South Penquite Farm

The Brown Envelope

South Penquite Farm — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 10:16:00 +0100

Earlier this week I was having 40 winks on the sofa after a particularly hectic morning vaccinating lambs, when I was rudely awoken from my slumber by the telephone. The lady announced that she was Tiffany from BBC Radio Cornwall, and would I like to comment on the “good” news today that DEFRA (the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) had declared its intention to pay 75% of farmers their 2008 Single Farm Payment by the end of January 2009. When she learnt that I was one of many still waiting for my 2007 payment she was keen for me to do a telephone interview ready for the main 5 o’clock news.

Farming subsidies are a complex and emotive issue and they have undergone radical changes in the last few years. Previous to 2005 we were paid a set amount per cow or ewe as part of the European Common Agricultural Policy. This was set up back in 1960 to ensure that the (mainly peasant) farmers of the EU could receive a reasonable standard of living while producing reasonably priced food.

Over the decades this has proved to be an unwieldy beast and led in the 1980’s to the infamous butter mountains and wine lakes. These surpluses were not only wasteful but highly damaging to developing third world countries who were struggling to maintain their own agricultural industries. Something had to give and as the EU expanded it was apparent that this level of protectionism couldn’t be sustained.

So in 2005 we had a massive shake up, and whereas previously we had to apply for a variety of subsidy schemes (Cow Premium, Ewe Premium, Hill Livestock Compensatory Allowance) each with their own rules and tradable quotas, we were presented with a brand new, one-stop scheme which paid out per acre rather than per animal.

This was radical because it meant that farmers would receive support for environmental benefits (clean air, water and soil protection) and were not required to grow any crops or keep livestock. For us hill farmers this would mean that each cow and sheep now had to pay its own way through life and gradually over the last few years farmers have reduced herds and flocks to more sustainable levels and the prices have responded to the diminishing supply. While this has contributed to the rising food inflation, it has meant that the amount of the EU budget spent on agriculture will drop from the over 60% of the total budget in 1992 to around 30% by 2013.

On a farm level the stark truth is that while a rise in the price of beef and lamb has been welcome it has been more than matched by a rise in diesel and grain and I would say that nearly every farmer is still ‘subsidising‘ his livestock enterprise with his Single Farm Payment so some degree or the other. I pride myself in being further ahead than most in running a low input, organic, sustainable farm with a handy extra income stream from the campers, but I am still no where near being able to survive without the ‘Brown Envelope’ – (farmers jargon for the subsidy cheque).

So I had a few choice words for Tiffany - she obviously wanted a whinging farmer for this item and I gave it to her in spades, and made the headlines of the bulletin at 5. I then immediately crossed my fingers and hoped that nobody from the Rural Payments Agency was listening, lest they might slip my application to the bottom of the pile! As it happens my brown envelope was delivered the very next morning – talk about the power of radio.

Mmmm….I’m lovin’ it

South Penquite Farm — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 10:28:00 +0100

Last Sunday was Open Farm Sunday. This initiative has been going for three years now and farms across the country are encouraged to open their gates to the public on the first Sunday in June as a massive PR exercise. This is an excellent idea and has really gained momentum since the first open day in 2006.

I had thought about doing it last year – but only really heard of the scheme late in the day and was already behind getting the campsite ready for half-term. However this year, with plenty of time to plan, I signed us up to be one of the 400 odd farms who would participate.

As first timers I thought we would keep it simple and I listed on the Open Farm Sunday web site that the event would start at 2pm with a guided farm walk, followed by a trailer ride back to the farm yard and then I would do a small sheep shearing demonstration and it would all be over by about 4.30.

The good people at LEAF (Linking Environment And Farming) who were doing all of the central planning and organisation had managed to attract an impressive array of sponsorship for the event and every farm that signed up received a box of goodies including posters, flyers, postcards, helpful books and a rather natty Open Farm polo shirt with all of the sponsors logos on the back. All of the usual suspects were there including the RSPB, the NFU and Natural England as well as a couple of unlikely ones including McDonalds.

Now, just because we live on an organic farm and grow our own veg in the garden doesn’t mean we don’t all enjoy the odd treat of pigging out on fast food once in a while. In years gone by I would always have favoured KFC over McDonalds – nibbling at bits of lip-smacking chicken and daintily wiping my fingers with the lemon-scented wipe supplied. McDonalds at that time was using Argentinean beef and had a lousy reputation.

However in recent times they have really cleaned up their act and now source only British beef (hurrah) and only use British Organic Milk (hurrah, hurrah). KFC on the other hand seem to have gone right downhill (if our experience in Plymouth last month was anything to go by) and their tasteless chicken (scoured from some broiler house god knows where in the world) was dripping with grease and to add insult to injury they have even discontinued the moist tissues!

Anyway, it was the source of much amusement with the kids to see their dad sponsored by the big M and raised quite a few comments from the 50 or so members of the public who thankfully turned up. All in all it was a successful event (despite the fact that if started to rain at exactly two o’clock!) and the kids tea and cakes raised £84 for Save The Children. The date for next year has already been set for Sunday June 7th – so if you are in the area please come along.

Two’s company…

South Penquite Farm — Mon, 26 May 2008 09:29:00 +0100

May is one of the busy times on the farm; with the flock lambing, the cows calving, four Yurts to erect and the campsite to be ready for the first May Bank Holiday. Chatting to my farming neighbours on the road, we have come to a consensus that this had been a ‘slow’ spring. Although we had some decent weather in early April it has been a very mixed bag since with lower than average temperatures and quite a few nigh time frosts – even as I sit here writing this on the second May Bank Holiday it is blowing a gale, and through the rain lashed window of my office I can see the hunched forms of disgruntled campers traipsing across the yard.

Lambing went well generally, with only a few weather related deaths and quite a good crop of ‘doubles’ (twins). On one early morning I was accompanied by Churton (now 7) who had plenty of time to lamb a few sheep before his day starts at the village school.
“Can a sheep have three lambs Dad?”
“Yes – it’s called a triple and we sometimes get them with our flock”
“Dad – can a sheep have four lambs?”
“Yes – we’ve never had one, but it can happen. It’s called a quadruple”
“Dad, dad – can a sheep have five lambs?”
“Yes – I’ve seen it in the farming paper”
“What’s that called?”
“A quin-something”
“What about six?”
“Well…”
“What about seven??”
“Hmmm…”
“What about eight…a hundred… a zillion!”

By one of those wonderful quirks of fate – as we get to the far corner of the lambing field that morning there is a ewe standing proudly over her three lambs! For a hill ewe to safely deliver three offspring by herself is quite a feat. Lots of sheep have trouble counting two lambs, so to have delivered three in the dark and successfully nurtured them all is good going.

There are a couple of problems with triplets. Firstly it is quite normal to have either one lamb much bigger than the other two or worse one much smaller, and secondly the ewe is only equipped with two teats. With twins, each lamb will stick with his preferred ‘side’ to drink from – with a triple one lamb is always undernourished. So after a few hours it is best to take one lamb away and adopt it onto any spare ewe you may have that has perhaps lost its own lamb.

All the sheep have now lambed and with all this rain the farm has really greened up and there is plenty of spring grass for everyone – if only I could get the campers to see the positive side!

A spoonful of sugar…

South Penquite Farm — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:54:00 +0100

The earliest Easter for 95 years, coupled with a rather dreary spring has kind of thrown us all out. Calving started while the cows where in the barn, and with the odd snow flurry and bitter night time temperatures there was little prospect of turning them all out. However, a winter barn with four months worth of manure underfoot is no place for a newborn calf, and so the mums and babies have to brave it out in the elements. This led to three of them developing ‘dickey’ tummies and requiring twice daily doses of scour tablets and re-hydration drinks.

