Across some of the most beautiful
and remote landscapes of the British Isles...
There's not many views like that. It's absolutely stunning.
..Scotland's farmers work day and night, producing our milk...
Come on! ..and our meat, trying out new ideas...
Buffalo doesn't want to do something, you're going
to find it very difficult. Hey!
..and striving to turn a profit in tough economic times.
We're struggling, we're definitely struggling.
Blue rosette.
Over the course of a year,
six very different families let cameras on to their farms...
Everything that could have gone wrong there went wrong.
Oi! The idea of lying on a beach - bliss!
..to share their struggles...
We have to get her out or she's going to die.
..and their triumphs.
Thank you!
It's not about the pay cheque. It's about the lifestyle.
It's late February in Scotland.
Winter is starting to release her grip up in the hills.
For the farmers, it's a chance
to prepare for the onslaught of lambing next month.
But with little growing, they can be long, hard, challenging weeks.
In North East Scotland, in the fertile but chilly plains near
Aberdeen, Mel and Martin Irvine and their family breed
pedigree Limousin cattle and an expanding flock of sheep.
The worst of winter has passed us. The dark nights are disappearing.
So you're looking forward to getting out in the spring,
go onto the land, start working the land,
grass will start growing, things will start greening up.
So a far better time of the year. Much better.
Martin's passion is for bulls. Wife Mel's great love is sheep.
Is that a little baa?
She's doing her very best to ensure that ten-month-old Erin
will follow suit.
We have sheep socks, sheep trousers, sheep pyjamas,
hat, which she's wearing, two sheep dresses.
Actually, I was looking at a sheep jumper online the other day
but it was sold out in her size so I resisted, didn't I?
Martin's off to the Spring Show today.
HORN TOOTS
With Mel on farm duty, Erin gets the morning with Grandad Stephen.
Erin loves it. Look. She absolutely loves it.
Mel's first task for the day is to feed
and check on all the sheep, most of which are pregnant.
Eat out my hand? Yes.
These five sheep are potentially carrying 11 lambs.
You don't really count them until they're out.
This time last year, Mel was heavily pregnant herself.
I remember exactly how they're feeling.
I actually was sorting out sheep the day before I gave birth,
cos Martin was sowing barley in one of the fields and I was
helping Stephen sort out sheep till half-past-nine at night-time.
Yeah. The day before I gave birth.
Yes.
As well as their own 240 sheep, Mel and Martin are also contracted
to look after another 600, which belong to the nearby estate.
This is why they say they're stupid.
The sensible ones stay and eat the food. The stupid ones run off.
This one's been stuck in a burn
and this one gets stuck practically every day.
I don't know whether it's the way the lamb's lying in her or not.
This ewe is carrying twins and has toppled over,
due to her unbalanced weight.
Crows have already found her.
Right, this is how cruel crows are. Horrible.
They think that she's dead, look.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to gently roll her.
Sit her up. She might have a wobble.
Steady.
That's her.
You see, she's a little lopsided.
She gets stuck every day, practically.
She's been sat there a little while.
Back at the farm, something's making a rattling noise.
RATTLING
So I'm going to put my bucket back in the shed and then I'll come back
and see these two ewes that... RATTLING
..that are in the um... That are in the shed.
I hate things it when things make a noise like that.
You never know what's happening.
The noise is coming from the bull shed.
RATTLING I don't like the sound of something in there.
I think that the bulls are just having a fight, but...
Oh, you silly...! RATTLING
Stuck.
14-month-old Lomu is trapped. He's pushed his head through the bars.
His ears have flipped up and now he can't pull out.
See, you never ignore a sound like that.
RATTLING
Lomu is a prize bull and worth thousands.
If he panics, he could choke himself.
She rings Martin's dad, Stephen. Hi, are you on your way back?
There's a bull got his head caught in the gate.
OK. OK...
OK.
The other bulls can sense Lomu's growing distress.
I'm going to go get the grinder out, in case it's needed.
Help is on its way.
But it could come too late.
55 miles northwest,
in the Highlands, Penny and Robin Calvert own a 110-acre croft.
They settled here 25 years ago
to fulfil their dream of living off the land.
They have 23 Highland cattle,
12 Cheviot sheep,
24 hens,
and one greedy pony, Jojo.
You never trust spring, until you know it's spring.
