Category: Goodlife

Our land management at Glengorm includes several areas of set aside, which totals about 300 acres. Set aside is areas of land which are fenced off from farmed animals in order to encourage natural growth and habitats. We have been assisted with subsidies and grants to help do this but the real motivation for this is for conservation and biodiversity, and to encourage a natural habitat to attract native wildlife.

Out today on a blustery walk to the sea, we went through one which is set aside as a wetland. The area as suggested is very wet and boggy and is carpeted in rushes. At this time of the year it doesn’t look up to much but in the spring and summer its rich vegetation attracts a myriad of insects and birds. At the moment it is home to what seems to be an abundance of frog spawn.

It seems this year that there is much more spawn about then previous years. This may be helped by all the wet weather and rain we have been having this year, today has been the 4th dry day of the year!

Other set aside areas have been created for scrub and vegetation, coastal sea flowers, mosaic habitat, ground nesting birds and wader grazing.

On the estate we also have SSSI, this is a site of special scientific interest. This is the volcano, ‘Sairde Beinn, it is an area of conservation due to its geological interest.

Conservation to us at Glengorm is very important, encouraging biodiversity and native species, and the growth of ecosystems. Our Wildlife Project was set up to help us achieve this and to help make the wildlife here available to all.

All our set asides compliments our farming here at Glengorm. Our highland cattle and blackface sheep are as native as farmed animals can get and live outside year round and enjoy the hilly landscape here. They are allowed access to some of the set aside areas in the winter season as this in turn encourages the cycle of life which thrives there.

Over the last 3 years, we have felled the block of forestry trees which is in the middle of Glengorm. The trees had to be felled as they had reached their maturity and were all starting to fall over. This was done over 3 years as we were limited to how much weight the Glengorm road could take and also to only taking the wood out between April and September, the drier months, to help the roads.

The majority of the wood was taken away and sold, but we have kept a supply to keep our wood chip boiler well fired for the foreseeable future. Coinciding with forest felling, our rhodedendrons were carrying a disease, so we were then instructed by the Forestry commision to clear an area with a 500m diameter to clear all the affected bushes.

An end result of all this felling and clearing is that, a lot of the trees left were exposed and left unsupported, and subsequently they have all being falling like dominoes.

The high winds and sheer volume of rain that we have had this winter has waterlogged the ground and we have been unable to do anything to prevent the trees from falling. The huge noble firs by the Lodge have all gone now, some huge ones fell, and we had to chop down the rest to avoid further damage to the walls and telephone lines. The Beech along the side of the road still stand and we hope they will hang in there. Around the estate there is a lot of blown over Oak trees and at the moment we are leaving them in situ to see if they will evolve and adapt and start growing up in this position as we already have some really old ones which have done this.

This winter we have completed replanting 90,000 native hardwood trees in the old forest which include Hazel, Hawthorne, Blackthorn, Rowan, Alder, Oak, Cherry, Aspen and Birch. We have had to fence off a huge area surrounding the forest and Castle to prevent the deer from getting in and eating them. This year we are going to replant closer to home and finish tidying up all the recent casualties in sight of the castle.

The tidying up is ongoing. When the weather is not too wet, Tom is out with his willing helpers chainsawing, shifting or burning debris to ty and get us away from the graveyard of trees. The piles of tree trunks and logs are still stacked where they fell, but they will get moved soon and will be used for firewood or will be chipped for our boiler.

Calving

Early this morning, calf no. 3 was born on Glengorm. He was discovered by Tom and Asha whilst they were feeding and unfortunately he came into the world on a very wet and windy day.

Our calving period at Glengorm, runs through February to the end of May. The bulls go out early June and the gestation period for Highland cattle is 283 days. They are often born into bad weather.

The rain, wind and hail persisted and Tom made the decision to go and take the cow and calf into the shed. The calf’s mother is a heifer and this was her first calf. The calf was maybe 12 hours old and hadn’t appeared to have suckled yet. Highlanders are very resilient and don’t mind bad weather, but when we reached them both, the calf looked really cold!!

We walked them back to the boat shed by the pier, which wasn’t an easy task, the field was very wet and boggy and the calves weak legs were struggling. The heifer won’t enjoy being stuck in the shed tonight, but we will sleep easier. Hopefully tomorrow the calf will have fed and they will be let loose again

Single, twin, triplets or empty!

The sheep were gathered last weekend by Alexander and his team of collies and brought in for scanning. This is done each year, to determine which sheep are pregnant and how many lambs they are carrying. It is done very similarly to the way us women are scanned! Daniel, who comes over from New Zealand each year to go around a lot of farms with his machine, has this down to a fine art and takes no more than 10 seconds per sheep.

The sheep are put through a race which takes them to a small sheep crush where each sheep is stopped whilst Daniel quickly scans and informs Asha whether the sheep is carrying a single, twins, more or is empty. It is Asha’s job to mark the sheep with spray dye so we can tell at a glance who has what and then the sheep can be sorted into groups accordingly.

This process is very quick and helps us on farm to know how much to feed the sheep, overfeeding and underfeeding both cause problems. Over feeding a sheep with one lamb too much will mean the lamb will grow too big and this will result in problems at birth, underfeeding on the other hand may cause the sheep to loose too much condition and abort the lambs.

Our statistics this year were very good, our best results ever. Our overall percentage rate between the black faced sheep and our crossed sheep was at 154%, thus meaning that out of 100 sheep we should yield 154 lambs.

This good rate could be down to many different factors, the weather plays a big role as sheep don’t really like the rain, and November when the tups went out happened to be very dry this year. Other factors which affect the sheep are their general health and how they have fared over the summer previous to tupping and then how they are fed after tupping. Sheep are very susceptible to stress, dogs not on a lead can cause a sheep stress even if it doesn’t chase it, and this may lead the sheep to abort.