Category Archive

There are a number of commercial wind farm proposals for North and West Devon in line with the government’s Kyoto Summit agreement. These are being met with massive opposition. They destroy the look of the countryside, they are inefficient, nimby-ism, and the huge grants available to energy companies who erect them is only there to make the government look as if it’s taken the energy crisis and climate change on board. Which, according to some, they haven’t, as they have their fingers stuck firmly in some other mucky puddle.

One argument that opponents to wind farms use is that because they can only generate power when the wind blows, every time a new wind farm is built a new coal, oil or gas station has to be built as well. I’m not sure I understand this. I get the point that wind farms will only ever produce energy intermittently, so they have to be used alongside other forms of power generation. No one says they are the solution on their own, just part of it. I just don’t see why new non-green power stations have to be built as well. Provided existing such stations are kept operational and ticking over, then when the wind drops they can be turned up. The argument that we need new conventional stations seems to me only to hold true if we need more energy overall – but with the increased imperative that now exists for energy conservation that should not be necessary. Indeed wind farms should surely mean that conventional power stations have to be used less (although as I say still kept operational), so helping to reduce climate change? Can anyone please help me here?

On Sunday it was Open Farm Sunday, and we went to visit a farm. It was in a beautiful hilly, undulating part of Devon, a part I’m not too familiar with and so very different from around here. Red, dry, stony land that drains far too efficiently and as a result suffers from drought. The farmers there think of it as marginal land, though to me it looked like an answer to a prayer.

It was a large arable and grass farm sporting a huge renovated farmhouse surrounded by landscaped Japanese gardens, red brick walls, laid brick drives and wrought iron gates. It receives substantial payments from set-aside and various agri-environment agreements. It’s heralded as an environmental flagship farm.

My impressions? One of wealth and prosperity. The farm has served its owner well in acquiring all manner of subsidies which I felt were not an actual necessity in the survival of the farm or the farmer. What did I feel it was delivering in terms of environmental benefits? And value for money to the tax payer? Not a lot. True it was in a beautiful part of the country and the views were stunning, true it had a fine example of a catchwork meadow and true it had some interesting swards. But nothing spectacular or mind blowing. I felt the farm lacked purpose or soul and was being managed to prescriptions laid out on paper without any real raison d’être. No stock, no vibrancy, just neat, polite management filling coffers from the public purse.

I know I’m being harsh; there were plenty of people, especially families with young children, who were really enjoying their visit. It was a good day out. The farmer had worked hard to make it a success, and it was.

Nevertheless when I think of the thousands of farms on the poorer marginal soils of England that can deliver as much, or more, in terms of the environment, landscape and biodiversity by using only a fraction of the money that’s being handed out to some large prosperous farms, I wonder at the injustice of it. To these marginal farms government/public support can make the difference between sinking and swimming.

I know very well that subsidies are not there to bolster up bad business and I’m not suggesting for a moment that they should. But it seems fundamentally unfair that farms which have taken care of their environment over the years and kept flower-rich meadows and such like in tact should be low down on the list for receiving public support, while those, often more productive and more profitable farms, which have in the past ploughed up their meadows and removed their hedges should now be being paid, as a priority, for restoring such things.

Locks Park is thought by some to be rather special. When visiting ecologists, environmentalists and conservationists ooh and ahh over our flower-filled meadows, the butterflies, birds and bees, the richness and diversity of the wildlife, hedgerows and pastures I feel privileged to live and farm such a piece of land. But I’m also made to feel culpable. When completing the infamous Higher Level Stewardship application I was brought to task over keeping sheep and ‘lost points’ as this is considered detrimental to the wildlife.
‘Bbbut’ I stammered ‘Sheep are good little farmers. They aerate the soils, break open rush clumps, encourage other plant species. Mixed grazing is important for many reasons too. And …’
I was cut short. Sheep, I was informed, eat flowers, so are unwelcome.
I also have too many cattle. More points lost. What about replenishing nutrients in depleted soils, sensitively of course, as in dung spreading and liming? Frowned upon.

I’m told that farms like this have always been subsistence farms. Minimal stock was kept, I mean just look at the buildings. Proves a point really.