These are a simple combination of sodium diacetate and glucose (salt & sugar to you and me) which is administered by diluting with 2 litres of water. A simple and effective solution which both provides the calves with all they need while restricting the amount of mothers milk they will intake.

How do you get a calf to willingly take 2 litres of medicinal potion twice a day? Well in this we are added by a clever gadget known as a Calf Reviver, which is an humane force–feeding device consisting of a long clear tube attached to a plastic bottle. You gently insert the tube into the calves mouth and ease it down its throat to a marked point on the tube – this will ensure the end is well past the wind pipe. You then hold the bottle in the air at arms length so that the fluid is gravity-fed into the calf’s stomach.

This is actually much easier than it sounds and would be painless for both calf and farmer if it were not for the perverse attitude of the cow. Instead of standing back and quietly thanking you for treating their loved-ones, our Galloway cows tend to take great exception to you manhandling their offspring.

If you are lucky they will contain their protest to bellowing loudly while pawring the ground with their front hooves. This type of angry mum can be kept at bay by an accomplice with a large stick to wave. The more aggressive mums will chase you round the field as soon as look at you and over the years there have been more injuries on farms attributed to cows with calves than to bulls.

One of our mothers fell into this extreme category and so we had to develop a new technique using the pick-up truck.

The driver (Cathy or Mitchell) would drive into the field and position the truck between the cow and calf, which would leave the passenger (me) a couple of vital seconds to leap out, pick up the calf and toss it into the pick-up bed, nimbly jumping in after it before (hopefully) the cow had the chance to circumnavigate the truck. We would then drive across the field with the cow in hot pursuit while I administered the medicine in the back. Once treated, it is a simple matter to stop the truck, lower the calf over the side and drive off into the sunset leaving the mother to reunite with her beloved!

Sport of Kings

South Penquite Farm — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 08:26:00 +0000

If you are looking for a great family day out at this time of year, you could do a lot worse that your local point-to-point. The grass roots level of National Hunt Racing – these meetings are the bottom rung of the sport which works all the way up to the Cheltenham Gold Cup and the Grand National.

Even at this humble level the races are all over a gruelling three miles and the fences are all at least 4’6” high. This is a demanding test and requires a great deal of stamina and courage from the horses involved.

Last weekend found us all at the Royal Cornwall Showground just outside Wadebridge for the Western point-to-point. The great thing about these local events is that you really are in the thick of the action. As you lean against the rails you are literally only a few feet from the pounding hooves of the horse as they fly past; as you trudge back to the enclosure after the race (tearing up your betting slip as you go) you are literally rubbing shoulders with the owners and trainers; and when you go for a pee you are quite likely to be standing next to a jockey in full racing silks!

Before each race you get a chance to choose your nag as it is paraded around the ring and then it is off to the row of bookmakers to place you bet. A quick look at the odds on offer and you will find one or two horses are ‘odds on’ (meaning that your £1 stake will only win you a matter of pence) while the rest are 20/1 or over - which could net you £20 , but more than likely means that they won’t even make the distance.

The kids are amazed at the prospect of winning so much money for so little outlay, and with five different horses backed in each race we were certain of a fair share of winners. It is only at these provincial meetings that bookmakers don’t wince when you walk up and ask to put a quid on each of five different horses, and after each race one of the kids (the one who had inadvertently picked the favourite) would run back to the bookies to claim his/her winnings.

The net result of all this is that you only have to lay out £5 for each race for having the joy of seeing one of your dear children win enough to buy themselves a small chocolate bar. Lets hope we can wean them off of this addiction before they build a super casino in Cornwall!

Who wants to be a…

South Penquite Farm — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 10:44:00 +0000

…type-1-Transporter-of-livestock-with-a-certificate-of-competence….I do!

I doubt Chris Tarrent would be sitting quite so pretty had he used the above as a pitch for his quiz show. However, Wednesday found me sweating it out with eight other farmers in a room at the National Farmers Union office at Exeter, faced with 28 questions about transporting livestock. There were - of course - four answers to each question to choose from, but crucially no 50/50 option and no ‘phone a friend’.

The prize – a certificate of competence in transporting livestock distances over 65km. Something I have been doing (like all other farmers) quite competently for the last twenty years.

Experience has taught me though, that despite the temptation to buck against such pointless bureaucracy by starting a one man protest of non-conformity, it is best to grasp the nettle and get on with it, as somewhere down the line the lack of the correct paperwork will come back to bite you in the leg – usually costing you either time, money or extreme hassle. So I duly stumped up the required £33, sent off a passport photo (which I presume means that the certificate will take the form of yet another piece of laminated plastic competing for room with my credit cards in my wallet), and wended my way to Exeter.

There was due to be a half hour workshop on the regulations immediately before the test, so I presumed that there would be no need to actually read the glossy information pamphlet they had supplied before I got there. Wrong!

The young chap giving the presentation started by saying “I wont bore you with the details of the regulations as I’m sure you will have read them by now so I shall just give you a brief overview of the background to the new regs” – oh shit.

Luckily, during the PowerPoint presentation the other farmers are giving full vent to their frustrations about how ‘that’ wouldn’t work in ‘this’ situation, and surmising that the ‘pen pushers that wrote this rubbish have probably never even seen the back end of a cow’, giving me ample time to scan the regulations before we got down to business.

For the test, each of us had a laptop and a different 28 questions randomly picked from a pool of 400. I pity the poor soul who had the job of posing 400 different questions from such scant material and then dream up a staggering 1600 possible answers; and some of my questions revealed the extent to which he must have been scraping the barrel by the end. It was all very commonsense stuff and I’m sure most members of the public could have gained the pass rate of 21 correct answers, without never having been near a livestock trailer in their lives.

However I did manage to get a couple wrong and on the drive back I was wracking my brains to work out where I had slipped up (they didn’t give you a print out of the test presumably in case you passed on the questions and answers to your neighbours). Eventually I deduced that the answer to the question on ‘the condition of a healthy cows skin’ should have been ‘soft and supple’ – not ‘dry and tight’.

Well, all I can say in my defence is that they obviously aren’t talking about my hairy Galloway cows (pictured), whose gnarly weathered hides are as tough as old boots. Ironically, most people on the street would have probably guessed the right answer correctly – whilst my 'experienced' opinion of dry (as in absence of sweat – a sure sign of distress in an animal) and tight (having bent many a needle trying to inject my leathery cows) got it wrong!

Pesky pestilence

South Penquite Farm — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 15:34:00 +0000

The farming press has only one major preoccupation these days – disease. Bluetongue is the hot topic at the moment, but it is only weeks since the last case of Bird Flu and only a few months since last years Foot & Mouth fiasco. All this is underlined by the ever present threat of TB (Bovine Tuberculosis), which gets less prominence in the press, but is ever on the increase – especially here in the South West.

In the good old days our chief moan was usually about European red tape (followed closely by those hardy perennials – poor prices and the bloody weather); then at least you knew who to direct your anger at, and spending the odd rainy day in the office wasn’t all bad. These current threats are altogether more stressful and you feel helpless in the seemingly futile fight against various bacteria and viruses.

The advice we receive is less than inspiring:

Spray the wheels of incoming vehicles with disinfectant – Foot & Mouth

Keep your chickens away from wild birds – Bird Flu

Keep your cows away from badgers – TB

Attend meetings and talk to your neighbours – Bluetongue

None of the above instils you with much confidence in our ability to cope with an outbreak and for a farm which prides itself on extensive free-range livestock, attractiveness to wildlife and openness to the public we don’t know where to begin.

Bluetongue is a particularly nasty one which debilitates animals and led to a 25% increase in livestock mortality in the Netherlands last year. The good news is that there is a vaccination currently being developed. The bad news is that it won’t be available until May, while the disease will be a threat from mid-April (earlier if warmer - as it is carried by midges).

