I'VE not seen a rat about the yard here for months. This is good, very good. But it's not quite as good as you think. There is a price to pay for this rodent-free zone – feline price; we are overrun with cats.

I don't know how many cats there are, they don't keep still long enough to count them. Could be 30, could be 50. Most of them are kittens.

They all live, not surprisingly, close to where we have calves on milk. Next to every calf pen there seems to be a receptacle that will hold about a litre of milk. Soft-hearted farmers are known to fill these with milk when they feed the calves.

We also have a very large bale of sweet- smelling hay. You probably don't need me to tell you this hay was made a couple of years ago.

We put this sweet-smelling hay in nice little racks for the calves to eat. The sooner the calves start to eat some fibre, the better their digestion will work, and the better they will thrive.

Hay racks full of sweet-smelling hay, I have discovered, are ideal places for a cat to stretch out in comfort while it idles the day away until it's time for the calves to have some more milk. A nice little hay rack will hold three adult cats or about 10 little kittens.

Calves, I have also discovered, are less likely to eat hay if it's stinking of cats.

Sometimes, on dark, wet days, my mind drifts towards the word "cull".

I know I could catch them and have them neutered but I took about 20 to the vets once and they got out of their boxes and nearly wrecked his surgery.

When he finally rounded them up, he pointed his finger at me and said: "Don't you ever do that again."

But I don't have only dark days, I sometimes have bright ones, and as I go towards the calf pens, buckets of milk in each hand, I have to smile at these semi-wild kittens that run to meet me, torn between their desire to be fed and their desire to remind me that they are indeed wild; backs arched, tails erect, spitting sparks, ready to fight me.

The dog keeps well away during these encounters. The dog, for his part, has developed a particular excitement on Friday mornings when I take the wheelie bin down to the bottom of the road. I suppose I have to pull it a couple of hundred yards and he becomes so animated about the process he has bitten me twice now.

But I'll never swap him for anything. He thinks the world of me. He knows I'm in the house while I'm writing this and he keeps creeping further and further through the kitchen door.

I can hear the corgi, whose kitchen it is, growling at him. Now they are fighting and Mert is getting the blame and a bollocking to go with it. I'll take him for a ride in the Discovery in a minute; just the two of us together is the best company either of us ever gets.

I've got a friend who used to be a builder but did a bit of farming on the side. He took on some extra land one year and bought a lot more sheep. If you've got a lot of sheep, it stands to reason you need a good sheepdog. So off he went to buy one.

He went to one of those top triallists, who can make a dog do just about anything, and paid him £500 – which was a lot of money for a dog 10 years ago; it's a lot of money now.

We advised him, we in the pub, not to let the dog loose for a few days until it got used to him. He didn't listen and the next morning he went out into the field where the sheep were, made the dog sit down by his side, and then with all the panache of a contestant on one man and his dog, told the dog to "get by". And the dog did get by, he ran around the flock of sheep in a perfect line beside the hedge, through the fence at the end and around the next field and the next and to cut a long story short, they never saw him again.

As far as I know, he could still be running – or then again, one of my friend's canny Welsh neighbours might have got himself a top-class dog, very cheap.

■ MY travels this week have taken me to the Lake District, to the Westmorland Show. My dairy co-operative had a stand there.

The day was dry to start with but field conditions were very wet underfoot. By mid-morning, the sun came out and was soon followed by a strong wind – strong enough to blow cups of tea off tables.

The sun and wind combination soon started to dry the ground, quickly and very visibly. Then a big black cloud came up the M6 and it rained heavily for about 20 minutes, so we were back where we started. So typical of the year so far.

Sadly, several wives told me they didn't expect their husbands to be milking cows in 12 months' time. The weather this year was, for most of them, the final straw.

With little prospect of a profit, enough is enough. Huge numbers of dairy farmers are drained of determination.