I scratched my head and thought ‘I wonder. I’ll ask Elli’. Elli is the daughter of the couple we bought the farm from eighteen years ago. Elli is enthusiastic and a keen member of the community. Athletic, up before the crack of dawn and when not working all god’s hours she’s often seen cycling up three-in-one hills with her graceful dog Mel beside her. Her father, George, came to Locks Park when he was a small boy of six and seamlessly took over farming it from his father and mother when they retired. Elli has a deep affinity for the place. She remembers well the stories her grandparents and father told of their lives here. She reminisces on those fabled forever, long hot summers and winters of snow and icicles. Helping out on the farm throughout her childhood she continued even after she’d left and married running her sheep on the Rutleighs. She loves the place and I believe if circumstances had been different she would have gladly taken over from her parents.

I knew she would know exactly what was farmed here and how – it’s part of her very being, her core. “Well now, twenty-five to thirty milking cows. They were up at the house and in all winter. Followers, young stock and the like: we wintered them out on the bottom of Scadsbury. Never in. Again twenty-five to thirty. You know max, Paula.”

the out-wintering land, Scadsbury meadow

Scadsbury was forty acres of rented land. Land, unfortunately, we never managed to acquire, and the out-wintering field she was talking about is the most glorious ten acres of flower-filled culm.

“The cows were grazed at home on Top, Flop, Little Hill, Five Acres, Dung and Rushy. Followers continued over at Scadsbury, you know, when the grass came on in the better fields.”

She went on to say they never brought in any forage, cutting it all at Locks. Fertiliser, 20-10-10, was applied, sparingly of course, as well as lime and slag when needed.
“Even on Dillings?” I chip in. Dillings being our ultra special flower filled meadow.
“Yes, yes, of course.”
They used to bale up rushes for bedding and she can’t remember them ever buying in straw. “Nothing was ever tilled at Locks, too wet, not even in the war. Yes, I know I’m right, though I think they once did a small piece over Scadsbury and we must’ve baled that as straw.”

And sheep? “Oh, eighty ewes give or take.”’

So who’s right? These small, beautiful, diverse farms were working, commercial farms. We’ve been left a legacy that no money can create. Should we now treat their land as museum pieces – to be polished and treated with kid gloves, or should we too work them to provide food and income, allowing them to reflect the character of our age, not ages past?

An afterthought. I believe I’m trying to express my idea of what I feel is wondrous and astonishing. So let me try and find an analogy. To me true beauty in a human has nothing to do with the plastic nip and tucked, contrived, gleaming and polished doll-like exterior we are apparently meant to aspire to in today’s consumer-driven/celebrity-culture existence. True beauty is an extraordinary mix of the physical and metaphysical, the body and soul to use a well worn phrase. A magnetic pull towards a radiating working energy. Not a self-serving manufactured appearance deprived of age or history. So if you can translate these clumsy thought images to farms (the physical) and nature (the spirit) maybe you’ll have an inkling of what I’m trying to express.

flowers in Dillings

On Saturday evening we visited a farm. Robert knew of it many years back when it was owned by two extremely ancient old boys. For numerous decades the farm sat in glorious isolation and neglect, the land and buildings softened and crumbled; definition of field and hedge, lane and track, farmhouse and barn sagged into tangled green obscurity. The old boys continued to live in their decaying farmhouse looking out over a farmyard of bent disintegrating barns and humped undulating roofs; astonishingly they were still using the original cloam oven and still gathering and burning bundles of faggots.

It was sold a few years ago and by chance we met the new owners in the pub. They are a delightful couple. Not in their first flush of youth Jim is instantly noticeable by a shock of wild bright white hair; he’s buzzing with energy, passionate and eager, a zinging wire – his edges rounded and softened by a warm brown voice and a distinct west country burr. Mary has her feet firmly on the ground and a gentle yet tough stoicism. She has an open sincere face and large, expressive eyes in which you glimpse hidden depth. Both of them shine with the ruddy glow of outdoor living and smell of fresh air and wood, plaster and earth. Working ceaselessly on the farmhouse and buildings they have made a temporary home in one of the open crumbling barns and a caravan. To Robert’s delight they didn’t hesitate in inviting him over do some mothing.

Robert returned home his eyes bright with passion for the untamed and unspoiled beauty of the place. Brimming with excitement he said ‘It’s quite extraordinary. You stand in the farm and look out over the surrounding countryside with all those neatly clipped hedges and bright green fields and just know…’

‘Hang on, hang on’ I said ‘Maybe you shouldn’t class it as a farm, should you? I mean it hasn’t actually produced food in an age, has it? Isn’t it an area, a wildlife haven. Extraordinary, yes, but a farm?’