Meanwhile, here on the farm, we have just reached closure on BSE – the curse of the 90’s. Currently the only cows now that are not allowed to enter the food chain are those born before 1996 (pretty old for a farm cow), and these may be sent on the governments Older Cattle Disposal Scheme. This means that the cows will be humanely destroyed and the farmer paid 292 euros in compensation.

There are estimated over 200,000 such cows left at the moment on farms and even when the scheme closes at the end of the year there will still be in excess of 100,000 kicking around. We had to wait several weeks for a slot in the scheme our two remaining geriatrics, and anyone left with older cows after December will be faced with a bill to slaughter them. This will then draw a line under BSE forever and confine our experiences of Mad Cows to the history books. Lets hope it doesn’t take a decade to sort out Bluetongue!

Food for Thought

South Penquite Farm — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 08:20:00 +0000

Three years ago I joined the membership of the National Farmers Union. You might wonder why it took me a couple of decades of farming before signing up; well I suppose it was mainly the influence of my late father, who had a slightly different interpretation of what the initials NFU might stand for - (it involved the words ‘no’, ‘use’ and another that, even in these days of lax moral values, I shan’t repeat in mixed company). They were seen in his time as very much representing the interest of the old barley barons with not much to offer the subsistence hill farmer.

Things have changed over the years, and above all they now have an excellent insurance arm which can offer any farmer a very competitive whole farm insurance with just the sort of no-nonsense, common-sense approach to claims that make them a joy to deal with.

They are also much better at recognising the needs all farmers and have even paid lip service to embracing the organic movement as having something positive to offer. However, they still do take a very black and white view of modern agriculture, maintaining that all farmers are doing a fantastic job while suffering under poor prices, unseasonable weather, bad press and unreasonable bureaucracy.

We liberal, eco-friendly, lily-livered organic souls tend, on the other hand, to be full of doubt and self-awareness and we regularly tie ourselves in knots on issues with which we can have very little influence over - such as air freight, fair-trade, global warming and human rights. This can, if you let it, get you down rather and I sometimes wistfully wish I was as self-assured as some of my colleges in the NFU appear to be.

As it happens, the latest copy of their trade magazine – British Farmer & Grower – has a fascinating article in it, comparing farming today with 1908 (it is the NFU’s centenary celebration this year). Written by their chief economist – Carmen Suarez – it is full of statistics that I for one would have hardly credited were true, and shows perhaps why the NFU feels that British agriculture has much to be proud of.

Back in 1908, farmers produced only 40% of the food needed by the then population of 40 million – we now produce 60% of the food required by the 60 million or so on our crowded Isle today. This actually represents a fall since the mid-eighties, (the height of production subsidies), when we reached the giddy heights of producing 80% of the nations needs.

This has all been achieved with a workforce which is now only a fifth of the size of the million or so workers employed in 1908 (fairly amazing efficiency), and also the actual number of farms has been steadily falling as they have grown in size. Interestingly though, this has been lately reversed with the ‘Good Life’ factor finally kicking-in and producing a rise in small holdings, part-time, and lifestyle farmers.

I would have to say, that we are probably slipping into this category, as most of out real income now comes from the campers and Cathy’s job as a nurse at the local hospital. The necessity for this is evident from the last set of stats, which reveals that in relation to the cost of living, farmgate prices have fallen steadily over the last hundred years so that they now only represent a paltry 20% of their 1908 level. Food for thought indeed.

Hedge fund manager

South Penquite Farm — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 17:07:00 +0000

I don’t listen to the Archers religiously, but with four of my five radios (bedroom, dining room, wind-up radio for bath times and the one in the truck) permanently set to Radio 4 (so much so that the wind-up now can’t pick up anything else) I do get to hear quite a few episodes. In case you are wondering - the fifth one in the tractor swings wildly between Pirate Radio and Classic FM depending on whether it was Mitchell or me who last fed the cows!

Sad to say, that from time to time as the story of the good folk of Ambridge unfolds over the airways, I sometimes find life imitating art – or visa versa – and I hear exact conversations between the characters that we ourselves have at home.

Just before Christmas there was a story line about Ruth and David Archer replanting a hedge that his father had removed during the good old subsidy driven days of the seventies. As it happened, I had also just ordered 250 metres of native hedge to plant as a new field boundary.

Unlike the Archers, we were not reinstating a hedge, if fact our moorland holding doesn’t have any hedgerows at all – just miles of granite walls. However one particularly large field had been split by a former owner with a simple wire fence, which was now about twenty years old and showing its age. To build a new stone wall to replace the 250m of tatty sheep netting would cost well in excess of £30,000 and so I hit upon the idea of planting a new wildlife-friendly hedge.

First of all, we borrowed a tractor-mounted rotovator and ‘ploughed’ a line next to the old fence. Next, in came Chris with his huge monster-truck post thumper and put a new wire fence the other side of the rotovated strip. Then the trees arrived.

With over 1200 assorted thorns and beech this was going to be no mean job for Cathy and I (despite the fact it only seemed to take the Archer family one leisurely afternoon), and so it was with considerable relief that I learnt that the local college was looking for planting jobs for the students on their NVQ land management course.

This was a true win-win situation, with the college delighted to have such a large planting job to train the youngsters on and with me having to do nothing more strenuous than stroll up and down twice a week and survey the progress.

So now the hedge has been neatly planted (with about 5 tonne of shredded garden wasted as a mulch to keep the grass down for a bit), leaving me to return to restoring old tractors and running the village cricket team while Cathy runs off for a fling with the herdsman - damn those Archers!

With a cheap cheap here, and a cheap cheap there…

South Penquite Farm — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 16:50:00 +0000

Like many, I have been glued to the TV this week watching Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s bold attempt to convert the good people of Axminster away from buying cheap, intensively-reared chickens at their local supermarkets. In addition, my email inbox has been bombarded by emails from both the Soil Association and the NFU (National Farmers Union) roundly condemning him for either ‘going too far’ or ‘not going far enough’.

I have a lot of respect for Hugh and have followed his career with interest ever since the first series of River Cottage. This had a subtle but profound influence on me, and I look back now and realise that I have since been gradually turning my farm into a very large smallholding. This has suited Cathy (who I suspect would be just as happy with 20 acres instead of 200) and has been a real boon for our small campsite – the campers just love to see the chickens, ducks and turkeys roaming around the tents, and lap up the burgers and sausages from our own sheep.

Several times now, when hosting events for other local farmers, I have heard one sneer ‘this place is just like bleeding River Cottage’; which I take as a huge compliment rather than the insult it is so obviously intended to be.

Quite often in life, I pride myself to be between six months or a year ahead of my time (or ahead of popular opinion anyway), and so I can smugly declare that it was over 12 months ago that I said to Cathy that, as we already have a plentiful supply of top notch beef & lamb, surely we can afford to spend a bit more on our chicken. So we stopped buying two for a fiver at Tesco and started buying from another local organic producer at Stephen Gelly Farm. Now we are a large family, and so for a large bird we pay anything between ten and fifteen pounds. But, as Hugh pointed out in his programme, we harvest at least 3 meals from each carcass, and once you have tasted real chicken it is impossible to go back.

Persuading people to pay more, when food and fuel prices are already on the way up, is a tough one, and hats off to Hugh for even attempting it. However this sort of exercise also needs to be repeated across pork, beef & lamb, all of which we struggle to produce profitably in this country but will suffer from their own welfare and environmental issues if sourced cheaply from abroad. The messages are subtler and much less easy to convey to the public – but this is the challenge we as farmers need to rise to.

