6.32pm - Sunday 5th November 2023 7,880

Bolusing cows, someone asked me the other day what we were giving the cows, so these blouses are all trace high iodine and we started this last year after a few years of bad calvings we had literally been at rock bottom loosing ten % of calves which is RUBBISH not only for us but defo for them, I’m an expert at skinning calves and adopting them on but let’s be real it isn’t something to be proud of as it means you have lost a calf (again and again and again) we tried everything, postmortems on multiple calves we even took a calf from its mum when we realised it wasn’t a viable animal and had it at the vet’s live and checked over… nothing!! We tested for BVD and all sorts of random things, we started giving the cows bovigen scour that’s supposed to boost colostrum and stop scouring calves (didn’t actually have a problem with scouring but at this point we did ANYTHING) we started vaccinating for BVD we changed bulls!! nothing made a defference at all and the final straw was loosing three calves in a row while vets were present! And do you know what showed us the light…. Talking to a mate Charlie who told us he used to rent some buildings across the road and when they were there they had awful trouble with iodine!! IODINE!????? What!!??? So I got an old PM out from a calf managed to translate some Latin god only knows how and realised it was low in iodine!! More of the issues we faced in tomorrows YouTube and if your having similar problems don’t overlook the simple things like minerals. We now use buckets but had 20 blouses left from last year to use up :) I’ll post it in my story.


in 2009 i had no experience of farming or the realities that came with it. That soon changed when I met my other half Roy, I had a job as a carer and in every spare moment threw myself into farming. I had only ever driven a Nissan Micra and had experience with horses, I learnt the hard way as nobody had the time to show me and soon after arriving I found myself mothering on calves to three quarter bred limmy cows. We spent every available moment on the farm between our day jobs. Fast forward to 2016 two children later we moved into our very own farm overlooking the northern Pennines, Laitha.

we are in a transitional period at present and will finally be milking cows and making the final switch later this year, after years of planning and implementing infrastructure we will be milking 120 Jersey cows on two Lely robots. This will be a huge change and a steep learning curve

I will be taking you all along for the ride so hit that subscribe button and see you every other day for farming vlogs.

I am overjoyed to be a farmer. I feel so fortunate every day to wake up and do what I love and even better share it with the world and hope it inspires more young people from Preston to spread their wings and think outside the box the world doesn’t need more childcare workers or hairdressers it needs more farmers.

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