Category Archives: Farming

The Captains and the Kings depart

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Second post of the day and it’s not even 4pm! Seemed a waste to keep things to myself when I have a perfectly good set of Kipling-inspired titles to use. Anyway,. I have other things to do, like checking out the mushroom book!

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Here are the new piglets, though there only seem to be six when we were told there were eight. Could be that two were hiding, or that tragedy has already struck. You can never tell with livestock.

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I’ll probably be back later but I’m catching the Twitter disease – posting little and often.

It’s good to be getting back to a cycle. I know the rush of schools in June/July is all part of a cycle, but it’s not quite as meaningful as animals being born and harvest coming round.

One day at a time

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There are a number of things that I’d change with the world if this was one of those sci-fi films where a well-meaning man was given the power to wreck the world with good intentions. I’d have to ask for world peace, well you would, wouldn’t you? And en end to disease. But with more people on the planet this would pretty much lead to the end of the world.

Back to the drawing board.

Everything you ask for has probably got unforseen consequences. I won’t go through them all here, but as an example, paying a fair price to producers in the developing world will only mean they consume more, and probably buy more Nutella.

The point of this is two-fold, one is that big changes can be dangerous so maybe we should all look to small changes. I’ve just started having meat-free days. I can’t bear to describe myself as a part-time vegetarian because that would align me with those misguided individuals who think that eating only fish (or even chicken) makes them vegetarian. I’m just a man saving money on his shopping, and as a side-effect of this I save –

84,000 gallons of water 

245 pounds of grain

7,700 sq feet of rain forest

15.5 gallons of gasoline

87 square feet of topsoil from erosion

I’m not totally convinced about all the figures, as I’m pretty sure that giving up a pork chop a week won’t actually save 7,000 square feet of rain forest, and the gallon will be American, so it’s only about 11 proper gallons.. However, it does make sense from a lot of other viewpoints.

If we all give up a pork chop a week it might put some pig farmers out of business, so we should ensure we give up imported meat. This will save fuel and, from a purely selfish point of view, shift the problem to some other country.

It’s not easy making ethical decisions is it?

Second post of the day

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Sorry if it seems like I’m running a bus company, no blogs for a while then two come along at the same time…

It was quite a good week last week and it mostly got steamrollered by Open Farm Sunday and the scarecrows.

We saw a red kite over Screveton for the first time in the four years we’ve been here. It was a great view too, with a really good silhouette against a beautiful blue sky (and who had left his camera in the back of the car? Yes, me.)

We had chocolate slab cake after one of the mothers made cakes for a volunteer event that was cancelled. Sadness at the cancellation was, I’m sorry to say, short-lived when I looked into the tin.

I know I lead a dull and boring life, but they are surely highlights even in the life of an exciting celebrity. Did Demi Moore see a red kite? Did anyone give Barack Obama a chocolate slab cake? Does my choice of celebrity mark me as being out of step with the modern world?

Anyway, far from the lifestyle of the rich and famous, we also had around 325 children in the activity tent over the course of Open Farm Sunday.

I was quite pleased with that – 325 kids who now know a bit more about food, farming and the environment., though I know it’s a drop in the ocean when you look at surveys like this that tell us 40% of people don’t know we grow oats in this country (I selected that one because of the next paragraph, but some of the other findings are equally worrying).

Then I started thinking about future events – it will be World  Porridge Day in  October and part of that is about Mary’s Meals – we’ve supported them in the past and they’ve just fed a million kids. A million! I’m now slightly less impressed with our 325.

However, we have another 30 coming in tomorrow (leaving me just 999, 645 of the million) and we’re doing insects and habitats with them. This calls for less blogging and more reading as I’m hopeless with insect ID.

Watch this space…

 

 

Open Farm Sunday 2015

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Sorry I’ve been away – we’ve been getting home late, eating, sleeping and stating again to prepare for Open Farm Sunday. In the end, despite the weather, the tent collapse and various other minor troubles, it all worked out well. That shouldn’t be a surprise because things normally do work out well.

In the end we had great weather, plenty of people and two proposals for the farmer. One was from a lady in the Kenya group who proposed during the barn dance and one was from a lady at the Question and Answer session, though she was asking on behalf of her mother. I don’t know what they see in him, though if anyone had been able to put their hands on two cows at the barn dance the whole weekend might have taken on a different aspect.

Due to TB regulations we weren’t able to have cows visiting for the weekend, so we will never know what might have happened.