New Year Revolution

South Penquite Farm — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 10:47:00 +0000

I have grown to like making New Year resolutions and like to think that over the years I have changed our lives on the farm in small but significant ways through trying to keep to them. First up for 2008 is to make a concentrated effort to walk more. This may seem a strange one for a farmer, but believe you me, you can quite easily do a full days work without stretching your legs any more that climbing in or out of the cab of your pick-up/tractor.

Now that the cows are in the barn for the winter, all their feeding is done with large round bales, and the sheep are fed oats which are dispensed onto the ground in neat little piles by a trailer we pull behind the quad bike – so not much room for exercise in the day to day routine. My saviour is our young dog Maggie, who if left to her own devices will harass the poultry all day long. The only solution is to chain her up while not in use and so she requires a couple of good long runs each day. This will do us both the world of good a as an unexpected bonus has provided me with uninterrupted thinking time away from the kids/phone/office – a real bonus.

Without doubt though, the star resolution this year has been to limit the time the kids spend watching TV. I suspect that this is a bit of an issue in any house and is nearly impossible to handle without a major row. When I was a kid at secondary school I was the only one in the class without a TV - and so considered a bit of a freak; nowadays our own offspring think its too bad that we don’t let them have a TV in their bedrooms!

There must be a third way I thought, and so I scoured the Internet and purchased a wonderful little gadget called TVTimer. This simple little box takes your TV’s plug and locks it in to a small timer, and you can then set the hours of each day when the TV will come on. This is a bit fiddly, but well worth persevering with. Our TV will now only come on for an hour in the morning (for the sake of the youngest) and then remains dead until 6.30 in the evening (in time for the teens to watch Hollyoaks) and then cuts off at 10.30 – thus making sure we all get a decent nights sleep.

If you are desperate to watch something out of these times then you can of course video any program (the timer only effects the TV) and watch it later. This all takes a bit of getting used to, but as I keep saying to the kids, with a stroke I have given them all something that money can’t buy – several hours a week of their lives back!

Actually they have accepted it surprisingly well (because, I think it is much harder to get angry with an inanimate object that is preventing you from watching the box than it is to harangue a tired parent), and for me the proof of the pudding was when on day three (of the rest of our lives) I walked into our sitting room (formally the TV room) on a wet afternoon and there was my eldest, sitting on the sofa, quietly reading a book – it almost brought a tear to my eye.

www.tvtimer.co.uk

Merry Xmas & A Happy New Year!

South Penquite Farm — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 11:57:00 +0000

T'was the night before Christmas,
and all over the farm,
nothing was stirring
~ a quiet eerie calm

No squawk from a goose,
no gobbling Turkey
They’re both stuffed and trussed,
just awaiting the gravy

No moo from the steer
~ that great thumping geezer
You won't hear him now,
from the back of our freezer

The silence of the lambs,
who along with mint sauce,
we’ve had chopped with our chips,
without trace of remorse

And the ewes and the rams,
after hectic conception
Chew a post coital cud,
in relaxed contemplation

The children have finished,
decking the tree with it’s bling
And lay dreaming of goodies,
that tomorrow may bring

Leaving old Farmer Christmas,
tying sacks on bedsteads
And mumbling ‘Bah Humbug’,
as he stomps off to bed

Jumping Jack Flash

South Penquite Farm — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 17:34:00 +0000

As winter approaches, and the grass slows its growth, it’s time to think about bring in some of the animals and feeding others in the fields; and so we cleaned out one of the stables in preparation to bringing in my late father’s horse – Jack. Bought for £300 from a neighbour as a youngster over thirty years ago, he was my dad’s workhorse and hunting companion for two decades until he passed away in 1997.

Christened Jumping Jack Flash in homage to the famous track by the Rolling Stones and also because he gave the local young rough rider – Ronnie – such a lively time while breaking him in. He was what my father would describe as a hony (as opposed to a porse) which meant that while he was a horse in height he was more like a pony in nature. In the begining Dad had grave doubts about Jacks ability to carry his six foot three inches across the moors , but he needn’t have worried – Jack had the heart of a lion and never missed a day.

‘The best horse is the one ridden the most’, is an old adage and Jack certainly proved it true. When my parents first bought the farm, it was only made financially viable through us taking in German students for horse riding holidays - whose parents would happily pay through the nose for so that they might improve their English. Jack would ride out as lead horse six days a week throughout the summer and then in the winter Dad would go out hunting most weekends; mainly with a ‘pirate’ pack of foxhounds called the Temple Beagles from the next parish.

When we carried my father’s coffin through the farm - Jack led the mourners; and despite my Dad once famously saying that he ‘might need another horse now that Jack has passed 20’, Jack has survived him by over ten years.

A few years ago, I thought I would take my eldest daughter to experience a ride out at the traditional New Years Day meet in the village. I took Jack out of retirement, dusted down my Dad’s old hunting jacket and out we went. From the moment Jack caught sight of the hounds he was in his element; he absolutely loved every minute and after three hours I thought my arms were going to be pulled right out of their sockets. Everybody recognised him and I was greeted by cries of ‘Hello Jack – long time’ all day.

I am writing this with a heavy heart as I decided that this would be one winter too many for the old boy. Spring can be the cruellest time for farm animals and with his dodgy teeth, Jack had only just made it through the last one. Having had a good autumn, it was time to let him go. Adam - the hunt master – came and helped me and he is now buried within a few yards of his former master.

And the band played on

South Penquite Farm — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 09:49:00 +0000

An old army buddy of mine – Roger (pictured in the middle) - organises the orchestra for the choral society at West Ham Church. This collection of enthusiastic amateurs have been expertly tutored by John (the church organist) and they hold regular concerts of famous choral works for the local populace. Over the years they have gained a just reputation for putting on a damned good show.

In this they are aided and accompanied by an orchestra made up of some of the top orchestral players that London has to offer. Knowing that the latest concert would feature Verdi’s dramatic requiem, (which requires a large orchestra, including three flutes), I blagged Roger until he finally relented and agreed to let me play.

As young men, Roger and I had both been musicians in the Army, but whereas he had always kept up with this Cello playing, I had (with less time and opportunity on the farm) rather let my flute playing go.

Anyway, having secured a spot as second flute, I purchased a CD and a score, dusted down my trusty instrument and set to practicing again on a daily basis. Over the weeks the old technique and embouchure (proper use of the face/mouth muscles) began (thankfully) to return. The next step was to procure myself a set of tails and a white tie. ‘Thank the lord for eBay’ is a standing joke in our household and sure enough £53 was enough to secure me a set of vintage 1930’s tails and I had just enough left from my £80 fee for the gig to buy a white dickey bow and black cummerbund.

Saturday was the big day, and having dropped off the kids with my sister in Camberley and had a very pleasant reunion with another couple of old bandsmen over a curry in Windsor the night before, we made our way across London for the rehearsal in the church at 2pm.

Over a pint, John told us about the effect that the 2012 Olympics was having over the area. His house had nearly doubled in value, nine out of the ten local petrol stations had closed and were making way for flats, and even the pub we were drinking in had sold off half of its beer garden to developers. Most notably, he said, one of the local kebab houses had been turned into a trendy sandwich bar with – shock horror – tables on the pavement. Where will it all end? His best guess was that as the money moved in the indigenous folk would probably pushed out to Dagenham.

But I digress, and at the rehearsal I was understandably a little nervous to be playing in such illustrious company. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried too much; our first flute – Jane (a lovely lady and a true professional) – barely missed a beat on learning that her deputy on this occasion was a sheep farmer by trade.

My weeks of practice held me in good stead, and that evening the soloists, orchestra and choir came together to deliver a sublime performance to over 400 eastenders (and one Cornish nurse) that I'm sure will be talked about for many years to come. For myself it was a once-in-a-lifetime evening that I shall never forget.