As often happens in our own feisty, ardent relationship a discussion was soon raging about, as Robert will have it, the semantics of the definition of farm…

A farm is the basic unit in agriculture. It is a section of land devoted to the production and management of food, either produce or livestock.
So says Wikipeidia and the Oxford dictionary.

‘Uh!’ poofs Robert ‘That is such outdated thinking’ and dismisses it out of hand.

With us this is an old, well worn and often revisited spat. Robert believes, fervently, that not all farms – land - have to be managed mainly for food. Some of it, just a small proportion should be managed for nature – marginal farms like ours and Jim and Mary’s. We are pretty refined and adept at this dialogue now, but still it manages to get our blood boiling, turns us red in the face, gasping and choking at the heinous atrocities the other is mouthing. Yet we are basically of the same mind and thought about most things. We cycle tandem ninety percent of the time.

Why am I at odds with this? Why do I feel it’s slightly immoral? Why do I feel it’s a luxury to be the custodian of a farm (as that’s what we are) and manage it primarily for wildlife? Running through me is a twist of tough chewed fibre – possibly a remnant of my bog Irish ancestry or strands of my Scottish heritage. Whatever, this part of me feels vaguely uncomfortable - almost guilty. To me, as guardian of a farm, I have a sense of duty, an obligation, to try to grow the best quality produce I can without compromise to my stock, the wildlife or the landscape. Can I achieve the balance I strive for? Robert thinks not. He believes I do compromise nature…and due to the demands of my livestock I’m unable to allow wildlife the unfettered freedom it requires; nor am I able to produce enough food on these marginal soils to render the farm economically viable. I’m falling between two stools. He has a point.

Uuuhuu…big breath. I’m down to only six in the household and have a little more room to expand.

Today I managed to take the dogs for a walk over Hannaborough and in just a few days so much has appeared and the countryside has shifted and changed. I love the way it alters and moves, infinitesimally, but directionally and forever forward. It sometimes seems the landscape is locked in time, but remove yourself from it for just a memory flash and all changes.

This afternoon I found lousewort, lady’s smock, oak trees in the initial explosion of bud burst, skylarks ascending heaven high on a note and the first swallow flying over the farm. The deer have rearranged their groups and are subtly preparing to drop their calves. I felt I was walking a bridge between disappearing winter and oncoming spring.

I know I’ve mentioned that when I walk I think. All your debate and comments over the last few posts are beginning to spill through into my consciousness and form ideas. One that keeps pushing itself to the forefront is our unconscious search for the familiar…what we, or our mind’s eye, are used to. Take livestock, for instance. I choose and breed for certain characteristics and traits that appeal to me, no doubt ones that I picked up from the first stock I ever kept. When I go to look at other people’s animals again I tend to pick qualities out that reinforce my ideal. I believe that this mental process is the same with landscape too. I can remember the day I first saw the countryside around here which I now find so attractive – it was alien, uncomfortable and altogether different from anything I was used to. I searched for the familiar, attempting to compare it other far-flung landscapes I knew, even Indian grasslands, African bush, tropical jungle…but without success, of course. So putting this feeling to our debate on the countryside, perhaps this is why we are so passionate about what we see or want to see – we constantly search out the well-loved familiar? What I fondly romanticise about is another’s bête noir. There are even those who adore the flat fenlands…But as we become accustomed to new environments, so we can come to love them too, as I do now the haphazard countryside I live in. And as the strange becomes familiar, so the desire for order and structure, the need for everything to be explicable and classifiable, diminishes, and we welcome rather than fear the unexpected and unmanaged. At least I do!

The CPRE have provided me with a pdf of the Robert Elms’ piece that originally sparked off the posts ‘not so green and pleasant’, ‘all things bright and beautiful’ and the subsequent discussion threads.

I would be most interested to hear from the man himself.

the future of our countryside

I’m writing another post on this subject spurred on by your comments. Perhaps too I did not make it clear where I was coming from. I’m waiting on the CPRE to find out if they can put Robert Elms’ article on line: if they can there’ll be a link.