The scarecrow contest attracted some fine examples and the spoon scarecrow competition managed over 70 entries this year. A lot of people made leaf  masks from Woodland Trust print-outs, while others explored the tree that Bea made ( good old Shipshape Arts!) and a number of others ate garden weeds. We also had information from Open Farm Sunday, Kellogg, Frontier and the Home-grown Cereals Authority. All in all it was a good team effort.

I’ll leave you with some photographs for now as I have to get on with some work instead of enjoying myself blogging.

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Price and Predjudice

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I was speaking to someone last week who tells me his brother in law has been ploughing vegetables back in because the supermarkets won’t pay him enough to make it worthwhile to harvest them.

It seems wrong, but where does the fault lie? The farmer has to take the most cost-effective route because he has a business to run. By ploughing he’s also saving the emissions that go with harvesting and he’s also incorporating organic matter into the soil.

The supermarkets? Along with farmers and the European Community they are one of our favourite villains. The French Government has just started to do something about supermarket food waste, but to be fair they are driven by the customers and if the customers want cheap food the supermarkets have to provide it. It’s like the Free Range Egg thing again. There was a time about 25 years ago when around 80% of people said they wanted non-cage eggs because of welfare considerations. Then for years they carried on buying the cheapest (battery) eggs.

So if it’s not the farmer and it’s not the supermarkets who is at fault.?

Looks like it’s me. I like parsnips, and I particularly like cheap parsnips. It suits me to buy a bag for pennies. Having said that, I made a lot of soup last year from the carrots and parsnips we bought for pig food. Those were really cheap and in soup you can’t tell the difference. I was taking them off the stack, by the way, not wrestling the pigs for them!

In other ways I’m quite responsible. Sometimes I look enviously at the more exotic or out of season veg and I admit I do buy sweet potatoes. I do, however, try to avoid Guatemalan asparagus, Kenyan beans and (in summer) Moroccan tomatoes. Although I try to base my buying decisions on air miles and nutrition these days I have previously based decisions on politics and xenophobia (as in refusing to buy French apples) when we had plenty of good apples ourselves.

So, to sum up, I compost, I grow organically and I buy cheap food from supermarkets if it’s reasonably local, seasonal and not politically abhorrent. I’m doing my best on a limited budget, though I’m not entirely logical.

The average politician, it seems to me, isn’t that bothered about sustainability and gets paid a sum roughly equivalent to the riches of the Indies (look up their multiple jobs in the Register of Interests).

No wonder they can’t formulate a logical food policy if it has to be based on me.

Goats

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Finally, we have baby goats. It’s taken a while and we were beginning to worry about continuing lack of kids but last night one of the two pregnant does had twins. They are doing well and the mother is much more relaxed. The other pregnant doe still looks like a square piece of furniture and is sitting in a corner glowering at visitors.

Something I’ve never thought about before is the ability of goats to scowl, I’m not sure they have the facial dexterity to scowl, but then again, I’m not sure if faces can be dextrous. Or if scowling and glowering are that different. I just checked it up and see that a frown seems to be a large part of scowling though not mentioned in glowering. I then checked up some more and found that “scowl” is given as one definition of “glower”. All in all it’s probably better to stop now instead of rambling on. I don’t want to lose my audience and while people like baby animals most people couldn’t care less about the facial expressions of goats.

I’ve put in a photo of one of the other goats for the time being as I forgot my camera today and my phone is resisiting all attempts to make it disgorge the picture of mother and babies which I took.

Update: Here are some photos taken in what is ‘today’ to me as I write, but would have been ‘tomorrow’ when I originally wrote the post. Both terms are, of course, relative to an international readership. There are actually two kids but they wouldn’t cooperate by standing anywhere near each other – in contrast to lambs who tend to sit around next to each other at this age. Hopefully the other pregnant doe will have hers soon.

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The presentation last night was interesting in parts (by which I mean the parts where I’m going to steal the ideas!) and the sausages were excellent and really well cooked (even though I’m clearly biased on that last point. We served the chorizo and the lightly herbed ones with leek, as those were the ones we had most of. The lightly herbed ones are similar to the Newmarket sausage but when you have Lincolnshire sausages all over the place I don’t see any need for the Newmarket. Three Newmarket butchers and the EEC clearly disagree as it is a product with a protected geographical indication. Now that I’ve started reading about Newmarket sausages I’m going to have to go down to Newmarket and buy some. Fortunately, though I’ve just finished reading about cooking badger, I’m not feeling any compulsion to eat one myself. I don’t mind travelling for sausages but I’m not ready for roadkill just yet.