It’s (not so) grim up North

South Penquite Farm — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 19:18:00 +0000

Just back from a half term break in glorious Yorkshire. Having endured first Butlins and then a narrowboat over the last two years, it was a pleasant change this time to be staying in a luxury converted barn in the Dales.

Whenever we go on our travels, the first thing I always pack is my trusty copy of Julian Cope’s The Modern Antiquarian. Famed in the late seventies and early eighties as the singer/songwriter behind the Liverpuddlian post-punk band The Teardrop Explodes, he has spent much of life exploring the Neolithic monuments of Britain and Europe. His book is an invaluable guide to anyone interested in stone circles and megaliths and there is always a collected groan from the rest of the family when I get it out to plan a trip to “not another boring stone Dad!”

Imagine my delight when I find our cottages are named after and adjacent to Brimham Rocks which are featured on page 266 of Mr Cope’s gazetteer. The area covers about 50 acres and contains huge gritstone outcrops which have been weathered and eroded into fantastic shapes and juxtapositions which look like the sculptures of the Gods. “Brimful of magic” exudes Mr Cope, and he goes on to speculate how they must have amazed our Bronze-age cousins - just as they continued to amaze us on the Sunday.

Monday and we visited Fountain Abbey (also on our doorstep) and explored the ruins and grounds. Founded by a dozen monks nearly a thousand years ago, Fountain Abbey rapidly grew to become the richest monastery in Europe and this was reflected in the sheer size and grandeur of the remnants. Now owned by the National Trust there is also a minor stately home, a mill and an extraordinary water garden to discover.

Tuesday saw us tramping over Malham Cove and Gordale Scar (both equally spectacular – see photo) on a three hour yomp through the high country, with the limestone pavement beneath our feet and acres of clear blue sky above, there was nothing to disturb the peace bar the constant whine of “are we nearly there yet?”

Wednesday saw us at Castle Howard - as an ardent fan of Brideshead Revisited this was a long held ambition of mine,. It was interesting to note that there were no references to the landmark TV series in any of their marketing or in their gift shop – however I for one was unable to walk around these oh so familiar grounds without a chorus of strings playing dum da de dum in my head!

All in all, a great way to take a break from the toils of life. However, when asked for the high spot of the holidays, the kids were unanimous in their vote for the hot tub outside the cottages. Which just goes to show; you can take the kids out of Butlins – but you cant take the Butlins out of the kids!

Moulin Rouge!

South Penquite Farm — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 14:25:00 +0100

The influence that my continental trip (see below) continues to hold over me was illustrated quite nicely at our local livestock market last week.

DEFRA, (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) had finally lifted some of the Foot & Mouth livestock movement restrictions (hurrah, hurrah!) and the valuable autumn sales were able to resume. As the main national ram sale in Wales had been cancelled last month I was tempted to go to our local market at Hallworthy for their own smaller but local affair.

Since converting to organic production in 1999 I have had little reason to go to the market, which in our subsidy-collecting ranching days was once a weekly fixture in our lives. I can’t say that I have missed it much as I never really felt at home in the very dour, testosterone-laden atmosphere that seems to hang over all of these weekly gatherings, and one glance around the sale ring at the gloomy weather-beaten faces was enough to convince me that I hadn’t been missing out on much.

To be fair, we sheep farmers are having a tough time of it at the moment with prices on the floor and masses of imported lamb being sucked in as a result of the FMD chaos. “So at least the rams should be cheap” I thought – and so it transpired. Bargain after bargain passed by my nose and the expressions on the breeder’s faces grew longer and longer.

‘Buy dear and sell cheap’ has always been my market motto and I wasn’t about to change today. In fact I had my eye on some rather fancy looking rams in the end pen which board proclaimed were pedigree Rouge de l'Ouest. Originating from the Loire area in France, and renowned for its rich thick milk, the Rouge was originally kept as a dairy sheep producing Camembert cheese. Well that was enough for me and I went home a happy man with possibly the two dearest rams at the sale.

Their distinct red faces and wide gallic bottoms would grace any flock and I am looking forward to the spring to see what the offspring will look like.

Entente cordiale

South Penquite Farm — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 11:42:00 +0100

Just back from a farmers’ jolly to France. Organised by Natural England as part of their Heathland project, I was fortunate enough to be invited to join one of the cultural-exchange visits.

We few, (we happy few), consisted of 6 farmers (the other five all from deepest, darkest West Penwith) and a couple of conservation officers; and we trundled in our minibus from Cherbourg in Normandy, visiting many Heathland sites over four days, ending up at Roscoff in Brittany for the boat home to Plymouth.

From the moment we set foot aboard the French owned Brittany Ferry at Poole, the cultural differences began to show. The food and service in the restaurant were not only superb but also very reasonably priced (not that we were paying , you understand). And I had barely enough time it seemed to digest my wild salmon (washed down with a very nice Beaujolais), before we had disembarked and were unpacking in our hotel and getting ready to meet our first French guide in a very swanky seafood restaurant overlooking the night time harbour – local oysters and mussels followed and the chilled white wine flowed freely.

And so the trip went on, and I can honestly say that I have never eaten quite as much – or so well - in such a short time; and if it were not for the occasionally foray onto some French Heath we would all have come down with early onset gout.

Those of you who have already discovered the joys of North-West France will not be surprised; but I was truly taken aback by the miles of empty roads, the relaxed attitude to life, the fine local cuisine and the sheer peace and calm of the small towns and villages we visited. This seemed even more surreal as the surrounding countryside bears a remarkable resemblance to Cornwall – just without the traffic and tourists.

And whilst the farms we visited were not perhaps the tightest of run outfits, and some of the Heathland restoration projects looked unlikely to succeed much past their European funding, they did seem to have their priorities right – good food, good wine & convivial conversation.

Back home again and it is all I can do to stop myself pouring a glass of plonk midday and if I find myself becoming at all stressed, I take a deep breath and recite to myself B.M.F. – Be More French!

When sorrows come…

South Penquite Farm — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 18:33:00 +0100

...they come not single spies, but in battalions - yes it’s been one of those weeks.

FMD (Foot & Mouth) has reared its ugly head again – indeed it never really went away; languishing unnoticed in a herd of cattle in leafy suburban Egham - and the onerous movement restrictions on livestock are in place again. However, unlike last time when we were all busy harvesting corn and hay and the cattle and sheep were happy to be left sunning themselves in the summer pastures, this time we are into the hectic Autumn season and the restrictions will really begin to bite.

To give you one small ‘for instance’; September always heralds the main ram sales when the pedigree breeders will fill the livestock markets with young rams to service the nation’s ewes.

You need approximately one ram for every 40 females and as the old saying goes - “a young ram and an old bull will keep the farmyard full”. Hardly Shakespeare this time, but very true nonetheless; and we were hoping to purchase a couple of young studs to boost our pack of aging gigolos. Last year we had a vary pleasant time at the massive National Sheep Association’s sale in Wales. Thirty three breeds, twenty auction rings, thousand of rams from every corner of the country to choose from and a turnover in excess of £2m in a few hours of light hammer work.

With a total ban on livestock movements where or how are we to get the extra rams we need? How about the larger, more commercial farmers, who bring in fresh blood every year?? You can’t buck the laws of nature – no rams = no lambs. And finally what about the ram breeders who depend on the autumn sales for a large slice of their yearly income???

And this is the story right across the livestock sector. The financial and animal welfare issues of a lengthy movement ban are going to be huge and given the persistence of the disease, exactly how long will the total movement ban need to be in place this time to be effective?

Perhaps even more disquieting, is the news in the farm press was that as this particular strain of FMD was being developed as a vaccination it is possible that it is not even contagious. That’s right – you heard correctly – this strain cannot be passed from animal to animal, but reaches each of the farm affected by ‘environmental means’ (whatever that means!).

