Forget hi-tech – the wheelbarrow gets my vote
There's been a competition in my farming paper to find "your favourite invention or piece of machinery which could be big or small, old or new, but has made a significant contribution to the industry", writes Rosemary Allen.
Then it gave some examples – rotary milking parlour, precision farming and robot milkers and feed scrapers.
You can't deny that these machines and techniques have revolutionised farming, but so did the wheel, the horse, sheep dogs and farmers' wives! I'm being silly now, but we take these things for granted because they've been around for so long – especially farmers' wives.
Being a non-techie person, I am impressed with what some of these ideas and inventions can do, but again, are some of them really necessary? Take the robot feed scrapers. They were invented to overcome the way cows throw their feed about when they are picking out the bits they don't like. There are a couple of ways to avoid this without resorting to walking up and down with a shovel three or four times a day, or buying another gadget.
Firstly, the feed could be made the same consistency by proper mixing, without bits they can pick out, like long straw, and secondly they could be fed from a trough with a high front so that they can't throw the feed out and can therefore reach it day and night, and troughs keep the feed clean and palatable.
How many times do you see people standing in the feed, or tractors dropping mud or dung next to it, to be scraped up by man or machine later? So troughs are one of my favourite inventions.
It took me quite a while to give up my knife in favour of the foot shears that Peter brought onto the farm, but I immediately fell in love with the sheep crate, which turned them over and kept them still, and saved my back. It almost made foot trimming a pleasure.
Tractors and their attachments don't really interest me, but having moved from small square bales to big round ones the need for spikes was undeniable.
But my favourite "machine", is the wheelbarrow, and its "attachments" – the fork and shovel. I've spent many happy and rewarding hours shovelling dung and clearing ditches. It is repetitive and never ending, a bit like housework, but infinitely more satisfying. Ah, the good old days!
* Rosemary Allen is a retired livestock farmer, now living near Ellesmere, and with her husband Peter is part of CowCash-UK
