Grandfather, Jack Tuckwood: They lived at Northfields. Granddad had mainly beasts and dairy cows. And he used to be a dealer in dairy cattle. And mother also used to work for my grandfather before she got married. So she'd always worked on the farm, but obviously when she got married worked with dad rather than with her father.

He [grandad] milked about 40 [cows]. I suppose. The numbers seemed to go up and down because obviously with dealing if you saw a good cow he'd buy it, even if he hadn't got somebody to sell it on to. So tales were always told that he would go to market just before Christmas when people didn't want to buy dairy cows - because they didn't want extra cows to milk over Christmas - so they would be cheaper. So he'd buy them. And of course mum would have an extra five or ten cows to milk on Christmas Day because he'd bought these beasts. And then they'd get sold in the New Year.

Foot and mouth disease: They're tending to stay well away from farms because of the precautions. I mean in the early days even the bank manger wouldn't call. People were just told you can not visit a farm because it's not worth the risk. And most people have been incredibly good about that. Certainly in the early days, when you weren't sure whether round here was going to be a hot spot or not, people in the village never walked on footpaths. They're still not walking them now to a great extent. We had somebody phone up to say, would it be all right if they exercise their horse past the gate. So the village people, people who live in the village, were excellent about it.

The nearest case to us was Stonesby, which is about 10 miles away I suppose as the crow flies. And there was a case at Ashby. So they've been a reasonable distance away. It's just that being a dairy farm; and the milk lorry has to come every day; and of course the milk lorry has to go from farm to farm; and you don't know where its been before. But then again they take precautions; they bring their own disinfectant; they spray all their wheels before they come on the farm, they go through our disinfectant matt; and then they do the same thing when they leave. So I think on the whole people have been very responsible about it.

Changes in methods of feeding and milking cows: In my Dad's day, and even when we started in '75, most of the feeding was done by hand. So we would order some barley into a roller mill. It would roll the barley - get a heap at the bottom. You then shovel this heap across and mix it with minerals and any other compound feeds you wanted to do. So you've got an even bigger heap. Aand then you would shovel it into paper bags. And then you would take it down the feed mangers and put it in the feed manger. We fed hay when we started, so that was all in little bales. All the bales had to be - strings had to be cut - and the hay put in the mangers. The straw for the bedding was all in little bales. So that was a case of putting it out in the yard and shaking it all up. Now it's round bales in the big yard of straw. So you just roll it and unroll it like a carpet. But we've got a mixer-feeder. We don't grow hay anymore. We do silage. So the silage is cut from the clamp and goes straight into the mixer-feeder. And anything else we want to add, whether it's rolled barley or rolled oats, compound minerals, is lifted up with the macros, put into the mixer-feeder; and then it's just fed down the feed manger. So there's nothing like the handling that there used to be. Of course in Dad's time, when he was milking the cows would be chained up by the neck in their own standings, milked into a bucket - put into a churn. Now we have the hay barn parlour. The cows come to us. They're milked twelve at a time. And it goes direct from the parlour to the bulk tank and is never exposed to the air at all. And then of course it is obviously refrigerated straight away and kept cool until the lorry comes to collect it in bulk once a day. So there's none of this moving churns around.

He used to have an in-churn cooler. So you would milk into a bucket - pour the bucket of milk into the churn. When the churn was full you would put this sort of paddle device - which cold water would run through. And then when you thought the churn was cool, you transfer this cooler to the next churn. And then when you went from buckets - into direct-line - it would then go through a plate-cooler, but then into churns. So of course it wasn't kept cool. It might have been cooled down, but there was no mechanism for keeping it cool. Whereas ours is in a bulk tank; and it's kept at a certain temperature until the milk lorry comes to collect it.

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