It could be that the total movement ban will all be in vain. That is until yesterday, when the first ever diagnosed case of the dreaded Bluetounge was confirmed in a highland cow near Ipswich. This new disease has caused havoc with our European neighbours and once in a herd or flock it can cause up to 70% losses.

If all this wasn’t enough; whilst out for a ride on the moors, our youngest dog Maggie chased a rabbit onto the road and under the wheels of a (thankfully) slow moving Discovery. Despite some very nasty bruising, she seems to have survived intact and I was up to check on her during the night when we were all woken up by the sound of a goose being massacred in the field behind the house!

Due to a mix up in communications between the kids, the geese had not been put away and Mr Fox had taken the opportunity to strike. 4.00am saw me and Cathy – in our dressing gowns – putting the rest of the geese away before slaughtering by torchlight the poor unfortunate victim of the attack; all ready for plucking in the morning. It’s weeks like these that make it all seem worth while!

You’d look sweet, upon the seat…

South Penquite Farm — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 17:24:00 +0100

With almost two weeks of dry weather now and we have been able to catch up all of the farm jobs and even squeeze in a couple of days camping in the Forest of Dean.

With the dry weather predicted (correctly for once) well in advance by the Met Office I had already lined up all of the contractors for the hay and silage and we only had one last bout of rain on Monday the 20th to get through. But, oh boy, did it tip down. By mid-day the smallest Yurt had flooded and had to be evacuated and the campsite gateways were beginning to resemble Glastonbury. And then, like a tap, it stopped and the sun came out. By that evening the campers had begun smiling again, on Tuesday we cut a field for hay and on Thursday the big mowers came in to lay down 25 acres for silage.

Making hay in what is in effect early autumn is hard going. The days are shorter, the sun is cooler, the crop is heavier, and the mist and dew mean that there is only a few precious hours drying in each day. After six days of turning, the hay was just about fit to bale and thanks to an heroic effort by the whole family we managed to get it safely stowed away in the barn just in time to tackle the big bales on Monday.

Trying to shift 200 odd big round bales 3 miles up the road on a bank holiday Monday whilst there is a fun-day taking place in the village (with no other route for our trailers) was always going to be stressful. However, again with full credit to the team, we limped in at dusk with the bales all wrapped. A damage report revealed one knackered clutch, a snapped loader and my own John Deere unable to lift another bale due to lack of hydraulic oil.

A well earned break seemed in order; and so we packed up the tents and bikes and headed north to the Forest of Dean where my sister and her tribe reside in the heart of the woods.

This, I thought, would be a excellent chance to try out our recently purchased tandem that one of our neighbours had propped outside their house for £165 ovno. This had been to good to resist, and on the third passing I had knocked on the door and the appropriate number of notes had changed hands.

I don’t know if Mr Tandem had intended to invent a mechanical metaphor for marriage when he welded two old bike frames together - but that is just what he did. When you are in tune with your loved one (behind you of course, on the back seat), life fairly zips by with the minimum of effort. You are more than a match for any lone(ly) cyclist as the sum of your four legs, two hearts beating as one, and a magnificent machine is an unbeatable combination.

However, hit a bumpy patch and it can all go horribly wrong. You want to peddle – your better half doesn’t. You want the high road – she fancies the low. And after 10 miles, when the legs begin to ache and the seat feels like a lump of badly carved oak, little cracks and strains can begin to surface. All in all though, a wonderful contraption, and an excellent way to explore the many trails the forest had to offer.

Fairly Non Bio

South Penquite Farm — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 08:11:00 +0100

Within hours of the news that Foot & Mouth had struck again we had concerned campers ringing up and wondering if they should still come down. With well in excess of 1,000 visitors over the summer from all over the country and with livestock which mingles with my neighbours beasts on the commons, what do we say? What exactly is the appropriate level of response.

Bio-security is not a word that slips easily off of the tongue, or indeed fits well with our marketing image of fresh air and freedom to explore our wonderfully wilderness. I remember vividly the sense of chaos and crisis which accompanied the 2001 outbreak, when I found myself - after a hastily convened meeting of commoners in the village hall - in charge of maintaining a bed of straw laced with disinfectant just below the cattle grid on the road to Blisland, about ½ a mile from the farm.

This was a typical - but understandable - headless chicken response by a community under threat from disease we actually knew very little about. More worryingly, this also seemed to be the case with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who ran around fire-chasing seemingly without a clue with how to really deal with the situation.

It was as I maintained my lonely vigil by the cattle grid that I began to see the fruitlessness of it all (who was I kidding with my bed of mushy straw), and I am depressed to see again farmers encourage to employ a range of Heath-Robinson disinfection-points with the inevitable hand painted sign written badly in Massy Ferguson red on an old piece of chipboard.

My personal feelings are that F&M was never carried or spread by the general public last time and I am glad to say that the advice from DEFRA this time contains unequivocal statements like “the countryside remains open” and “there is a clear principle that there should be a presumption in favour of maintaining public access”.

So our response to concerned visitors has been “come on down – its business as usual” and there is no bits of old carpet in our gateways or footbaths brimming with chemicals. Bio-security is a word which belongs firmly with establishments like the Pirbright laboratories. Air-filters, compulsory strip showers, secure drainage – this is Bio-security. And even with all these mechanisms and procedures in place, they managed to let the cat out of the bag.

Business as usual

South Penquite Farm — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 19:25:00 +0100

It’ been a mixed week – to say the least

With a promise of seven dry days on last Sunday’s weather forecast, I was quickly on the phone to various contractors in the hope of getting all of the silage, hay and shearing completed in what would in effect be the first (and possibly only) week of summer.

First call to Graham (who cuts and bales the silage) only to find that he is approximately 600 acres behind on his list of work and couldn’t possibly come for a fortnight. Not very encouraging - it might be snowing by then!

Better luck with the next call to Greg the shearer. He says no problem – leave it with him and he will fit us in.

Lastly, I call Johnny and instruct him to cut the 4 acre field we always use to make some traditional small bale hay for the horses. ‘Am I sure?’ – yes of course I’m sure. Look at that glorious sunshine.

It was all going well until Thursday morning when the ‘possible light shower’ turned out to be a downpour followed by a couple of hours of steady rain. Make hay while the sun shines, goes the old proverb, and how true. Perfect hay is sun dried and each shower of rain that falls on the freshly cut grass will dramatically reduce its feed value.

So, with the weekend looming we had damp hay, no silage cut, but with at least a promise of shearing on Friday – as long as the sheep were dry. And thank goodness they were, for we woke on Saturday Morning to the news that Foot & Mouth had been found in a herd of Longhorns in Surrey. A complete shutdown on all livestock movements was implemented within hours of the outbreak and this has also stopped the shearers from working farm to farm.

So the sheep are all now shorn (except for four that gave Greg the slip – I will tackle these errant girls myself on Monday), and I have given up on making the hay (after another overcast day on Saturday it seemed wisest to just get it quickly into big bales – not such good quality, but adequate bullock feed nonetheless), and have spent the rest of the weekend reassuring campers that, despite what they see on the news, we still open and very much business as usual – mores the pity!

Farty Pants!

South Penquite Farm — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 20:58:00 +0100

There are greenhouse gases and there are greenhouse gases, and whilst Carbon Dioxide hogs most of the limelight, it has a couple of partners in crime which, despite grabbing less of the headlines, are much more deadly.

Nitrous oxide is a staggering 300 times more damaging than CO2, and (as I have already pointed out in an earlier post) the very fact that we are an organic farm and therefore do not apply soluble nitrogen fertilizer to the fields, dwarfs any of the other measures we might take in the fight against climate change. If you are a farmer and would seriously like to make a difference – then this should be your first step. This will also have a beneficial knock on effect on the other unseen enemy – Methane.

