It is now a full year since we arrived at Blackmark and a time to reflect on the triumphs and tribulations of a new farming challenge.
Let it be known that we love a massive challenge and although the past year has been somewhat tricky, the beauty of the surroundings makes any misery vanish from memory.
The Challenge of Moving
The biggest challenge of moving to a farm which has not been run as a complete modern unit for decades is that everything over the years has got bigger. Bigger tractors, bigger sheds and bigger bales, demand bigger lorries, bigger yards and bigger roads.
When our thirty cows arrived, one week after our furniture, they had to be unloaded on the main road. We had no where to store their silage, nowhere to feed them out of the mud and no chance of bringing in our three artic loads of farm equipment. So we built a yard at the foot of our farm track.
We then had to build another yard at the top because turning the artic in the bottom yard was utterly torturous in winter conditions.
Finally on the 11th February 2016 Jim managed to bring our last artic load of stuff up the farm track and our move was complete, two months after we had begun.
In the next blog we face the challange of catering for thirty "in-calf" cows, through winter and with minimal facilities.