You've got the thrushes out there, making a lot of spring-like sounds,
there's a lot of birds down in the woodland down here, chaffinches
and things, the ducks are doing their bits and pieces
they do at this time of year before they start nesting,
and I mean, those are all signs of spring coming in, but there's no actual growth in anything yet.
Until the spring grass appears next month,
each day starts with the feeding rounds.
But negotiating the croft has its challenges.
There's nothing for you, pal.
Nothing for you at all.
No, don't run down there, you silly horse!
To replenish the sheep feeder,
they need to get through the gate in Jojo's field.
And Jojo is always hungry.
I'm not going to have much luck keeping her out, I think.
Yes, you are. I do not want her in... I'll do my best.
Sneak me through.
Get out of it. Go on.
I tell you what I'll do.
I tell you what I'll do, I'll give her a few nuts.
Jojo. Jojo. No!
Get out of there. Come on. Get me through that gate, then.
Right. Shut it fast!
Shut her out. I can't. Shut her out.
She sneaks through the gate. Right, we've got a problem now.
She shouldn't be with us.
Nothing's going to get fed because of this damned pony.
What are you doing down here? Come on. Jojo!
And quickly makes it to the sheep feeder.
HE SHAKES THE BUCKET OF FEED
Now, Robin must tempt her back.
Get out of it!
Right, move fast now.
Hold tight!
Shut that gate now!
Yes.
PENNY LAUGHS
Pony psychology.
She's just such a greedy animal, is that one.
She's so inquisitive.
Come on! WHISTLES
The small flock of Cheviots
also know what the sound of a rattling bucket means.
Come on, girls.
Food.
These are being fattened up to be sold later this year,
as breeding ewes.
So it's important they don't go hungry.
It's not the best hay, but they were eating it a couple of days ago.
This time of year, they'll go for anything green, rather than the hay.
There are signs of new grass, but much of the croft is mud-bound.
It's been mild, but it's been very, very wet.
The ground has just never, ever dried up.
Anywhere that there's been vehicles over, there's been a lot of cattle
coming through a gate or something, we've got mud absolutely everywhere.
You talk to the old boys and they all say this winter that they don't remember the crofts as wet.
Robin's 23 Highlanders
are well adapted to cope with this wet weather.
Their double-layered coats insulate them, but with
so little to graze on at the moment, they need to be fed silage and hay.
As with all herd animals, there's an established pecking order
and they can fight over the winter feed.
Look at that, them two locking horns down there.
You don't want to be in the middle of that.
With pregnant females in the fold, hormones seem to be running high.
The red cow coming back up this side now,
that's the one that's causing the trouble.
Very rare they go at it like this.
Seamus the bull tries his hand at mediation.
It's not a good time for them to be doing this because, as I say,
they're not that far off calving.
The calmer we keep them, the better.
I think we'll just leave them to it.
They know what they're doing.
COW GRUNTS
RATTLING
Back in Drummuir, Mel has a dilemma.
Should she try and free Lomu herself, or wait for help to arrive?
Come on. The best and quickest option is to cut through the bar.
It might pop out if I go in and do it,
but I just don't want to make it worse.
I hate this. I really don't like it.
He could potentially fall down and choke himself.
Mel's father-in-law, Stephen, is on his way.
Stuck.
Stuck. Stuck, stuck, stuck. Stuck.
I didn't want to go in and make it worse, in case...
I took the grinder out.
Is he going to come out or not?
No, he's stupid. Are you going to grind it out? Grind it, aye.
I don't know whether he's still got the foot thing on it or not.
While Stephen gets the angle grinder, Mel's mother-in-law,
Denise, keeps watch.
As long as it doesn't get his windpipe,
he's just stuck at the minute but he'll be able to breathe OK.
Sometimes, they lie down there
and they'll rest their head on the bottom bar and sleep.
Of course, if we wake it up and maybe push it out forwards,
that's him hacked.
It has happened before cos you'll see there's a bar
missing in the bottom one there.
Steady, steady, steady.
Yeah, just watch it doesn't fall.
GRINDER WHIRS
Shall I go in and push his nose?
Lomu could free himself, but he doesn't seem to realise it.
Shall I push his nose?
That's it, coming right off.
Silly. Watch the gate.
Stupid bull!
He's out.
Unsteady and with a bloodied nose, but back on all four feet.
Just.