The perception of the countryside, and the values we attach to it, vary as much as we do. Even if we’re broadly in agreement, the detail leads to plenty of healthy discussion! None of us holds quite the same views about the Enclosures, wind farms, badgers, hunting, subsidies, green belts, organic farming, gmos…

Just a tiny scrap of the British Isles is left untouched by human hand. We haven’t scarcely an iota of true wilderness left. Ours is a cultural landscape, a record of our history and social evolution. A palimpsest – love that word. And it will continue to change. In the next few decades I believe it will undergo as rapid a transformation as anytime before, apart from perhaps the clearance of the wildwood, through the demands of population growth, climate change, food security and energy generation, but that’s no excuse for not sharing our views on what the future of our landscape should be, so that collectively we can exert some shaping influence.

I’m not a naturally untidy or lazy farmer. Far from it, I’m cursed by obsessive industry. It’s all too easy for me to look at a beautiful farm and see only work to be done. I have farmed various types of land for over three decades and my ideals, passions and expectations have changed dramatically over the years. But I’ve never held sway with intensive agriculture and have always tried to the best of my ability to farm in harmony with the land. When farmer met environmentalist (Robert- husband) there was a meeting of minds on some aspects, but headlong clashes over others. I began to look at certain practices with different eyes, just as Robert began to better understand the needs of a farmer, his stock and crops. Fortunately for us, Locks Park could never be intensively farmed (come Armageddon I will have the greatest of difficulty to even grow a handful of cereal to feed the family) so compromise has not been too difficult.

Reading Robert Elms’ article I was struck not by his dismissal of the countryside (I couldn’t care a toss if he doesn’t want to live in it) but more by his observation of the boring sameness of it all. You see I agree. To me a lot of our countryside has become over manicured, bland and uninteresting. With mono-culture, horsiculture and diesel and unimaginative planning laws we are losing character and individuality.

Affluence is part of the problem. We no longer have to mend and make do. We have the cash to throw on the fertilisers, on all-powerful machines, on high tensile wire and smart new gates. You can tell so much about a place by looking at a single old wooden gate, repaired and patched over many years, lichen-smattered, so little from a brand new one.

Then there’s the legacy the Victorians left us, that cleanliness (neatness) is next to godliness. The inordinate desire the stamp our mark on every last square foot, to create order out of Nature’s chaos. Have you any idea how difficult it is to cut a field in wavy lines, so deeply ingrained is the need for everything to be straight and true? Many say that the sign of a good farmer is how neat his land is, but in my view we have to learn to think differently.

And that goes for environmentalists as well as farmers. How many times have I seen the soul of a beautiful place tamed and dulled by the well-meaning but misplaced views of some conservation organisation or another? The sort who believe that tacking an inconspicuous line of fencing wire to an oak tree or two is a sin, requiring instead a line of standard-spec yellow-green fencing to cut across the landscape like a slash across a Constable.

Am I the only one willing to speak up for the rusty tin roof, the abandoned harrow in the hedge, even the ruts in the lane?

urban countryside?

I’ve just read an article in the CPRE’s spring edition of Countryside Voice by self-confessed city lover, Robert Elms, who can’t stand the ‘the dreary predictability of muddy little England’. Compared to ‘the buzz, thrill and noisy creative glory of a city’ to him the countryside is ‘a depressing rejection of all that in favour of safe, samey conformity’. And I find myself nodding in partial agreement. Too much of England has become over-sanitised, too safe, too uniform.
Often when Robert (husband) and I return to visit old walking haunts we are surprised to find how much they have changed. Gone are the haphazard pastures and meadows filled with a riot of dandelions and daisies. No more are there crumbling stone or earth banks, gaps stuffed with old bedsprings and handy corrugated iron. Gone is the decrepit rusty fencing tied up with fading fibrous pieces of bailer twine to the nearest gnarled stump of hedgerow bush. Gone too is the exhilarating feeling of a remote and wild place. In its place we find acre after acre of bottle-green nitrogen ryegrass, geometrically divided by straight, neatly trimmed hedges bounded by bright tight squeaky clean fencing. Smart tanalised styles, each with neat dog gate and sporting a brand new painted signpost. Barn conversions all following the same brown-window syndrome

I feel angry, upset and cheated. But, if I’m honest, I can remember thinking once that all that broken decay was a sign of shoddy farming! Okay, so our rush-infested fields and pastures are either a waterlogged, sink-sucking morass or an ankle-breaking, knee-twisting concrete with nothing inbetween, and they are exacting and unproductive, but we are blessed with a farm that has character. It is totally individual and exciting. So we resolve to leave that old dung-spreader where it was in the field corner, not to make any more hedgerows redundant through fencing them, to tolerate those thickets of brambles springing out here and there and to leave that muddy gateway where the house martins collect the mud for their nests.

