Any cattle farmers on here who know much about bulls?

[Prontoe]

I'm worried about my Dad.

How the hell does he lamb 400 sheep on his own?

Being human, he doesn't lamb. The sheep do.

I used to live on a cattle an sheep farm. Bull was also a bit antsy but spent most of his time in a field with the cattle. I had pretty much nothing to do with that side of the farm. I had 60 horses to busy myself with. I do remember sitting in the hayloft one day watching my boss have a Mexican standoff with the bull. Thought he was going to charge!

We did keep the bull, the cows and a few yearling horses all in one field.

Being human, he doesn't lamb. The sheep do.

I’m not even a farmer and I know they don’t do it alone most of the time! Someone has to stay with the sheep when they’re lambing. It’s really exhausting physical work. Lots of it during the night. For a man in his 70s to do that 400 times over a very short space of time on his own is pretty hard to believe TBH.

It smells like shite round here.

It does that

Absolute shite. As if someone once read a bit about a farm, and wants to pretend. But whhhyyyyy?

Talking of shite, does anyone else think that red bull smells of the shite of a cow that's eaten spring grass? Because it really really does.

Why's Mike Tyson a cunt?

He bites folk. That’s a bit cunty TBF

Christ I didn't know that a quick google confirms it is indeed rather cunty.. as you were

OP in the main sheep do give birth on their own but they need attention as well. Make sure the lambs are up and suckling. iodine their navels and give them Spectam against watery mouth. Many lambs come the wrong way. Make sure ewes are not stealing other ewes' lambs. It's constant and exhausting. You can't pull the wool over my eyes.

I think I could guess who else is a bit of a cunt and it ain’t nothing to do with biting

Utter tosh. To imagine that the child of a farmer knows so little and was never on the farm is batshit.

Speaking of cunts, there's a fair few of them on here tonight.
With regards to the sheep lambing, he has them lambing in two separate batches. Some in Feb and some are lambing now.
As I said, he spends 16 hours a day on the farm and sometimes is up in the middle of the night on top of that.
We were never allowed onto the farm and that's just fact - not even my older brother. My mother was over protective so we just weren't allowed onto the farm.
The extent of my knowledge about the cattle would be when we were children, being told to keep an eye on the cattle down the field (from the living room window), to see when one was abulling. All I knew was we had to shout when we saw them having piggy backs. Presumably in hindsight, that's when the AI man would be called.

My father also worked a full time job as a manager in a factory.
Next door neighbour (also a farmer) would help out occasionally. Likewise, my father helped him out. A couple of years, said neighbour went to London for work and my father looked after his sheep as well as his own. Just the way it worked in those days.
It would be a strange fucking thread to make up. But thanks for the compliment that you think I have such a vivid imagination.

He also has CCTV on the shed that the sheep are in, so that he can see when one of them is 'sick' as he calls it i.e. when they're in labour I suppose. My father is probably the most hard working individual I know of. It's no skin off my nose if you think this is some cock and bull story.

In terms of the cows calving, my father bought a calving jack many moons ago. Still he would have to call on the neighbour to help pull some of the calves. It's a full time 24/7 365 days a year job, which he merrily gets on with. Whenever I ring, he's either fencing, sheep are lambing, cows calving, or he's moving them from one farm to the other (e.g. bringing the sheep due to lamb into the sheep shed). Other times he's at the cattle mart as he sells his weanlings on to other farms - marts are closed now due to covid The lambs sadly go to the factory. It's a busy busy job. Next thing he'll be doing will be 'topping'. This involves driving around with a tractor and a sort of blade coming out of the side of it to cut the heads of thistles. I asked him why he wouldn't just spray them with something and he said he could, but he doesn't have 'the price of it'. I tried saying that it would be cheaper and he'd have more free time if he wasn't spending a week a year at that craic, but as I said, nope. I do show an interest, but I know fuck all about it, never having been allowed to be involved. My father jokes that he's on the 'maternity ward', when it's lambing season. To reiterate, the extent of our involvement would have been standing in gaps when he had to bring cattle in for the VET for dosing/testing etc. I also recall that the young calves (well not babies) would be let out into the field next to the house every summer I seem to recall, and that had an electric fence. It was much amusement watching the poor buggers try to escape the field and getting shocked. Those calves would be let into their mothers twice a day for to eat their fill of milk. Wild things they were.
It's a tough bloody job and I don't know how he does it all on his own.
Oh, apart from that, most years, we'd have a pet lamb to feed (usually lambs that had been rejected by their mother, or the mother had died). So I would know a little more about the sheep than the cattle.