Steady! He's a bit wobbly.
He could choke if he's in too long. He's started...
His head's started to swell up. Aye, he'll be fine.
He's just been in a good fight.
Have a black eye.
And a bloody nose. Aye.
I'll re-weld it.
How on earth did he get his head in that tiny hole? Tiny.
He lies, he sleeps and puts his head on there.
And then the lugs fold in, pop up, can't come out.
We'll go for the sheep.
It's been quite an ordeal for Lomu,
while Erin's been completely oblivious.
This is why Erin loves the Gator so much.
Sleeping.
So, just leave her now.
180 miles south, on the rolling pastures of Dumfries...
..the Roan family has farmed for over a century.
FAMILY TALKS OVER EACH OTHER
The current residents span three generations.
66-year-old Derek has handed over the day-to-day running of the farm
to his two sons and their wives,
Stuart and Aylett and Steven and Tracey.
They farm sheep and keep pet pigs.
But the financial backbone of the business
is their herd of 320 Holstein dairy cows.
And the 3.3 million litres of milk they produce each year.
Dairy cows in general and especially Holsteins are pretty placid.
I just like working with them
all the time, especially ones like this, that you can speak to.
Come on.
Steven's job is his passion. Go on, that way.
And his wife and children have to share his devotion
with 180 bovine beauties.
I'm so interested in them. I'd have followed them
right through from birth till they're older animals.
I just know near enough every animal on the farm.
His knowledge of his cows
and their breeding history is almost encyclopaedic.
I'd also know her pedigree, her ancestry, what daughters that
cow's already got on the farm, just purely from looking at it, yes.
He's a bit special!
Certainly a talent that we all kind of joke about,
but I think we're all pretty impressed how he remembers it all.
213, a black one.
For a Holstein Friesian fanatic like Steven, today is a landmark day.
The quality of his herd is to be evaluated
and scored by one of the Breed Society's assessors.
Holstein expert Murray Cochrane inspects 13,000 cows each year.
They are the predominant dairy breed in the UK.
And Murray knows exactly what makes a top milker.
There's about 16 to 20 physical traits.
Body depth, udder depth, and then you measure the rump structure
of the cow, which is the last bit of the spine to where the tail is.
A lot of things go wrong from that area,
including how the animal walks, how the udder's attached and
whether she'd actually be fertile.
Murray scores each cow in a range of categories
to calculate her final rating.
50 is poor, moving up to very good, 85 to 89.
And for the cream of the dairy crop, 90 to 97, excellent.
And excellent again, yes. Twice, excellent.
These rankings help Steven make good breeding decisions and a high
scoring cow will fetch a higher price at market, should he sell her.
The information that I give them today,
they can use that to put more emphasis on breeding
the top end of the herd and less emphasis on breeding the bottom
end of the herd, so they're breeding better animals at the top
and getting rid of the animals at the bottom.
It's a wee bit nerve-racking because
you're never quite sure what somebody's going to think of them.
84. Four? 84.
She's just...a little bit.
The cows get assessed after each calving.
Next in the spotlight, number seven.
She is excellent in the frame score,
which is the body score,
she is certainly excellent in the mammary score, which is the udder score.
And it's whether the cow has good enough legs to be an excellent cow
is the question.
And she does, just.
90.
90? Yep. Right.
It is nice to hear what he's saying about the cows,
it makes you appreciate them a wee bit more.
It's entertaining sometimes.
This cow is really milky, she's so dairy, so feminine
and she just wants to produce milk.
If this cow was a human, it's in the area of grandmothers.
And this cow walks like a teenager.
A fantastic locomotion cow.
Her udder is about the appropriate size for her lactations there.
And there's a ligament that runs through the centre of the udder,
which is really what supports its - if it's a lady - the cleavage,
you would call it.
And that's going to keep that udder in shape.
The cow's got all the essentials for a long-lasting cow.
She got 94 points again.
And comfortably, very, very comfortably.
Braveheart Sunray is her name.
Oh, it just makes me laugh, the way
they describe them. I just think
you don't describe your wife like that,
that she has a bit of swagger and high ligament attachment.
And, yeah, it depends if you're a boob man or a leg man, I suppose,
what you like. He's giving me a dirty look.
He's like, "What are you on about?"
We started with an animal score of about 79 points
and finished with one at 79 points.
