FACING UP TO CHALLENGES OF CROFTING
A warm welcome to my latest Tales from the Far North!
As we are rapidly approaching Autumn with the days getting shorter by the day and the mornings getting colder as the weeks go on I’m hit with the surreal realisation that another year is flying by.
It won’t be long until we are driving to and from work in the dark. At least a warming fire awaits us on our return.
For the exact reasons above, I have been mega busy both on the fence line and the crofting side of things too.
These are busy times for me in both respects. The lambs have recently been weaned from there mums and lamb sales are fast approaching to make way for the breeding cycle again. We are then straight into tup sales after ensuring we have new rams (tups) on the ground ensuring plenty of new lambs to come in spring of 2026!
As soon as we weaned the lambs, a lot of the bigger older lambs were kind of self spaining by that time and wandering off! Almost like teenagers, they’re too cool to stay where they are supposed to be and heading straight off into another field to chomp on grass that’s supposed to be kept clean for the stock ewe lambs that we hand pick for stock.
The problem with a lot of my own field boundaries are that many are old school plain wire spec fencing. To give you an idea of this spec, it’s basically a 3×3 square stock posts at 3m centres with two droppers in between this with roughly a dropper every one metre before and after a square post and with the wire format usually being a 6 or 7 wire fence with one barbed wire and 5 or 6 x 4mm mild steel plain wires.
The lambs decide to just force their way through and into the next field. To solve this issue we have been replacing any broken posts and give the wires a tighten up and cladding with a rylock net over the plain, usually with a tornado HT 8/80/22 net.
All of this is, of course, in between running the fencing contracting business. It’s like the old saying “the cobbler’s kids have the worst shoes“. I’m the same, minus the shoes of course! Our own fencing is always the last to get done!
We have also been very busy with customers’ fencing although the tracked dumper breaking down again didn’t help. This time it was just the rear forward / reverse controls that failed. Not bad after five years of constant use in all weathers. This setback was quickly sorted with a call to Gareth at Kattrack. Within 48 hours I received some shiny new handles and cables that got the Morooka back up to full strength again. If you’re reading this, thanks Gareth. Top man!
We were back up and running, from a mixture of stock and deer fencing with a good spec of materials to even a little job where we had to tie down a garden shed using posts dug into the ground with T-bars and secured with 4 points of contact using a 3.15 HT wire secured at each corner with Strainrite xt1’s. Job done for years to come!
As you’re reading this, we are currently getting materials put in place for a nice hill job with some tricky terrain ahead. Bring on the challenge!
Stay safe.
Mark, M – Fence.
