls at Eastington (nr Stroud) is a very small family business. When we arrive it’s always calm and quiet, it’s always the same chap to help gently unload and nothing is rushed or hurried. In fact there is an air of calm about the place.

I’ve dropped many sheep, cattle and a few pigs off at the abattoir over the last few years and its always sad to know that it’s the end for that animal. Fortunately, I know the cow or sheep is going to be treated with the utmost respect right through the process. For a while now I’ve thought I ought to see one of our cows slaughtered, but at the abattoir there is normally a queue of pick-ups with trailers waiting to unload and with no other parking it’s not practical to wait about. However, on my last visit I was a bit later arriving and the abattoir was quiet so I had the chance to watch. I moved our cow from its holding pen into the alley-way which resembles the cattle handling facilities most farmers have, this means it’s not an unfamiliar environment for them to be in. Once at the end of the handling alley the slaughterman who is on a raised platform at the side places a captive bolt gun on a specific spot on the cows skull and the animal is killed - instantly. It’s not pleasant, I don’t think watching something die could be but it’s not unpleasant either. The animal wasn’t stressed at any part of the process and was dead in a fraction of a second.

The owner, who is also the slaughterman, was interested and pleased that I wanted to share what I’d seen and was very proud of the fact it’s a very swift and humane process.

Broomhalls process about 15 cattle a day but the service is invaluable to help provide high welfare, local meat. Large meat processing factories wouldn’t want to deal with the likes of me bringing 2 cows every few weeks so the small abattoir is the un-sung hero of local food and animal welfare, long may they continue.   

Wildlife on the farm - Heading south

I think of the farm as a motorway service station for the hundreds of birds that pass through on their long journeys south. Not so much a Moto or a Welcome Break, full of burgers and slot machines, but more of a posh one like the Gloucester or Tebay ones, packed full of local great, in season produce to fuel the weary traveller onward for a few more miles. At the moment fuelling up we’ve got yellow wagtails, wheatear and whinchat -all following the cattle about gorging on the insects the cows stir up from the long grass. The swallows are also increasing in number every day, they’re not all ‘mine’ so some must be heading south or maybe moving around locally to enjoy the feast. We’ve had a couple of days where the swallows have flown low over the fields hovering into the wind to pluck tasty morsels from the taller plants. A hundred birds doing this is quite something to watch but not quite as impressive as when they swarm amongst the cows, streaking between them twisting and turning to catch those flies. As I watch them I’m still hoping I’ll one day witness one passing under a cow.

I have to make time to watch and enjoy them as once their gone it’ll be a long wait around to April to welcome them back home.

Thanks for reading and please forward on to any friends who may be interested in what we are doing.

Best wishes

Chris & Lindsay Rumming