But the average of the heifers will probably be nearer
a good healthy average on the heifers today of 82 or so,
which is a very healthy average.
And we've hit the high spots a couple of times
with 94-point cows. It's been a good day, I think.
It basically confirms that the sort of standard of the cows
is improving, year on year.
It's been a good day for Steven.
For the ladies, probably less so.
I think for them it's kind of just another day, basically.
They just like their routine.
They don't like anything out of the ordinary.
February and March are lean, hungry months
for animals and hard work for farmers.
Winter feeding is getting through what is known as the hungry gap,
where little is growing
and everything depends on conserved food like hay,
which is dried grass.
And silage - grass which has been pickled or fermented
by being compressed and wrapped in plastic.
By slowing down decomposition,
animals have nutritious feed
until nature provides fresh grass in spring.
The constant challenge for Robin
is getting good grazing from the rough, poor-quality land
that makes up so much of his croft.
He needs to encourage the growth of new grass for his hungry livestock.
Today he's chain-harrowing the fields,
spreading out the dung after winter grazing
and pulling up moss to help drainage.
BULL BELLOWS
You're always looking for keep for your animals.
Whether it's letting the grass parts come on
so you can get them for hay
or whether it's getting the rough grazing into better condition
so you get better or more grass on it, keeping the weeds out of it,
keeping the thistles down, keeping the bracken down, this sort of thing.
It's a worthwhile job, is this.
I'm looking back on this when it was nothing but sort of
literally bracken up here
and bits of stunted birch kicking about all over the place.
There was no grazing on here whatsoever.
And we've taken it from that
to being rough like it is now.
Still too much moss in it but we're keeping raking away at it,
that will help with that one a bit.
And I say, the natural cow manure going on it will do nothing
but improve the grassland.
It's quite tricky going with this little machine
because this is a terribly unstable little tractor.
But it's terribly handy as well because you can get in between all the rocks with it.
Maybe not the most efficient way of doing things
but it's the kit we've got and it works.
PENNY CALLS
Thank you.
Crofting is being able to get out on the hill on a Tuesday lunchtime,
like now, and just savour what is on offer for the day,
like we've seen wagtails reappearing after the winter.
We've just seen five deer.
It's just a magic thing.
I go back in and Robin says, "What did you see?"
And there's always something.
We're very lucky living up here. It's...
The wide-open spaces are just brilliant.
Penny's daughters, Rebecca and Rowena, grew up on the croft
but have now moved away from Scotland with their families.
I'm quite jealous of families that have lived
here in their crofts for generations
and their grandchildren are still there, the grandparents,
all the different generations living within a few miles of each other.
But here we are,
living a life that's been lived for hundreds of years.
I'm very reliant on the aeroplanes, the plane flights to London
to go and visit daughters is essential.
Three years ago, Penny was diagnosed with a degenerative condition,
Parkinson's disease.
To be quite honest, having Parkinson's
and living on a croft is all right, it's OK.
Oh, look, it's a fox, look!
Oh, he's beautiful, isn't he?
Parkinson's hits the brain
and not only are you
organising your movement of the body but your brain function...
..er, gets very affected,
so that if you've got fresh problems to sort out each day,
then it's keeping the brain matter healthy,
or as healthy as you can be.
Have you found a rabbit hole?
Yes, Meggy, come on then, leave it, now.
Leave it now.
We only ever get cross with each other
if one or the other isn't trying.
If you're not pulling your weight, then, you know,
not to do with CAN pull your weight,
if you're NOT pulling your weight, then we get annoyed with each other.
But apart from that, we just let life flow along
and meet each problem as it arises.
Penny and Robin are now in their early 60s.
Both had professional careers in music
and fully appreciate what this crofting life gives them.
We don't have to commute.
We don't have to find somewhere to park, you know,
all the things that make most folks' life difficult,
we certainly have the freedom from that.
But there again, when they're having a lie-in on a Sunday morning,
I'm still out here doing this.
If you're in charge of yourself and in charge of your own time,
it makes all the difference.
It's a cliched statement but it's a way of life,
rather than a profitable occupation, shall we say?
But, erm, I'm not complaining.
200 miles south at Roan's dairy, it's the dawn of a new day.
Steven is on milking duty, as his dairyman's on holiday.
MACHINERY WHIRS
I was up at three this morning.
But it's not my regular job, so I can't complain.
