The end of November is upon us and preparations for Christmas are well underway. The past month has been primarily involved with improving the daily routine after the housing of the cattle at the beginning of the month.

One of the main areas of improvement has been in the method of feeding silage to the cows. They are terribly wasteful old dears, and like nothing more than to pull the long forage from a round bale of silage, through the feed barrier and then stand on the clean food before complaining that there is no further food left in the feed area. This wasted and soiled silage has then to be cleaned out daily, and at great expense later in the year, it is spread back on the fields in the dung.

We had been using a bale chopper manufactured by Teagle of Cornwall for some time, known as a Tomahawk 4040. Although a most excellent machine for chopping and spreading bedding straw, when used for chopping a silage round bale, for which the machine was also designed, the scenario became extremely labourious. It could take up to twenty minutes sometimes to chop one bale, and all the cutting blades in the machine would rapidly blunt themselves after only a few bales. After much discussion with the manufacturer and intensive experimentations by ourselves, we replaced the all of the cutting blades with a new harder version, some of a Tungston Carbide type. Wow what an amazing improvement. We can now feed a short chop length of only four inches of silge which the cows find impossible to pull through and waste, and really they find it a much more palatable feed. It nows takes only five minutes to chop a complete bale, using minimal diesel and causing a fraction of the tractor wear of before. Teagle's service and advice has been second to none. Many thanks to Tom Teagle and all his colleagues for their excellent assistance.

Another snag that popped up earlier in the month was the sad demise of our trusty 1960’s Lister SR2 that we rely on constantly to drive our Startomatic generator that powers the farm and house. Those of you that are lucky enough to be connected to the mains supply, enjoy the privilege! I had have to commission our second standby ST2 Lister, whilst I rebuild the first engine, which suffered Big End failure at 23000 hours. Also we are undergoing a bit of a power revolution as I have recently purchased at great expense, an Outback Inverter to be coupled with the generator to give us constant 240v power from a large battery bank. This should bring our generator running time down from 16 hours a day, to hopefully three; if my calculations are correct. This will save use a fortune in fuel and generator wear. The children are most excited at having constant available power, as is Miranda. I told you that we live somewhere to the left of the 21^st century.