Sad goodbye to my faithful Chum

Students have arrived back at Walford and for some this is their first taste of life away from home. This in itself brings its own challenges. We get asked how do you cook baked beans or can you boil an egg in a frying pan!

On to farming issues. The biggest enterprise at Walford farm is dairy and like so many other dairy farms we welcome the recent farm gate price rises in milk.

We are currently getting around 30 pence per litre for our milk which is a huge improvement on 12 months ago. These prices have ebbed and flowed with more ebbing than flowing. We have all seen the scenes on TV of farmers picketing the major dairy companies. Now, in no way do I condone this, but I do feel for the farmers and their families who have suffered huge financial heartbreak over the past few years.

Let's hope we are now in a spell of stability for the dairy industry.

Further to this, I must congratulate Muller based at Market Drayton who have had the foresight to offer their supplying farms the chance to sell up to 25 per cent of their milk on the futures market. This has been done with many commodities like grain and potatoes for many years and very successfully.

The hope is this will encourage the large commercial users of dairy products to buy British dairy products instead of European imports. This can only be good for the local Shropshire economy.

I am always looking at ways to improve things on the farm, both financially and in ways that will make my working day easier, and on this I recently had to make the tough decision to have my Border Collie put to sleep. Chum had been a faithful friend for 14 years and it's only when they are not there do you realise how much running the sheepdog does for you.

And so I went in search of a new dog. Everyone who is selling a trained young dog says it's the "best they have ever had"! My answer to that is: Why are you selling it then?

I finally found one I liked and Roy is now my new dog on the farm. I set to work on striking up a bond and partnership and things were going along really well, so well that I thought I might even enter the two of us in a local trial.

We spent two weeks really working hard every spare moment on the sheep. The trial was on a Sunday. It got to Friday and I thought we were doing great. I even told my wife while the three of us were seated in the garden that we were on for Sunday.

On the Saturday morning I thought, one last training session then we are ready. Well, I can only say Roy had the worst day ever. We never got to the trial. Roy has worked amazingly every day since!

I think Roy knows more about sheepdog trialling than I do.

Richard Aldis is Walford Farm Manager.