Sausages and speakers

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We have a speaker tonight at the Ecocentre – Tamara Hall, who, after a start in engineering and tailoring, runs Molesfarm Community Projects from her family farm.

On a more mundane level (which is generally where you will find me) I was thinking I needed to sort out the sausages (we will be offering refereshments tonight, and trying to sell sausages) when a man arrived brandishing money and asking for two packs of Nottinghamshire Sausages – one of our best sellers. By the time I’d finished digging to the bottom of the reserve freezer it became clear that he was going to be disappointed. However, he took two packs of the Plain Pork so that was good, and by the time I’d rearranged everything so I wouldn’t have to shift 120 packs of pork and apple burgers to get to the reserve stock next time, I’d done all the sorting I needed to do.

We’ve filled the new notice board ready for the meeting, cut back in the gardens, potted up cuttings, planted seeds and had more lambs. I’ve partly re-written the blurb for our second annual Scarecrow competition, sent some invoices, answered emails and drunk tea. Then I drank more tea. It’s good for you.

I’ll leave you with a picture – cade lambs under a heat lamp. Probably the strangest looking photo I’ve ever taken…

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Friday Feeling

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It’s Friday and that’s time for quiet reflection on the computer again – Level 3 catering this time as part of the soap opera that attends the running of the Saturday Cafe on the farm.

I’ve seen the lambs, I’ve had a word with B (though she may be Bea – I’ve never been sure) at Shipshape Arts, I’ve watched an empty bird table and I’ve fired off a couple of emails. I’ve also eaten lunch and doughnuts, done some proof-reading and wrestled with a spreadsheet that won’t save the work I do on it. Either I’m an idiot who can’t use Excel or the sender is an idiot who can’t use Excel. As I don’t usually have trouble entering a few details I’m coming to an inescapable conclusion about the sender, but don’t let me influence you…

I’m rapidly running out of excuses so I’ll load some pictures and try to put off the evil hour. Note the kestrel picture – we have someone making a nest box which we’re going to place in the statue, so fingers crossed we get some interest.

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Finally – the list!

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Here, at last, is the list of birds we say in our half hour. Despite a great deal of excitement, which showed itself as chatter and rapid hand gestures, we managed to see 14 species.

Blue tit, Great tit, Long-tailed tit, Chaffinch, Blackbird, Robin, Wren, Dunnock, Rook, Jackdaw, Carrion Crow, Yellowhammer, Wood Pigeon and, finally, Buzzard.

Not very impressive, particularly after the list on Tuesday, but it’s another step forward for the people doing the census.

I’ll put some pictures up as soon as I can.

 

 

 

 

Big Farmland Bird Count – part 1

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It’s been a frustrating day today, with our first crack at the Big Farmland Bird Count.

At 9.10 am I had the telescope set up on a buzzard sitting in the big tree across the field. Although we’ve often seen it go there, this was the first time it had given us such a clear view.

Of course, at 9.55 am it decided to move on, never to be seen again. After that people arrived and we were kept busy for a couple of hours before we could settle down for the count.

What had been skies full of birds abruptly emptied and we found ourselves staring out on a birdless prairie. I really don’t know how they do it. One day you can be sitting in the car waiting to go, or just looking idly out of the window and you’ll see a barn owl, a great spotted woodpecker or a charm of goldfinches, but the next (when you are deliberately looking), there’s nothing.

Well, next to nothing. We saw chaffinches, robins, dunnocks, blackbirds, wood pigeons, a blue tit, a wren and a starling. I’d seen most of them yesterday when I spent an hour cleaning up in my back garden in Nottingham. The only bright spot in the half hour was when three yellowhammers turned up. You don’t see them in Nottingham.

We’ve seen some good stuff from here – a kestrel chasing a buzzard (twice), a buzzard chasing a barn owl and a sparrowhawk struggling to gain altitude with a pigeon clutched in its talons. And before you ask, no, I don’t know why they do it, apart from the sparrowhawk. Anyone who has seen me struggling home with a large pie will recognise that behaviour. What we haven’t seen is crows or rooks mobbing a sparrowhawk, which you would expect to see as we have plenty of sparrowhawks and plenty of corvids. However, when it comes down to it, we’ve probably spent less than 24 hours watching interesting birds out of the last three years, so the chances of seeing something notable are about one in a thousand.

We’re counting again on Wednesday with the full group – here’s hoping we’ll see something interesting.