The week on Manor Farm has been mainly preparing for the next lambing session, with Ian helping Kevin all week.

Births are due to start on the 20th, but one lamb was born three days early, a good, strong, healthy youngster. All barns housing the ewes have been cleaned out and batches of individual pens put up. As each ewe lambs, she will be penned with her offspring until Kevin is sure that all is progressing well and that there is a strong bond between mother and baby.

The ewes have been guided through a footbath once a week for the past month, but this has now stopped with an intense period of lambing. One other job, apart from all the routine work, was turning out to grass 300 of the ewes which gave birth in January.

A job completed the week before was to vaccinate the January born lambs to protect them against a number of clostridial diseases .

During the week I attended an NFU South West Region Livestock Board where I represented Wiltshire's livestock farmers.

The meeting was held in the regional headquarters, Exeter on Tuesday. I was however surprised to hear on my return that the weather in North Wiltshire was nothing like the wall-to-wall sunshine we had in Devon,where it was a warm, sunny spring day!

It was an interesting meeting with several speakers including from the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board. This is our levy board, from which funds are used for research, knowledge transfer and promoting our produce, just to name a few things farmers value.

One topic up for discussion at the meeting was regarding the West Country protected geographical indicator beef and lamb.

We were given some facts and figures on the present state of the market for West Country PGI-labelled meat. We were told that the food service industry is probably the best outlet for this premium product and in the last two months the label has been used in Waitrose and Harrods. There has also been an enquiry from a German supermarket.

A small group was chosen from those attending the meeting to try to find ways to increase sales.

Another speaker was from the Department for International Trade, representing the food and drink sector, which works closely with DEFRA. The job of this department is to make producers aware of trade opportunities. There are regional international trade advisors and overseas staff in 100 market places advising what is in demand.

Recently Melissa selected and helped prepare two teams of Beaufort Pony Club members to attend the area quiz. The Mini team consisted of four children of 10 years and under. The other team was made up of four members from 11 to 25.

The quiz took place in a village hall near Malvern and was run by area nine. This is a large area stretching from north Wiltshire to Hereford. Area nine is made up of 18 Pony Club branches and 18 centres. Melissa told me that the format of the quiz was quite different to previous ones attended. For this one there were eight tables, each with a different equine theme.

One table was to identify pieces of grooming kit. You may think that was fairly straightforward but the items were sealed in a bag and not at all visible, so identification was done solely by feel. Another example was a table set up for charades. Someone would act out a given scenario, such as miming the use of a hoof pick, which the rest of the team would have to guess.

One other example was a table on top of which was a tray of equine equipment which was taken away after a set time, leaving the teams to remember what they had identified.The quiz took two hours.

Our mini team was 4th out of 16 competing area nine teams and the senior team 7th out of 14 teams. Unfortunately only the winners go on to the National Quiz, but well done to all the Beaufort PC members who took part.