I am in a long term relationship and it’s not my wife…..

I know that’s a startling revelation for the Farmers review Website, and trust me I had reservations about this topic. But to reassure you my wife was aware of this relationship long before we got married, and has resigned herself to playing second fiddle to my ‘other woman’.

My life and business is ruled by this volatile temptress, holidays have been cancelled on her whim, and the time I have to spend on my family is decided largely by her moods swings. Every Sunday night I study her weekly diary, only to realise without fail she’ll have changed her mind by Tuesday.

I speak of course of the weather….. a topical subject.

Everyone it seems has their own weather experiences, unsurprising considering how generous the weather has been with its bounty this last decade. Our own worst experience came in June 2007 when a wet winter made way for a wet spring. Rainfall was copious culminating in approximately 9 inches of rain in 10 days, 5 of those inches falling on the 25^th June.

To put that in context we farm in an area used to an annual rainfall of 23 inches, there are no rivers only drainage dykes, and we are located within a mile of the coast.

The sheer volume of water on already saturated land led to the drainage system being overwhelmed, resulting in nearly 50% of our farm being flooded to a depth of 2 foot in places.

We fortunately lost very few livestock, mostly by good fortune as stock netted fencelines stopped lambs being washed away or stumbling into the submerged ditches. I shall never forget swimming 100 sheep and their lambs down the back of a fence and forcing them through gates to the few acres of grazing we had above the water level. One or 2 lambs on the verge of exhaustion had to be carried out….

We farm around a gas storage installation, with a series of raised roads which turned out to be a godsend as we cut fences to allow sheep to clamber up onto the tarmac havens.

In  what I consider a typical farmers way we got on with it. Neighbours rallied round…..loader tractors with gates arrived and livestock trailers found….pens were made…grazing was found.

I shall never forget the frantic noise from the sheep as we had to lead them out through deeper water, and the water seeped into the base of the livestock trailers….

Nor the strangeness of riding across fields to find submerged feeders and electric fencer units….

Yet in many ways we were lucky.

 Our crops kept their heads just above water….this crop of oilseed rape was harvested by a neighbour in early September. And through his sense of adventure we only left 20 square metres, which he tried hard to get on metre wide tyres. The sight of a large combine going from forward to reverse very quickly was a regular sight that year…

I never knew till that year that silage bales will float…..

This is a resounding memory….Hares perched on a pile of fencing stakes to escape the flood water.

The other remarkable thing i never photographed was little collections of bugs gathered on the top of fencing posts to avoid the water.

I like to think they all survived.

Fortunately the bedding levels in the fold yards were higher than the water level….

But we were lucky…. over 30 houses out of 80 in the village were flooded.

Our farmstead stood high enough to escape.

My sympathies go out to anyone currently suffering through flooding.