Today was drizzly, cloudy and dull so there was only really one course of action (if you were a cow): to head for the dry field shelter and snuggle down in the straw!!! Well done Thyme!!!
Elsewhere the sheep and alpacas carried on as usual, eating hay from their outside racks, grazing and looking hopefully at Jack as she came through the gate with a laden trolley... The goats managed the quick run to their field shelter after breakfast, lay down again in the dry and then a few hours later bleated to come back in the barn for their tea.
We are, thank goodness, now due a week of cold dry weather. We hope it will be enough to dry out the ground such that we can let the cows out again each day. In an ideal world, we would want to open up the Cow Pad so they could come out to graze but leave it open so they went back at night. That way, the main field shelter in the 4-acre field would remain empty in case the sheep and/or alpacas needed it. The trouble with this idea is that the access in and out of the Cow Pad is via a gate in the corner of the whole Collecting pen so firstly we would need to create a path from the Pad to this gate and secondly the ground by this gate is already a bit poached just with Jack going in and out each day to muck out and feed. Plan b) is to see if the lovely Mike Ford Fencing could come and put in ‘another’ gate directly out of the Pad itself!!! Of course he can only do that when the ground has dried up a lot anyway!!!
The Cow Pad itself is working really well in that the cows have clean, dry lying areas as well as a lot of outside space. We feel it is a very healthy alternative to complete indoor housing. The downside is of course the fact they are still ‘contained’ and we have twice daily mucking out to do. If we can get access to the field sorted for those cold, dry days then we may just have the best of all worlds in that our land won’t get too badly poached because we can contain the cows when we need to, but in less wet times, they can go out!!