麻豆约拍

Spring arrives on the farms - the season of new beginnings and spring lambs, when the hard months of winter finally begin to pay off.

In the Lake District, Matt, Dani and Murray have their hands full. They are expecting over 1,100 lambs over the next six weeks, and while they are still setting up the lambing shed, some early lambs make an unscheduled appearance. Later, when vet Dani discovers one of their Texel ewes is struggling in the second stage of labour, she steps in to perform an emergency c-section, just two weeks after having her own c-section to give birth to son James.

In Northumberland, shepherdess Emma Gray and firefighter husband Ewan are preparing for the Whitebred Shorthorn pedigree bull sale in Carlisle. To sell as a stock bull, John Jo, their four-year-old bull, needs to be shown off in the sales ring as biddable and good natured - but with just 10 days until the auction, he鈥檚 still not fully halter trained. Tensions run high on the day of the sale, as Ewan struggles to keep John Jo under control.

On the Stoer Peninsula in the north west Highlands, Helen and Graham鈥檚 Gloucestershire Old Spot Sow, Miss Piggy, is waiting to be matched with a new suitor. In true crofting tradition, Graham borrows a boar from a neighbouring croft, and it鈥檚 not long before Butch and Miss Piggy are getting down to business. Later, when Graham discovers the pig house destroyed, he realises Butch may have been a little overzealous.

In Cumbria, father and daughter team Frank and Georgia are nearing the end of the birthing season for their 120 goats. With some of the kids now a few weeks old, it鈥檚 time for disbudding - a difficult but necessary job to stop injury from horns within the dairy herd. Their local vet, Ben, takes on the task.