Would Mr Elms, I wonder, find this countryside - wild, unkempt, unpredictable - a more interesting exchange for his culturally exciting, glorious buzzy urbanity? Or would he still feel all the countryside has to offer is various forms of soil?

to read the whole article see May edition of Devon Today

Checking the sheep yesterday I found green. Look! It’s just beginning…

Touches in the willows alongside the pond in First Rutleigh.

My wolf dog, Ness, waiting patiently whilst I looked for more signs of spring.

Amazing molinia - purple moor grass.

On Saturday the rain hurled rods and sleet flung stinging shot; the wind whipped and howled, crashing and banging anything and everything with vandalistic glee; the fields ran and sighed with cold clay water – and I lost a lamb. She died from pasteurella. She was bonny, big and strong; she and her sister were some of the first lambs to be born.

I’d been up in the top yard checking the buildings were holding out, and the ewes and lambs hadn’t succumbed to drowning or hypothermia. Surprisingly everyone was okay though a mite wet and bedraggled; the ewes had sensibly brought most of the youngest lambs into shelter. Returning back down to the farmhouse Robert made some remark about the water supply and so couple of hours later I went back up to check all was well. And there she was, dead. Pasteurella is that sudden. It’s a bacterium, p. heamolytica, which leads to severe pneumonia. I’ve never had a case before on this farm. They say if you’ve had one probably more will follow so I’ve been keeping an ever watchful eye on the flock and…I dare say no more.

But what a difference a day makes.  It was time to move Dot, her offspring and a couple of other ewes and lambs up to rejoin the main flock.  Walking them slowly up the hill to the Rutleighs I felt and smelt a balmier air.  A definite stirring. The verges along the lane had erupted with the crumpled unfurling of cow parsley and hog weed.  Down in the dip the pungent cat’s pee smell of wild currant mixed with earthy watery dampness. Primroses cover the hedge banks and nestled in a sheltered mossy hollow I found the first shy violet. Promise…

I’ve run out of steam. For me March can be like that. The world around me has lifted; lighter and brighter, faster and smarter, pulsing in an elevated frequency - but I am not resonating to this hammering beat.

Bird business flourishes and whirrs through bush and branch, a helter-skelter of display, mating and nesting, collecting and feeding. A lattice-work city of frenetic activity. Song clamours from every direction swelling the air with vibrating tunes and notes; the head-banging enthusiasm of the woodpecker’s drumming, a heart-busting liquid cadence from a blackbird, the clear loud chime of the great-tit belling, a robin’s hope-filled spring aria, the rabble-rousing, chattering, squabble of sparrows. Even the night echoes around the vixen-cry of the barn owl discordant against the quivering ‘oos’ of the tawny owl’s hoot. The first chiffchaff, the first skylark, an imagined cuckoo…

The trees shift imperceptibly as their roots suck up draughts of deep cold water. Buds tremor, blush, swell and burst. Peeks and flashes of fresh-clean acid green. Cotton-wool buds of pussy willow, golden-rain catkins. Shoots thrust with phallic determination through wet glutinous clay topped with winter detritus.

Ice-clear light bounces off surfaces in shattered kaleidoscopic patterns. My eyes sting - hurt. I’m so far behind this living vitality. Lost still in the sludgy greys of winter, my body has yet to shed its winter skin. I feel a pale, slow, sallow shadow beside the energy of life around me. Ugly and unlovely. Soon I will catch up with mother earth but for a few weeks more I shall struggle to free myself from Skadi’s clutch.

This weekend we burnt. Throughout the winter months Robert lays hedges. This is done in rotation over the farm and is a bit like the Forth bridge – you never ever get to the end.

The final hedge to be laid this winter is between Dillings and Rushy Field. Our third time of laying since we’ve been here. Stupid. In retrospect we should have trimmed it more often to encourage the hedge to stay thick, bushy and do what it’s meant to do; be a strong effective stock barrier as well as providing a bountiful larder, the ultimate des. res. and the definitive transport system for multitudinous types of wildlife. This doesn’t mean hedges should be trimmed every year – but once every three to four and at a slightly greater height each time. By doing this you can increase the hedge’s useful life as a bushy barrier and it should only need laying, say, every twenty years, even forty years, instead of every eight. Of course there’s the other side to the coin – if you don’t trim but lay, the hedge will produce copious quantities of firewood and won’t require hours of fuel-guzzling tractor work. Something which with our changing climate and countryside we should to take into consideration?

