Welcome to our October newsletter

Moving fields for the ewe lambs - We've all certainly enjoyed these few warm sunny days!

Christmas turkeys

October for us means just one thing, selling turkeys!

We have always set the 1st of October as the date when we open our online shop. First thing in the morning Lindsay changes the settings on the website, pings everyone on the email list a message, and crosses her fingers that everything works. It always does because everything has been checked, double checked and test purchases have been made to ensure the correct confirmation emails go out with the right products, increasingly tricky with multiple products and differing collection details!

We are always amazed that as soon as the shop is activated orders start coming through. This year we sold over 10% of our turkeys on the first day which we think is a record. We’ll have to keep up the momentum with the marketing but it’s certainly a very positive start to the season and we’ll be keeping a close eye on sales, and the stock we are predicted to have, and take sizes off sale as we run out.

Each year we review our costs to work out if we need to reduce, maintain or increase our prices, it’s always a tricky task. This year the chicks and minimum wage have increased but feed costs have reduced a little. We’ve also made a significant saving by moving away from the beautiful branded boxes we used to use, to plain packaging - not so attractive but a lot cheaper and a saving we can factor in when working out the pricing.

The conclusion to all this is that we’ve put the prices up on the smaller sizes but kept the bigger ones the same as last year.

We have to be honest also about the fact that the turkeys have to make a profit. It’s a lot of work, needs a lot of capital tied up in buildings and equipment, and, is very stressful at Christmas – after all, the turkey is the centre piece of the most important meal of the year, each one has to be perfect!

Many small turkey producers have stopped over the last few years, and I remember one farmer telling me that producing turkey was “not for the faint hearted”. For us it’s a very important part of the farm business and we’re confident we’ll be doing it for many more years.

Pop up farm shop Saturday 12th and Sunday 13th October 10am – 12pm

Park Farm, Hook Street, Swindon, SN5 3NY

Our own rare breed lamb & mutton will be available in the fridges - Selection boxes can also be pre-ordered on the website. 

Plus we have all the usual goodies including our 100% pasture fed beef, fresh bread & lardy cakes, a huge selection of jams & chutneys from Rosemary, British in season fruit & veg, a range of British grown pulses, Dairy products from Berkeley farm, Free range eggs and more!

We should also (delivery hopefully arriving on Friday) have some Christmas goodies from the Authentic bread company based in Newent. This includes organic mince pies and Christmas puddings - It's never to early to think about Christmas!

Dogs on leads very welcome - Cash or card accepted

New butchery update

Andy putting the panels up for the new butchery fridge

The main job for the autumn is to build our new butchery. This HAS to be finished by December and we’re just about on target but I’m sure there will be a few late nights along the way. The new fridge has been built and we lifted the refrigeration unit in yesterday. The next tasks are building the rail, which will run the length of the building for moving beef around, and panelling the walls before the resin floor is laid – 7 weeks to go, it should be fine!

Sheep update by Lindsay

Lydiard Brunel in with his ladies - He has just had the raddle colour changed to green

Tupping is in full swing, and every ewe has a yellow bottom – I put a paste called raddle on the ram’s chests so that when they cover the ewe it leaves them with a colourful bottom. I start with yellow and then after one cycle (17 days), I change the raddle to a different colour so that I can note if any ewes have repeated. A ram will only mate with a ewe if she is in season, and the hope is that he got her in lamb on the first attempt. Sometimes the early repeats are just because he was full of enthusiasm and got carried away on the first day after not seeing a female for 11 months!! Hopefully all the ewes will lamb over a 3-week period so that me and Colin (the dog) aren’t sleeping in the lambing shed in the campervan for too long. The ewes will be pregnancy scanned in early December and hopefully plenty of lambs will be arriving in February.

Farm wildlife

The last Swallows fledged at the end of September, but they still spent quite a bit of time perched above our butchery building site being fed by their parents long after they were able to fly. They normally do this behaviour for a few days, but this last brood of the year seemed to be dragging out the process, probably because of the weather, or perhaps they had been over enthusiastic to get airborne because of the time pressures they were under, and then thought better of it! Anyway, the final tally for Swallows this year was 16 broods from 12 locations and a possible three other broods from nests that were too tricky to observe the comings and goings.

2021

4 nests, 20 chicks

2022

7 nests, 11 broods, 54 chicks

23 

11 nests, 15 broods, 65 chicks

24

12 nests, 16-19 broods, 70 chicks

You’d think that counting Swallow nests is easy but it’s surprisingly tricky. It’s hard to see the active nests as many of the buildings have old nests in as well. Swallows will either have one, two or three broods, and some try but fail to breed. The broods all end up over lapping and you can only really tell you have a successful nest when the chicks are visible and feeding over the side.

All my figures are best guesses and my conclusions for the season are more buildings being used, two new buildings occupied and more nests in modern type buildings as opposed to older traditional buildings, and perhaps a slight increase on last year’s chick total.

As many farms have declining Swallow numbers ours appear to be stable.

A couple of weeks ago I noticed what I assumed was a Little Egret flying around the farm, beautiful birds and I’ve always been surprised I don’t see them more often as we have a good stream for them to fish in. I never got a good view but the small white heron-like bird is unmistakable. A few days later I got a better view, it was wandering around the cows – which, along with a yellow beak is a dead give away it was in fact a Cattle Egret. Cattle egrets first bred in this country in 2008, they are still a rare breeding bird but they’re getting well established and I’m sure in a few years will be as successful as the Little Egret.

Hedgefest

Back in the spring we held a small event on hedges which was a great success and the organisers suggested we did a bigger, more ambitious event in the autumn to inspire farmers to learn a bit more about better hedgerow management. The event is generously supported by North Wessex Downs National Landscape, and this has allowed us to have a packed agenda of speakers in two venues, as well as six demonstrations continuously taking place, including two professional hedge layers. The event is on the 21st of October and is free of charge, please click the link to find out more and book a ticket.