I'M writing this on Sunday morning. The milking is nearly finished and I've snuck into the house for another cup of tea. My demeanour this morning is best described as disconsolate. If I had to put it to music, it would be called "the pissed-off dairy farmer blues".

I switch on the television and the main news item this morning tells the story of a hard- drive containing the personal details of prison officers which has been lost, or stolen. You'd have to have a pretty sad life to want to read that on a Sunday morning. Now, if it were the bank statements of some of my neighbours, that would be very different.

Yesterday afternoon, before I went out to milk, I checked our "close to calving" cows. They are put in a shed for the purpose, with plenty of room and plenty of nice clean straw – the bovine equivalent of having a baby with BUPA.

Two of our best cows have calved since this morning, unaided, obviously without too much difficulty, and now the calves are up suckling their dams. They are by a dairy bull and are beautifully marked.

I didn't go any closer until this morning and, as I approached the calves, I thought they would make really smart cows. But they won't, ever, because they are bull calves and have no sale value whatsoever.

But that is not the real loss. We aspire to have a healthy herd of cows that are all home- bred, self-contained and not exposed to any disease risks that might arise from bought-in stock. To do that, we need to have about 40 heifers coming into the herd every year. For the second year running, we look like getting only 20.

Nature usually sends a 50/50 split of heifers and bulls and we ensure we always have at least 90 cows in calf to the dairy bull to achieve our target.

As nature is still probably sending along the equal-sex split, who, I ask myself, is having all my heifers?

I make a point of tracking down the keeper, as I've not seen him lately. Keepers are making the headlines around here for all of the wrong reasons and I need to check if he's OK and not in Swansea Gaol.

He's fine, apart from enduring the worst pheasant-rearing season for years. Young pheasants don't like a lot of wet weather so that in itself is self-explanatory.

They lurk about in the mud of their rearing pens in wet weather. On nice days, they travel about the shoot, looking for insects and natural food, which is much healthier.

The usual collective noun for birds is a flock, but I don't think this best describes these birds – as they roam about, curiosity takes them long distances, much to the keeper's dismay, and I often come across groups of 40 or 50 exploring the estate. I suppose the southern hemisphere term, mob, would describe them better than flock. I came across such a group last Wednesday.

About 20 of them were sitting on various bars of a gate. The top bar was inevitably the best place to be but sitting in the middle of the top row, ironically with very similar markings, was a buzzard.

The pheasants seemed totally at ease, as did the buzzard – the pheasants either side were as close as 6in. I don't know if the buzzard was pausing between courses of a meal or even if he was licking his lips before a meal began.

There was almost something of

about it all: "That's a very sharp hooked beak you have there Mr Buzzard, nothing at all like mine."

Whatever happens from now on, this will be classified as one of the most difficult harvests ever. A reminder, if it were needed, that we take our food supplies, anywhere in the world, for granted at our peril.

Progress, when it eventually comes, will be very slow, with combines having to tackle laid crops. Straw may be damp, soil will find its way into the combine and inevitably, from time to time, they will become blocked.

The threshing mechanism of a combine is towards the front and if a blockage occurs, bits of combine have to be removed and the blocked material dragged out, usually with difficulty, by hand. This is the conventional method but I once worked with a combine driver who could not resist climbing on to the back of the combine and disappearing into its bowels in search of the problem. I think he must have been a reincarnated mole because he would burrow away through the innards of the machine until you could hear him moving about quite close towards the front.

There were three of us on the outside one day and him on the inside when I motioned to my companions to be quiet and shouted out in my very loudest voice: "OK, I think we've cleared it, start her up." The cries of "no" that came from the inside had us in stitches. There was a very fast exit from inside of the combine, head, elbows and knees were bruised and clothes were torn. Strangely, he didn't see the funny side.