Loads of people will tell you farming’s a lonely job, whether you’re the boss or purely an employee. In some respects that is true but if you are technologically minded, even only slightly, you’re never alone!

Bleary eyed and functioning on automatic pilot you don’t feel your best at 2am while doing a check on the ewes during lambing. So it doesn’t improve your mood to find a dead lamb in a skin and its live twin looking for its mother. You start berating yourself; “should have come out sooner” “should have put the ewe in a pen earlier” “it’s my fault the lambs died and the mother’s done a runner”. You would love someone to talk to and share your frustration with but its not fair to wake your already exhausted partner.

Enter Twitter-land. At 2am when you thought you were alone you actually have a mass of “friends” at your fingertips with whom to share your troubles. They’re most likely doing the same as you, farming. But even if they’re not from the same industry they still support you.

In the palm of your hand you have a world wide web of friends. Able to support, listen, encourage or share with you in the daily frustrations of the job.

It can act as a pressure release valve for even the most mundane of things, such as forgetting to call someone to a flat tyre scuppering your plans. Such small things can be the breaking point to your day and to get instant replies that lighten your mood and tell you the monoploly isn’t all yours really can make the difference.

Farming is certainly hard work, many factors influence the job which you have no control over what so ever. But it doesn’t have to be lonely or isolated. You may not be able to see people physically, sometimes not a bad thing, but you can converse with them via such sites as Twitter.

Twitter is a Pandora’s box of information, humour, images and chat. It never ceases to amaze me what nugget of information I find on a weekly basis.

So when you feel brow beaten next time at 11pm when the combine has blocked or at 7.30am when it’s too wet to plough or at 2pm when the sheep have broken the fencing and you send up the “Why me?” question just remember “You’re never alone.