Glensaugh News 28 February 2011

At Glensaugh we have started calving our suckler cows. The latest bovine celebrity is L5 who calved a pair of Charolais twins. Multiple births in hill cows are regarded as a disaster because the demands of two calves (who incidentally are doing well) quickly outstrip the resources of the mother. Our strategy therefore is to offer additional milk to the calves while they are young and impressionable so that one of them can be weaned if no foster mother is found.

The setting up of our biomass enterprise has reached its final stage as the boiler house is completed and the plumbers make final connections before we commission the plant. Meanwhile our new firewood processing machine has been brought into use and a mountain of logs has been reduced to a heap of usable fuel-wood.

Having cleared away a lot of last years timber we are now ready to fell more. Two overgrown sycamores at Glensaugh Lodge are due to come down. A lot of sycamore has been planted as a nurse crop, but not removed. We are getting round to this about seventy years later.