Thirty times more damaging than CO2, and a quarter of world wide emissions come from belching and farting livestock. It’s the burps that cause the most Methane, and such is the extent of the problem that scientist across the globe have been tasked with researching possible solutions.

It is now acknowledged that the greatest threat the Chinese pose to global warming is not by hankering after a washing machine and/or family saloon, but it would be a simple change of their eating habits towards the western diet of red meat with every meal that will cause the most damage.

What I love about these debates is the ludicrous statistical parallels that are quoted to illustrate the point. So - believe it or not - in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, the production of 1kg of prime beef is equivalent to driving an average car 160 miles. Does that make it any clearer? What if – like us – your nearest MacDonald’s is 14 miles away?? What price a Big Mac then???

Anyway, as it turns out, the boffins have discovered that diet of the cow can have a dramatic effect on its flatulence output, with plants such as white clover and birdsfoot trefoil being the best performers.

While very interesting, this comes as no surprise to me. For while these species are generally less productive and hard to establish from new, they are both abundant on our low input organic holding. No nitrogen fertiliser with fewer animals eating a less potent diet. Once again we are reinventing the wheel within agriculture when good old fashioned traditional farming already has the answers – even to ‘new’ challenges such as global warming.

Rain, rain, go away…

South Penquite Farm — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 17:44:00 +0100

At some point I am going to have to say a few words about the weather.

The last four weeks have been grim – very grim. Even telling the campers “never mind, it could be worse – you could be in Hull” hasn’t bought a smile to their faces. Every man, beast and plant on the farm now is desperate for a little sunshine on it’s back.

The warm wet period has been a boon for Blowflies and has seen me shearing a succession of damp fly-struck ewes, whose maggot ridden fleeces are quietly rotting in a corner of the yard.

Fortunately, when Greg the shearer rang me a couple of weeks ago late on a Saturday night and asked whether I had any sheep fit to shear on early Sunday morning, I had the presence of mind to forgo our Sunday lay-in and say “Yes – come on down”. A couple of hours work, and his team had shorn 160 of our ‘mutton’ (last years lambs) and so our prime organic wool for the year was safely stored away dry. I had momentarily thought about shearing them myself (as I had last year), but that would have required a least a week of dry weather (when it comes to shearing – I’m 20 a day man) and so thank goodness I didn’t.

Our organic wool has been improving year on year as we have been selecting only the best young sheep, throwing away the belly wool and not using any paints or markers. Whereas our first batch was ‘Arran’ (very itchy), we are now up to Double Knitting (only slightly itchy) and I have had a very natty sleeveless cardigan made up for myself – (pictured here after a hard morning in the shearing shed).

I have become very fond of the item of clothing, and not only does it look very dapper but I think it makes quite a bold statement. There can’t be many (if any) farmers in the UK sporting a garment produced from his own flock – let alone wool that he had sheared himself. My children, on the other hand, treat it as some sort of crime against fashion - they howl with protest when I get it out of the wardrobe and refuse to let me wear it in public.

However it doesn’t matter, for as it happens I was approached by Sky Travel Channel last month, who wondered if I would like to be part of a programme they were making about green tourism in Cornwall. They explained that the programme would have an audience of about 300 million people across 90 countries and would be repeated over and over ad nauseam. I jumped at it. What better opportunity I thought, of giving my cardigan the audience it deserves while sticking it in the eye of my brand-obsessed teenagers - hah!

Fashion? – what do they know about fashion!

Lazy Dog

South Penquite Farm — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 11:46:00 +0100

June too soon,
July they die,
August you must

So goes the old saying with regard to controlling thistles in your fields, and there are basically three methods you can choose from. Chemicals, topping and pulling.

On Thursday evening I was asked by a neighbour to slip over and humanely dispatch a young foal that had been hit by some idiot speeding on one of our moorland roads. As we drove through his fields I noticed large areas of his hedgerows were browned off and dead. “Round up?” I asked. “Yes” he replied “and d’you know, ever since I did it I’ve had a terrible sore throat”.

And there you have it. Use a pesticide and you will not only decimate wildlife and leave unsightly scars in the greenery, but will also put your own health at risk to boot.

Alternatively, nearly every pasture farm has a topper. These are robust mowing machines that are designed to kill the thistle while leaving the grass intact. Our earliest machine was a ‘finger mower’, and these machines were universally acknowledged to be the best tool for the job all through the ‘50’s and ‘60’s and still have their fans today.

Two 4’ arms with sharpened ‘fingers’ down their length would be lowered to run perpendicular to the rear wheel of the tractor and a complex array of wheels and belts would drive an apple wood shaft (it had to be green apple wood for the perfect combination of strength and flexibility) which would guide one blade over the other as you went along. Where these fiddly beast score over more modern machines is that as the blades ran to the side of the tractor, you didn’t run over (and flatten without cutting) the weeds you were trying to prune.

However my favourite method (and not surprisingly, the least used by far) is pulling. If you can pull out the individual thistle root-an-all it will never come back. In this I am aided by a fantastic tool called the Lazy Dog, which was designed by a firm in North Yorkshire with this specific job in mind.

One of the best eighty quid I have ever invested on the farm. It gives me an excuse to spend an hour or so each day in some of the quietest corners of the farm with just the dogs and the view to keep me company. Better still, you know as you tear each thistle’s roots from the soil with a satisfying ripping sound, you are saying goodbye for ever.

www.lazydogtools.co.uk

It’s Showtime

South Penquite Farm — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 19:04:00 +0100

The second weekend in June is always marked by the Royal Cornwall Show. One of the last true agricultural shows and also very ‘royal’ this year with the presence of Prince Edward. He opened the show on the Thursday and so we sensibly chose to pull the kids out of school on the Friday.

The ‘early summer monsoon’ (and I kid you not – this is a recognised meteorological event) had occurred a week earlier - thus washing out half term - and so we were blessed with wall-to-wall sunshine for our day out. We also had added excitement this year, as we had arranged to see a bull, with a view to purchasing him to introduce fresh blood, (and indeed a fresh breed) into the herd.

We currently have a small herd of 20 Black Galloways on which we have been ‘working’ a pedigree Black Galloway bull. This is fine & dandy except that after three years we are now faced with welcoming daughters of the bull into his harem. For obvious reasons this doesn’t make good breeding sense and so we have decided to keep the Galloway bull for the older cows and buy a Beef Shorthorn for the heifers.

The Shorthorn has a long and distinguished history as shown by this extract from the breed society’s web site

“In the late 18th Century two brothers, Charles and Robert Colling started to improve Durham cattle using line breeding techniques established so successfully by Robert Bakewell on Longhorn cattle. In 1783 Charles Colling found four particular cows recorded as Duchess, Cherry, Strawberry, and Old Favourite among others, and at the same time his brother Robert had noticed the superiority of calves in the local market bred from a bull known as Hubback, which he subsequently bought for £8.

It was a combination of these bloodlines, which led to the birth of the bull Comet bred by Charles Colling in 1804, and later sold at the Ketton sale in 1810 for 1,000gns. This was the first 1,000 guinea bull ever recorded, but the wisdom of this bid was later to be justified by his progeny and he has since become a legend in cattle breeding.”

1,000gns in 1810 equates to £54,705 in today’s money. We shook hands on the bull at a much more reasonable £1,500, and then had plenty of time to introduce Churton to the wonderment of Candy Floss.

Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war!

South Penquite Farm — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 20:00:00 +0100

Last weekend we hosted a trial on behalf of the Cornwall Sheepdog Society.

