This past week has felt an awful lot like the calm before the storm. All the sheds are ready, all of the necessary supplies are on standby and there is an almost eerie sense of calm in the yard as we await the beginning of the calving season.

We have about 20 springing heifers and cows on a straw bed and are watching them closely from now on because I have no doubt that once the first one calves the flood gates will open. In the meantime, to keep ourselves occupied we have been spreading slurry on our fields with low covers. As we have a lot of grass around at the moment, we are fairly restricted on where we can go with it. It looks like we will have to start our first grazing round before we can really start to motor at it. If that’s the only thing I can complain about this week I think I’ll live!

Calving on Twitter

With the amount of farmers on Twitter, I think this upcoming calving season provides us with a great opportunity to get our story out there. Most people from outside the farming community are genuinely fascinated and amazed at the things we take for granted every day. It’s a super opportunity for us as farmers to highlight the care and attention we give our animals and the work that goes into it.

Too often I see tweets painting farmers as something to vilify and chastise, often using an example of a single and isolated breach of animal welfare best practice as the industry norm. The best way to combat this sort of thing is to speak for ourselves and I think the best way to start is to get tweeting about what you are doing this spring. Remember, there are people out there that have no connection to farming that would find the most mundane and boring thing you do fascinating.

Farming has a great story to tell and if we don’t tell it ourselves we leave it open to being hijacked by pressure groups and individuals that will twist it any way that suits them in order to push their own agenda. So during the next month or two when posting on Twitter or Facebook, use the hashtag #calving15 and you never know, we might even get it trending!