Despite the mud, Suzie Corboy really enjoys shifting cattle break fences in winter.

AM I THE ONLY FARMER WHO GETS up on a Sunday morning in winter and wonders what the people in town are doing today? Drinking a latte while reading the Sunday paper, a walk along the beach, lunch out?

I know I could do all of these things, but it will be after I do the daily shift of five break fences for cattle on swedes. This is rain or shine, and there has been a bit of rain over the winter, 293mm in July.

After more than a quarter of a century spending my winters feeding animals, I do sometimes think how many more years I want to keep doing this? But every year I am still here. Is this a case of keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result?

Regardless, another winter is over.

The days are busy now with all the fun of lambing and calving. Cast ewes, bearings, lambs who forget which ewe is their mother. Then there are the heifers who decide they want to give birth at sunset, but don’t look very confident that they can do it alone, or the heifers that have a stuck calf but like to act like stubborn two-year-olds and refuse to go easily to the yards to let you help them, despite the fact that you are in a hurry to go out to that birthday party of the friend who’s family obviously weren’t farmers, or if so weren’t good at family planning, or they wouldn’t have been born in September or October.

Despite last year’s dry autumn our ewes scanned exactly the same as last year, 187%. This is not the best nor the worst that we have scanned over the years, but our ewe hoggets looked good in autumn and this was confirmed with our best-ever hogget scanning of 152%. We just have to get most of those foetuses to lambs at tailing, which is sometimes not very easy if the weather doesn’t behave.

I have nearly a month’s leave from my job at St John for lambing and calving, and one or two of those previously mentioned townies have asked me what fun things I am doing during my leave, and am I going away anywhere?

My terse reply of I might pull a few calves out and perhaps take a trip to Balclutha to get more food meets with some strange looks.

I might sound like I have had enough of farming, but when I think about moving off the farm, which will happen eventually, I think of all the great things I will miss. The tuis and bellbirds in the kowhai trees as I walk down the driveway to collect the mail, the kereru that land on the washing line, my pet ducks that waddle along following me as if I was their mother, the new lambs and calves skipping around the paddocks, the majority of whom have caused me no bother at all.

I think I need to book some tickets to go visit my family in Wellington again, then I will have something good to look forward to during my checking of our 150 in-calf heifers. Or chasing a hogget that looked in so much trouble lambing, but can suddenly burst into life and run the length of the paddock in record time without even slowing for a contraction.

Despite the mud I enjoy shifting cattle break fences in winter, it gets me fitter and it is great to see the cattle getting so quiet after 80 days of walking beside them as you shift the standards. In the last two years I have started listening to audiobooks while I walk, and regularly get through three a week, all of which I download free from our local library on to my phone.

Have a great spring and hopefully by the time you read this most of the lambs will be on the ground, without too many losses, and the grass will be waving in the breeze.