Come on, on you go, hup! Come on!
180 cows come through this milking parlour.
Milking them all takes 3½ hours.
This happens twice a day -
at four in the morning and again at three in the afternoon.
Just now, it's getting to work close with the cows, and just seeing them
full of milk in the morning,
is probably what makes it worth getting up for.
Steven's passion for breeding the perfect Holstein
is also driven by his milk yield.
They're an excellent dairy breed,
unsurpassed in their ability to convert their food into milk.
This cow, 137, you've got a lot of veins on it, which points to
basically a high-producing cow.
You can see the udders sort of jam-packed full of milk.
Come on!
The cow basically starts making milk, starts producing milk
when she has a calf, so when she starts lactating,
we obviously take the calves off the cows
and rear the calves by hand, so that we can milk the cows.
To keep the cows producing through the winter, they need
a nutrient-rich diet, mainly silage made from summer grasses.
The cows are averaging about 31 litres a cow a day just now,
which is fairly decent. It's not outstanding.
The quality of the silage in their diet this winter's not been
vintage, so, it's very difficult to sort of get them really performing.
On a dairy farm, there is no milk without pregnancy and calving.
In tandem with the process of milking
is the breeding cycle of each individual cow.
It's all run on a tightly monitored system.
So, this is our breeding board, that I call it.
Every cow number has a magnet.
White ones is the ones that have just calved.
And then the ones that have been turned to yellow,
they're all due to calve.
They've been dried off, they're not milking at the moment.
And then once you get scanned in calf, it gets turned to pink.
It's quite an old-fashioned thing, it's not new. But we still like it.
Morning! Morning.
This morning's 2,845 litres will be sent for processing.
At current farm gate prices,
a litre of milk generates a profit of at best 2p.
So, this morning's milking will make Steven about £50.
120 miles north, in Argyll, Western Scotland,
husband-and-wife team David and Sandra Colthart run a large farm
that stretches over 3,200 acres of hilly terrain.
Like all farmers at this time of year,
David is at the mercy of the weather.
In Argyll, this is very common for winter weather, mild and wet.
So, you just get used to it.
You know, it's not very nice to get used to but it's just,
days like this, especially if you have weeks and weeks of it,
really, that, it kind of grinds you down.
CATTLE LOW
This morning, David's sending his calves to market.
To protect them from the boggy conditions,
he keeps his cattle indoors for winter.
As the next generation of calves are about to be born,
he needs to make space, by selling off last year's crop.
They've been in since the end of October, beginning of November.
And hopefully, they're looking the best that they can.
They're quite happy, quite relaxed, they've been fed every day.
And they'll leave the farm, so, I do feel a wee bit sorry for them.
The sale of these calves is one of the big paydays of David's year.
He hopes to make around £800 a head for the best animals.
It's either them or me - if they don't go, then all these bills
need to be paid, so unfortunately, it's just the cycle of farming.
The challenge will be getting 35 nervous young animals
into a large, unfamiliar trailer.
It is a wee bit stressful, when they go onto a lorry.
They'll leave the shed, all the mums are at the other side.
At a certain point they kind of click there's something up.
So, you hope that everything goes smoothly.
But there's always a wee bit of anticipation just in case it doesn't.
Right.
Come on, steady now. Steady now, steady.
Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa...
Steady now, steady.
If you get stressed out, they'll detect that
and then they get excited, so, just try and keep things cool and calm.
Come on! Hup, hup!
Hup, hup! Right, get them quickly, guys. Come on, quickly. Get them.
And how you keep them calm is to stay calm and focused.
Yup, yup, yup.
Hup! Ooh...
Come on.
These calves will be sold to a farm with better grazing, where
they will feed and grow for another year before going to slaughter.
That's good.
Calvies aren't stressed, they're all on, thank God for that!
David's pens won't stay empty for long,
as calving starts in a few weeks.
It's actually deathly silent at the moment.
It's a bit sad, them going away, but they have to go away,
there's bills to be paid. But...it's just very quiet.
I just don't like it when there's quiet.
With so much rain at this time of year, the land quickly becomes
waterlogged, causing problems for both farmers and their livestock.
David's had an emergency call asking for help.
There's a cow trapped in mud on his neighbour's farm.
Get her closer in the first instance...
The young cow is stranded in a bog next to a fast-flowing river.