It’s hard gruelling work, laying hedges. Especially on our land as the trammelled clay becomes a gloopy, welly-hungry, energy-depleting morass. Over the years Robert has honed his skill and expertise resulting in hedges that are aesthetic living sculptures, works of art. My role, on the other hand, continues much as it always has. I’m the skivvy, the pack donkey, the serf that trudges up and down the hedge line bowed under huge bundles of branches and brash for the final burn and tidy. But in some perverse way it’s satisfying, hard, hot work. And a change from the intensity of the lambing and calving sheds.

What do I hope for the future of farming?

What I hope for is probably irrelevant. Our countryside will change hugely in the coming years. Since the Second World War farming and countryside has been in a constant state of flux due to changing food demands and growing new crops. Farming has never been stable; but now more than ever farming has to alter to meet the demands of a planet in crisis.

What can we expect? Fields of tree planting for carbon storage; hectares of elephant grass and acres of withies to fuel power stations; drought resistant crops –sunflowers perhaps; less methane belching grazing animals and huge areas of cereals for human, rather than animal, consumption. We will become more and more conscious of energy (wind farms, solar power), food miles and food security (growing our own), and national biosecurity.

Whenever an industry undergoes massive transformation it’s hard for those involved. Change is frightening and we are not good at accepting it. But I do feel that there are huge opportunities to be had for people with sight, vocation and enthusiasm, but most of all innovation. After all we have to eat to survive. The countryside is changing and I for one will mourn it. I love the quintessential Englishness of our pastoral idle - our patchwork of fields; hedges, trees, woodlands and moorlands; our grazing animals. But preserving that in aspic is no longer something we or the planet can afford: farming and the landscape either change dramatically or we face extinction. The trick will be to guide the change in ways that create beauty and inspiration, that feed our souls as well as our bellies.

endangered?

What would you do for farming if you were government?

This was one of the questions I was asked when being interviewed the other day. A ribbon of quicksilver thoughts free-fell through my brain – global economies, EU legislation, free-trade, climate change, energy, air-miles? Where would I make a change, what would have an effect? I was about to open my mouth with something along the lines that the topic was far too involved and deserved discussion in its own right, when I heard myself say – Education. Simplest, cheapest and most effective. Educate all our children from an early age about food, farming, countryside and the environment, locally, nationally and internationally. Integrated fully into the curricula of subjects already taught, future generations would come to understand the value of quality food (so they are prepared to pay the extra to buy it and farmers can earn a decent crust), and about the way food and the environment and our cultural heritage are inseparable. So, the current Year of Food and Farming is on entirely the right lines, but it needs to be continued, become mainstream. Ultimately, farming depends upon all of us as consumers, and this is where government should show real leadership, not through passing yet more laws but through helping us to make informed choices.

Jane has asked for my opinions on set-aside. So here goes, not, I’m afraid, a terribly sexy subject!

Set-aside was originally put in place in the early nineties as a production control measure to take around 10% of arable land out of cropping; it was not an environmental scheme. I can remember the huge outcry from the farming community as some of England’s good arable land lay fallow. Apart from letting the land revert there were specific things you could and could not do to manage the land; these requirements changed over the years. Back at the beginning, for example, you could grow fodder legumes (lucerne, vetches and clovers) and graze at certain times with goats, camilids and horses (hence the exorbitant prices alpacas and lamas commanded back then and the start of the huge surge into horsiculture). These things stick in my mind as I was running a milking herd of goats that benefited from a neighbour’s lucerne hay and some herb-rich grazing. There was some talk of environmental opportunities missed, but the increases is farmland birds and rare arable plants that followed was incidental, not a planned benefit. Read the rest of this entry »

farming has devastated the environment?

‘And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’ (the Bible Genesis 1:28).

Shouldn’t it be so? Shouldn’t the earth be used to feed the starving in any way she can? A recipe for global disaster! We need the Earth’s diverse and complex ecosystems to support life, give as the oxygen we breathe. Don’t we need it too to inspire us and bring us wonder? Read the rest of this entry »

Gill asked if I could write a post on the economic side of farming. Wow what a subject and one I don’t feel I’m fully qualified to write on. But I can maybe give you slightly more understanding.