He separated from my mother about 25 years ago and his current Mrs. is slightly more involved in the farm, but she also has a day job, so not too much either.
It's complicated.

To add to all that, he was on the bog today, footing turf - he rears his own turf. He's as fit as a buck goat. Never ill. It's only now that the realisation of 70 looming in the near future has come to my mind, that I'm starting to worry about him. He has always just been strong, but I realise he's not getting any younger, so I do worry about him. But he's 70 years farming so he knows what he's doing.

And the next big job will be silage. That's usually a week of a troop of big tractors coming in, and to my immortal shame as a child, my mother would cook dinner (lunch) for them every day and it was my job as a child to bring the dinners over to them on the farm. I was pathologically shy as a child, and I still vividly remember the shame of that daily trip. Refer to said mother as to why I was a shy child.

Any other proof you want?

Also - he has always had sheep dogs. When my late grandfather (the fella with the arthritis) was alive, he would train the dogs. He died about 20 years ago. So my father still has dogs, but doesn't have time to train him. Again, I've tried to tell him to just spend half an hour a day training them and he'd save time in the long run. But it's literally a case of not being able to find the time. He's always at something. I actually feel guilty now for calling him every day as I'm taking up his precious time, but I adore him and always did as a child. My mother was a wicked woman, and he was so gentle in comparison, but we rarely saw him as when he came home from work, he was straight out onto the farm. He reads the Farmer's Journal cover to cover every week, so he's not exactly illiterate. He's extremely intelligent. He just never got a chance to make his own life, though he has confessed to me that he wishes that he had. That's life I guess!

Furthermore, he had a younger brother (the youngest of the five of them), but he moved to London at 18 and got a trade as a carpenter. When my grandmother died, the house was left to my father (as well as the farm which was already his), and the younger brother (my uncle) has now fallen out with the whole family as he assumed the house would be his. Why he'd want a little cottage in the arsehole of nowhere, the Lord alone knows, but that's life. He's actually my dd's godfather and hasn't seen her since she was about 6. He's a cunt. Lol. Very arseholey. Gets drunk and then fights with everyone. He's doing really well for himself and is a millionaire in his own right, so to fall out over a little cottage seems ludicrous to me, but that's what happened. I told my father that he should write a book but he said 'arah sure they're all at that'.

And I'd beg to differ - the sheep do lamb on their own with little to no intervention. Yes, you need to be there to see that everything goes ok, but rarely would you need to pull a lamb. The sheep just get on with it and from my experience, don't particularly appreciate your presence either! Sometimes they need intervention, but mostly they get on with it. An odd time you'd have a weak lamb and they'd be given 'beastings' (not sure how you spell it, but it's the first milk from a cow who has given birth) and that livens up a weak lamb.

So I do know some things, but as I said, we simply were not allowed onto the farm. My mother had notions about herself and was over protective of us. She never worked on the farm at all either. She kept the house and reared us and that was that.

I've been watching this thread and have enjoyed the huge swing from OP being so clueless about farming that they don't know why the bull was in a field with cows to waxing lyrical about calving jacks, silaging and topping thistles.

I got a bit lost at the bit where you said spraying thistles would be cheaper than topping them though, or how it took a week to silage less than 80 acres.