You don't have to pull, Robert, just be sure, maintain her head...
She came here to calve early this morning... Whoa, watch the head.
..and has been trapped in the mud for at least eight hours.
Pull it down. Watch, she's in the muck there.
She's found the worst possible place
to wander away round the back here to calve.
And she's just got stuck in a bit of a bog.
It's just a very awkward position here,
she just got over a bit of fence and came down here, where
she shouldn't have been and then started to calve and then got stuck.
Her calf died during the difficult birth.
But they can save her - if they can free her.
Where we're at the moment is
we have to get her out or she's going to die.
So, we should get her out quite quickly now.
Birth is the most hazardous time in any young animal's life
and an anxious time for the farmers.
Up to 8% of dairy calves die within the first 48 hours in the UK,
mostly due to difficulties during calving.
With lambs, the start of life is even more perilous.
Around 15% of all lambs born will die before they are weaned,
from trauma of birth, disease or predation.
Even with good farming and the best animal husbandry,
life is a struggle for survival.
A nationwide health scare has reached the croft in Sutherland.
Robin and Penny's chickens are in lockdown.
Watering the hens. They drink about a bucketful a day,
so you've got to keep up to it.
At the moment they're having to be penned up
because of the avian flu scare.
But if they were running free,
they could be getting water from anywhere in the puddles
and things, which they can't, so we're giving them all their water.
The threat posed by the contagious avian flu strain H5N8,
carried by some wild birds, has led to all poultry having to be
kept indoors for the past three months.
The small henhouse has become a detention centre.
CLUCKING
HENS CLUCK EXCITEDLY
Because the grain is so dry, they need the water to soften it.
Whoops.
These hens normally enjoy a stimulating free-ranging life,
scratching and foraging for insects.
Until the flu scare passes, they're thoroughly cooped up.
We've got 17 eggs today. I prophesised 16 but we got 17.
You can just pick them up, look, they're very tame.
So, there we go. So, I'll sneak out rather than them getting out.
They're desperate to get in the daylight.
Until the ban is lifted, they'll have to stay in quarantine.
Well done, Meggy, are you guarding them?
She could sit there all day, until she's got something else to do.
And then she'll zoom off and do the next thing.
In between tasks,
Robin has been working to complete a long-held ambition.
MACHINE BUZZES
Rather than buying feed for his animals,
he wants to create and process his own.
He has the technology and he has the skills.
It's Robin's feed mill.
I'm still a little bit at the experimental stage with this.
He has patiently restored
and reassembled a collection of old farm implements.
A barley bruiser...
We'll certainly have some sort of a safety cage on it
when I get it sorted out.
A chaff cutter...
And this, believe you me, is quite hard work.
Lovely old machine.
And today, it's the inauguration of a Victorian root vegetable cutter.
That's as near as it's going to be.
See, what I'm doing here is essentially antediluvian.
It's old-fashioned, it's out of the way, it's, it's...finished.
These days have gone.
But I don't see any reason why they should have done.
I mean, essentially, you are putting yourself to more work,
you know, it's a bit...a bit cranky.
I mean, you know, we're not going to go 100% our own feed,
we'll still be buying some in, obviously.
But, erm, it is a way of making sure that the croft is
as economically run as we can possibly make it.
It's so well-balanced.
You lift it with its weight, then, as it gets over the top,
the weight drags you down.
It's just doing it for me, it's pulling my body round.
Right. Moment of truth time. Let's just see if it goes, shall we?
Right, here we go.
How's that?
Two going through at once, there.
Perfect! Oh, it's slicing them up!
Yeah, perfect! There you go.
Do you want sliced turnip for your tea? This is for the cows, girl.
And that's what we've ended up with, which is exactly what I wanted.
There you go. That's fantastic!
Robin and Penny eat the animals they rear and the vegetables they grow.
That's another piece of Victorian rubbish
that's back in working order again.
With the feed mill, they can now extend this move towards
greater self-sufficiency to their livestock.
I'm very happy with that, very happy with that indeed.
Job sorted.
Back in Appin, David is trying to rescue a neighbour's heifer,
trapped in clinging mud.
You don't have to pull, Robert, just be sure maintain her head...
She's just given birth but her calf has died
and she's cold and distressed.
If you probably pull around to the side a wee bit
and then up and lift her over.
David's brother Alistair and his nephew, Robert, who farm nearby,
are also here to help with the rescue.
