It's a hard life

Alarge part of my life is spent talking to other dairy farmers and it's clear it's not been easy lately. Milk prices are on the slide and they are having difficulty coming to terms with it.

Things have been better since last summer and dairy farmers weren't sure they had found the light at the end of the tunnel, but they sure as hell thought they'd found the tunnel. Now the tunnel has a "no entry" sign on it again and they are justifiably miffed.

No amount of explaining on my part will make them understand that the world milk powder market is on its knees, processors are switching to cheese production and cheese is being dumped here from everywhere, impacting on what we call the liquid milk market.

The liquid milk market is what you put in your tea and on your cornflakes. But a quieter older man has a word or two of wisdom: "There's a world recession on and we are bound to feel the effect of it the same as everyone else," he says. "We're all a lot better off than we were in the Forties and Fifties. It's just that we expect a lot more." And we are better off than our parents were in the Twenties and Thirties.

I thought a lot about what he said. I used to have an old man working for me and would listen to him endlessly, probably because he never stopped talking, but he would tell of an age and a time that we today can only guess about.

I suspect he was born in the first decade of the last century, the son of a farm worker with a large family, and in difficult times, when living conditions would have been very basic and rewards just enough to keep body and soul together, but only just.

He would tell of being sent out as a very young boy, from the age of five, to locate pigeon's nests. These weren't boyhood adventures – there was a real purpose to it, and a significant measure of success was expected by his parents.

Having found the nests they would monitor progress regularly. Pigeons usually lay two eggs and the young boys would have to climb the trees regularly to see when the chicks hatched.

As soon as the chicks were robust they would tie a piece of string around one leg and tie that to the nearest branch. After that they would leave nature to take its course. The parent pigeons would continue to feed their young, but obviously the fully fledged young couldn't fly away, so they just continued feeding them. There's no prizes for guessing where these succulent young pigeons ended up. To most of us today, this would seem to be a particularly cruel practice. To young mouths living on a daily diet of, perhaps, bread and cheese this would mean a tasty meal of protein.

I remember a story of officers returning from World War I astounded at the difference in physique between that of the soldiers from the Commonwealth and the relatively stunted growth of the average British working-class men of the time. The reality was that their basic diet was inadequate.

So back to my farm workman. Everyone called him Rattler because of his talking but I used to love listening to him. He told me that he went on to become a shepherd. We kept sheep at the time and sometimes, at lambing, you would have a hopeless case that neither you nor the vet could save.

Death would be inevitable and I would always detect a pause in him as he surveyed the sick ewe. I might say something along the lines of "that's a pity, but we've done all we can".

He would pause, look down at the ewe and say something about waste. One day I got him to elaborate. He told me that when he was a young shepherd if they had such a case, if the bosses agreed with the diagnosis, he would despatch the ewe with his knife and take off her shoulder.

The shoulder would go home with him for Sunday dinner, his sheep dogs would have the other pieces and what was left was buried.

He wouldn't be allowed to bury the carcass until he had plucked all the wool off it. The wool would be put in a bag and sent away with the annual clip.

He would choose the shoulder to eat because it was furthest away from whatever had gone wrong at the other end of the sheep, such as dead lambs and infections and all sorts of nasty things.

So these may be hard times, but they've been a lot harder.

■ It's such a nice day today that the dog and I feel a bit full of ourselves. It must be the best day for about 10 years. Well, it must be the best day weatherwise for a couple of months, anyway.

But we're not as full of ourselves as the keeper who has just been on a week's holiday in the sun. Best to bring him down a bit. You may remember he has not had the best of shooting seasons with regard to birds shot, so I ask him if the syndicate is going to give him another chance.

He gives me one of his thin smiles and says they are. "They asked me if I would take it on with you as my assistant; they know it's me who keeps an eye on everything for you, but I'm much too busy," I tell him.

The thin smile gets thinner, but he's not sure if he should believe me.

"They know you help as much as you can," he says. "Pity the other tenants aren't as co-operative."

But the keeper is full of the new season and the nice day, and says he's been out lamping foxes.

"Any hares about?" I ask.

"I've never seen anything like it. You have a serious amount of hares up there – there were 14 in one field chasing each other about."

So that's all right, then. It will soon be the time of year when the dog and I will be up there every day and we can see for ourselves.