Farming is in a state of change and flux. It could be said that’s always so, but never more than at this present moment. Farming will survive for as long as we need food, it’s knowing what form it will eventually take. Pressures come from society’s changing needs and perceptions, new laws, free trade and the influences of climate change and depleting energy sources. It’s certainly a tough and unknown path to be trod but I believe there are opportunities for those that can see them, though I also think the casualties will be great. Read the rest of this entry »

What is going on with those civil servants and government bodies?

The other morning I listened to the news in disbelief. Civil servants had ‘lost’ discs, apparently randomly chucked onto a courier van, containing the personal data, yes really, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers, bank details and heaven knows what else, of twenty five million people! Nice one.

And it’s November not April.

Today…
…I open an unsigned letter from Natural England which informed me that

‘as my organic registration had been terminated I no longer qualify for the Organic Entry Level Scheme (OELS).’ Read the rest of this entry »

This week is Devon Hedge week.
We haven’t celebrated the beauty and diversity of our hedges this year by opening the farm or holding a hedge event because last year when we did the heavens opened with a vengeance and all our hard work was rewarded with but a handful of brave souls. To cap it all, the seasonally decorated barn full of delectable autumn goodies was flooded, the sheep went walkabout, cattle bawled hideously and hid under the trees and stress levels reached new dizzying heights - making it a thoroughly miserable affair!
A different story this October. The sun is shining; the stock content; and we walk around our hedges and admire their glory in solitary splendour. Read the rest of this entry »

Every year I sell some of my cows and heifers. Generally it’s a handful of my yearling heifers and a few cows from the main herd.

Heather’s a young down calving heifer who’s up for sale. She’s due to calve in the next few weeks with her second calf. Yesterday when I checked the cows she looked very imminent. Her vulva was engorged and she was holding her tail high, her bones were soft and her udder was beginning to fill. I decided to bring her back up to the farm to keep an eye on her. Read the rest of this entry »

cut hay waiting for the sun so it can be baled

If I thought it was busy when I went away I had another think coming… Read the rest of this entry »

The sun is shining again and the whole countryside is thrumming with the whining moan-drone of tractors franticly mowing.

Uncut pasture

Read the rest of this entry »

I wonder how many of you heard the piece on the Today programme where Liz O’Neal from the Vegetarian Society stated that we should all be veggie/vegan to help climate change as farm animals produce more methane than the airline industry. The interview was prompted by a leaked email from the Environment Agency to a vegetarian campaign group. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday felt special.

Blue sky streaked with soft mare’s tails left by watery brush strokes. Clean, bright air full of warm honey-bread-fragranced grasses and delicate green-tea scented blossoms – a day when you breathe in, and in, and in. The colours clear and crystal-sparkly. Bird song filled the air, the soft lowing from a cow calling to her baby and the distant humming drone and clank of a tractor working. It made me smile.

I walk, the dogs scuttering and bounding in front of me, surprising the odd hiding pheasant which explodes into the air with loud chuck, chuck, chuck. Spears of southern marsh and spotted heath orchids peeping through young green stems of purple moor grass. Meadow thistle, bugle, tormentil, hay rattle and ragged robin flowering amongst the earlier lousewort and vetches. Huge dragonflies blunder past me with the whirr of old propeller aircraft as butterflies flit and dance silently overhead.

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Will, my son, said I had to watch Lie of the Land - the Molly Dineen documentary broadcast on Channel 4 last week - as it was just what I was on about. He even left instructions as how to record it and phoned me again on the evening to make sure I hadn’t forgotten. He phoned again during the second interval…’it’s awful.’ he said ‘I don’t get it. Hunting is not the whole reason for rural life and farming. And all the killing – it’s using shock tactics. most urbanites will have turned off by now.’ He phoned again at the end…‘It’s biased and one sided and I don’t think it will do farmers any favours.’ He also added that he didn’t like the camerawork. Let me explain – Will was born and bred on a farm, he’s seen and experienced life and death and understands the gore and grit as well as the joys and beauty. He now lives in London and works, successfully, in the media.

What did I think? I felt distinctly uncomfortable.

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We needed to get off the farm…beautiful though it is sometimes all you can see is the next job. Winter takes its toll too. Nature has done the spring thing but my body certainly hasn’t. Robert wanted to take some photos of blackthorn hedges so we headed off to a part of the north Devon coast that has an old green lane. I remembered it well even though I hadn’t been there for about fifteen years as it was the last walk I had with my now frail mum.

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