Ooh!
They plan to winch her out of the mud,
watched anxiously by her owner, James.
Using Alistair's harness and getting it around her,
so with the telehandler I can lift her out of here,
because we can't get the tractor round.
Right, watch she doesn't go forward.
You get that, Alistair? The straps underneath her? Her tummy.
It's good that she's struggling
because she's still got a bit of kick in her yet.
The heifer weighs around half a tonne.
If you drop that down, Keith, we'll spread out the forks.
Luckily, a local builder has come to help -
and offered the use of his specialist kit.
It may look a wee bit rough
but this is the only way we can get a chance of getting her out.
There's no other access with a vehicle or anything,
other than lifting her this way.
Watch! Let it go forward!
Right, have you got it, Robert?
They're worried that she might panic
and free herself from the harness, falling backwards into the river.
Stay there, stay there. Right, quickly, get that on!
On the thing, quickly, before she lands in the...
It's all right, it's all right.
When she gets up, she'll start kicking and trying to struggle out.
So, it's trying to keep the thing in place.
I know, I know.
Watch your heads, guys.
Right.
Right, good girl. With the lift under way,
they need to be sure her weight is evenly balanced in the harness.
Well, it's not comfortable but we need to get her right,
so she doesn't slip out.
You've got it right, yeah? Right.
Tell him to take it close to the ground as he's going out.
Just so he doesn't tip the thing.
And tell him to come in with it, Alistair.
I do think that if there's a cow that's in trouble,
it knows you're trying to help it.
Do you want to get someone to get this here?
Get out here. Out here.
Freed from the bog, she can be gently transferred to a dry barn.
That's the difficult bit over now, getting her out of there.
Just need to see her get in the shed.
David's neighbour, James, found her first thing this morning
and struggled alone to rescue her, before calling for help.
I mean, she was nearly up early on this morning, down there.
But she was so deep.
Oh, she'll be all right. I've no fear of her, really,
she's cleaned anyway.
If she wasn't eating, we'd be a lot more worried.
She's not looked like she's broken anything
but she could have ruptured something internally,
or during calving, she could have caused some damage.
But she's shaking, usually a sign of low calcium.
To help her recovery, they're giving her extra calcium.
Right down, put it down there...
She's produced colostrum and milk for the calf she lost
and her own body could now be depleted.
Right, hold that, Robert.
It's absorbed into the bloodstream
and it usually goes quite quick.
We're not a vet, so we wouldn't put it into the... Vein. ..the vein.
So, we put it under the skin, so it absorbs slowly,
into her bloodstream.
You don't want to go in too fast, you have to make sure it's at
blood temperature, so it doesn't give her a shock to her system.
Helping each other, when a farmer or animal gets into trouble,
is crucial in rural communities like this.
If a neighbour calls for some help, he's got a cow stuck or whatever,
you know, you just drop everything and just go and help him because,
you know, if you were in the same situation, you'd, you know,
you'd be asking him if you could and he would be there in a shot,
so, it's very much a community thing.
We've had to do it since we were kids, helping our parents
or our neighbours, so it's quite normal just to get out and help.
She's lucky she's alive
because she could easily have went over the bank into the burn.
She's inside, she's in shelter,
so she's dry and she'll be left in peace
and because she has a fighting spirit in her
and she's a young beast, I think she should pull through.
It's just going to take a wee bit of time.
On the Roans' dairy farm,
the carefully planned year-round calving is closely monitored.
The hope is always for a female.
A heifer calf can join her mother in the milking herd
and produce more calves herself.
When they have a high milk-producing,
high-scoring pedigree cow,
they're keen to get as many daughters from her as they can.
Today, Steven is concerned about the future of his very best cow,
Colvend Duplex Rox.
She's very nearly the Holstein Breed ideal,
scoring 95 out of 97 in her last classification.
She's the only cow I've ever had to reach that score.
Basically, I think there's only maybe about a dozen cows
go 95 points in the whole of the UK.
Her mother was a really good cow for us.
Her mother gave over 100 tonnes of milk in her lifetime,
which is quite a milestone.
You're always wanting to get as many daughters out of these cows
as possible because you're always hoping that
you're going to produce really good cows and keep the line going.
Unfortunately, now she's 10, she's started to miscarry her calves.
