Page 28 - The Farming Years proof

THE GooD SHEPHERD
We had earlier bought a large Rice horsebox/trailer for Jo and this was ideal for transporting the lambs to market. The lambs had to be fat enough to grade which was con rmed at the market. The practice for selection was we would round-up the total ock and go through them all by feeling the fat cover on their backbone for selection – a Sunday job. We needed around 20 plus to ll the horsebox and be suf cient to ll a sale pen at the Monday Thrap- ston market. I did manage to arrange for Jim to do the market transport with Sylvia’s 3-door van Range Rover bought without purchase tax.
We sold 77 lambs in the market that we sent between october 76 and January 77. This left 6 lambs that we considered would not grade which went to the butcher and, funnily enough, went into the freezer for Sunday lunches. They were a bit older yet with a minimum of fat and tasted really good.
It was a commitment to feed the lambs each day and has to be ex- perienced to appreciate the effort involved. You can understand why we didn’t have a holiday for 6 years but it originally helped the work on the house by diverting our money in the right direc- tion. In the end the store lamb project for the year showed a gross pro t of £372 and 6 lambs in the freezer. I think the pro t was the 6 lambs in the freezer! In 1977, for some reason, we only had 49 store lambs showing a gross pro t of £141 which would be a loss. The good side is we still had lamb in the freezer and we had to remember we had made enough money on the hay to carpet the farm house with high grade carpet. It looked as good after 25 year’s service when we sold the house as it did when it was laid.
In 1978 we bought 124 store lambs but 4 died. We would have broken even but it was poor compensation for a lot of effort but I suppose it kept us t and not every hobby makes money. 1979 was a better year. Lamb prices had risen so we bought 30 lambs for £1,075 and sold them for a total of £1,350 – £275 gross pro t.
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