The cows have to produce a lot of milk and, in order to do that,
they have to keep producing calves every year to start lactating again,
and she's not back in calf, so basically,
the prospects for her aren't very good.
Her milk producing days might be over,
but her excellent genes could live on.
In a last-ditch attempt to get more daughters from her,
Steven is turning to embryo transfer technology.
She's being given hormones to make her ovulate more than one egg,
and then inseminated.
Specialist vet Tom Kilpatrick will find out today
if she's created any embryos
which can be implanted into a surrogate.
It's a good way of getting more heifers out of
the really good animals.
In this case, this girl's getting on a wee bit.
Tom's been helping Steven maximise his pedigree
bloodlines for many years.
In fact, he helped breed this cow
using the same technique 12 years ago.
It's a day he remembers well.
It was Steven's wedding.
Steven said I would need to come sharp in the morning
to get the cow done, and I said,
"Look, I'm not coming on your wedding day to flush a cow.
"We'll put it back a day."
I don't know if that's actually right properly true.
I think Tom's slightly mistaken, there.
No, no, I remember it well...
Are you sure it wasn't, like, just the day before or something
and I had to go away to get ready for the wedding
or for the rehearsal? I don't think it was the actual day.
The first thing, I'm just having a wee feel at the ovaries there.
There's several bumps where the eggs have been released,
so that part of the process is going all right, I think, so...
That's a good start.
Steven is hoping for between six and eight viable embryos
from this cow with such outstanding genetics.
It's an expensive procedure, costing £400,
which is commonly used only by top pedigree breeders.
It's a very specialised technique and, I mean,
there can be financial rewards,
if you get offspring on the ground.
Any embryos she has produced are flushed out
and captured in a filter.
It's a bit tense, you know, just a bit anxious, really...
..just with what's going to happen,
but there's nothing you can do about it.
We just have to see what happens.
With the flushing completed, it's time for Tom to head to
his mobile lab to find out how many viable embryos have been collected.
I'm going to pick the embryos out now.
As well as embryos, there's lining cells off the womb and suchlikes.
Tom and Steven hope for at least six embryos.
Four embryos in total,
three of which will be suitable for freezing.
And the other one is fertilised,
but it's not good enough to freeze,
so not great, but not a complete disaster either, but...
..you just can get that with old cows sometimes, as well.
We have three, Stephen. Three?
And there's a fourth one that's degenerate. It's fertilised, but...
Yeah.
So... Yep.
Well, at least there's something.
Aye.
It's a disappointing result, but the three precious embryos will be
frozen until suitable surrogates can be implanted with them.
Be nice if we got a couple of heifers for him,
just to keep the line going.
Well, it would have been nice to have, say,
five, six, seven, eight eggs,
but I did have a cow that only gave two eggs
and both of them were implanted,
both of them held and both resulted in a heifer calf,
so you can never tell how it's going to pan out, sort of thing.
You've always got to be optimistic.
I don't think you'd be farming if you weren't optimistic.
The news in Sutherland is a bit more positive.
It's chicken liberation day.
CHICKENS CLUCK
As Rogart isn't a high-risk area for avian flu,
the government has ruled the hens can be freed.
It's time to let the hens out again after their incarceration
since the 6th of December.
The poor things have been shut up
because of this avian flu preventative measures.
Unfortunately, it's, er, put them into rather poor condition.
They haven't been getting the sunlight
they should have been getting, so when I let them out this morning
I'm pretty sure they'll be keen to be out.
You can hear them talking away there.
As usual, Meg's taking up her stance.
GREAT ESCAPE-STYLE MUSIC
There we go.
Ho-ho, look at this - keen to get out.
RAUCOUS CLUCKING
Look at them.
Dull combs, raggy feathers.
Poor things.
Look at them.
That's the hens out again this morning.
Freedom at last for the chickens.
Happily free-ranging over their croft again.
Another hen here wants to come and say hello.
Cheeky hens.
Next time, on This Farming Life...
PLAINTIVE BLEATING
Oh, God, that sound. I'll be sick of it in about two months.
..spring has sprung on David's farm.
Great. First calf.
669.
It's D-Day for Stevie's new bull, Heineken.
If he's not got any of them in calf,
then unfortunately he'll be, eh, away for burgers.
And Tracy and Aylett swap mud and muck for glitz and glamour.
I'm totally going to feed calves like this in the morning!