Bill (pictured) – who has been running the sheepdog training courses on the farm over the winter – came the day before and set up a deceptively simple looking course while I fetched 140 odd hoggs (young ewes) to be left in the field overnight to acclimatise themselves to the gates and hurdles.

“We’d better test the course” said Bill once we had set up, and promptly let his dog Splatt loose on a half dozen sheep who proceeded to guided them expertly up the field and neatly through one of the ‘gates’.

“D’yer wanna hav’ a go?” he innocently asked.

Why not, I thought. There’s nobody about and I was sure I could detect a certain smugness in Bill’s amiable challenge. We let another 6 sheep out of the pen and I fetched Morag from the truck.

The gates for sheep dog trails consist of two hurdles with a 7 yard gap between. Now this might sound easy but the nearest gate was at least 200 yards from me and (without my glasses) seemed just a blur in the distance. I let Morag of the chain and she chased the startled sheep up the field at her customary 168 mph, while I hollered at the top of my voice in a vain attempt to direct her left and right.

Call it a fluke, call it luck or call it divine intervention but the sheep galloped up the hill in tight bunch and straight through the gate.

While Bill picked his jaw back up off of the grass, I nonchalantly called Morag back and tied her up in the back of the truck saying, “You know, I might well give it a go tomorrow.”

By 9am the next morning, 40 local dogs were all lined up ready for the off. The running order had the most inexperienced dogs first and Bill took the first spot with a very young dog that , like Morag, had never competed before.

For the trial, we stood at the top of the field, while the sheep were let out 5 at a time from a pen at the bottom - some 300 yards away. Poor Bill couldn’t even get his youngster to find the sheep, let alone drive them and after 5 mins of cussing and shouting had to withdraw defeated. Well if Bill didn’t mind looking the ass then nor did I and I entered Morag’s name at the end of the novices.

I was confidant that she would be able to collect the distant ewes and bring them to me and this she easily managed, only missing the first gate by a dozen yards. Having now run over ¼ mile, she had slowed her down sufficiently to be able to control her enough to get the sheep away from me down to the second gate on the far right of the field.

Here it all went wrong. One ewe strayed from the pack and Morag pounced, giving her a healthy nip on the hind quarters and sending off to the far corner of the field.

While I was shouting at her at the top of my voice, I felt a gentle tap on my shoulder. It was the judge asking me politely to withdraw. Apparently, this sort of rough behaviour is strictly against the rules and no amount of pleading that they were my sheep anyway was going to make any difference!

Good Energy???

South Penquite Farm — Sun, 20 May 2007 19:18:00 +0100

This week we are changing our electricity provider to Good Energy. I have been wanting to move to a ‘green’ supplier for a year now but had been hampered by the fact that our current supplier - EDF - had never sent us a bill!

Last April we installed a new meter on the farm and I changed from British Gas to SWEB. Almost immediately they were taken over by the French firm EDF, who wrote to me saying that the change would be seamless and there was no need to do anything – so we didn’t.

The months began to pass and we didn’t hear any more. So faced with the prospect of fiddling a foreign firm out of their cash we did what any right minded Englishman would do – crossed our fingers and hoped for the best. Take that Napoleon!

After about ten months I began to think the unthinkable. Perhaps they have forgotten us. Perhaps our file had been lost in the takeover and we would have free juice for life!

No such luck. Two weeks ago a bill came for £1,772.

Nothing we could do. It was a fair cop, so we simply took it on the chin, coughed up and promptly looked around for a renewable source for our power.

A bit of research on the ‘U’switch web site revealed that the market for green energy is not straightforward. There were a bewildering number of eco friendly firms on offer with wildly different claims. However, one stood out from the pack – the package being offered by Good Energy who claim to be “the only UK supplier that supplies only 100% renewable electricity” . Also, a fact that made them seem even more attractive to us, one of their main generating sources is the wind farm at Delabole, which was Cornwall’s first and the nearest to the farm.

This all looked entirely plausible, as their cost per Kw hour was about 10% dearer than any of the other ‘green’ tariffs on offer. To counter balance this, they do have a ‘Home Generation Scheme’ which rewards people who have their own wind turbine to the tune of 4.5p for every Kw produced on site. While we don’t have one yet, this is definitely something I would like to pursue as during the winter we have plenty of wind power to harness.

So we have signed up to guilt-free electricity, and now (with the dearest supplier currently available) have even more incentive to use as little of the stuff as possible.

www.good-energy.co.uk

Ring-a-ding-ding

South Penquite Farm — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 19:26:00 +0100

One week into lambing and everything is going well. As any shepherd will tell you, lambing is all about the weather and the last seven days have been wall-to-wall sunshine. With only a couple of hundred ewes to lamb this year we decided to do most of the work on foot (as opposed to roaring around on the quad bike). This means we are keeping the expectant ewes in just a few acres and moving them out one-by-one onto fresh pastures as they lamb.

This has been very pleasant, with the worst problems being heat stress for the birthing ewes and sunburn for us!

A few years ago we moved the date for the start of lambing forward to about the 20th April from its traditional 1st April start. This was to ensure that as organic farmers (without the option of pushing the early grass with nitrogen), it would have warmed up enough to get the spring growth well under way. Well global warming has made a nonsense of this decision (despite the fact we only implemented it a few short years ago) and now I have to consider moving it back a few days each year.

Once we have moved the ewes and lambs out of the lambing field we leave them in a small holding field before ‘ringing’ them. This involves using a special applicator to stretch open a small rubber ring, through which the lambs tail can be threaded. Once in the right position the ring is then slid off of the applicator and sits tight around the tail, stopping the flow of blood. After a couple of weeks the portion of the tail below the ring will simply drop off and leave the lamb with a shorter tail which will be much cleaner and so less prone to fly strike.

If you are male and over the age of 13 you might like to look away now, as exactly the same method is used to castrate the boy lambs. The ring is simply slid over the testicles and ‘pinged’ shut thus stopping the blood flow. 14 days later and the two nuts in their sack simply drop off and are picked up by passing crows looking for a tasty snack.

All very neat and relatively painless – only please don’t try this at home!

Those Magnificent Men

South Penquite Farm — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 11:03:00 +0100

Last week we were away enjoying a kid-free weekend on the Isles of Scillys. Our first visit to these sub-tropical havens was brought about by a Christmas gift of two plane tickets by my kind and generous sister-in-law.

Now I have often written about the evils of flying with regard to global warming, and came in for a fair bit of stick from family and friends about taking to the air for our weekend break. However I can’t imagine that the two tiny engines strapped to the wings of our 8 seater sky-bus would contribute much in the way of emissions – indeed they barely looked large enough to power a small car and the whole (flimsy) plane rattled and shook as they sparked into life.

Lands End airport is in fact a strip of grass which ends with a steep cliff and from our seats behind the pilot (and I mean just behind the pilot – cough and you spat on him) we had fantastic views of the cape of Cornwall as we took off and even more dramatic views of the short runway at our destination on St Mary's. Cathy isn’t the best flyer, but she pulled bravely through the 15 minute flight and only really wobbled as we passed over the wreck of last weeks' sky-bus, which had crashed on landing and now resides in a farmers' hedge to the right of the airfield.

The islands themselves are a world apart. Our B&B was just a short walk across a couple of fields from the airport and the main town of Hugh Town was another 10mins down the road. In fact the whole of St Mary's (the largest island) can be comfortably circumnavigated on foot in three to four hours – which indeed we did.

On the other day we took one of the many ferries over to Tresco and spent a couple of hours in the amazing Abbey Gardens. These were planted in 1834 by Augustus Smith and have been maintained by the same family ever since. It was his grandson who introduced daffodil planting to the islands and these have been the mainstay of the agriculture for over a century. However a combination of climate change (which means that the advantage of an early crop over the mainland has been lost) and the fact that there is no where to accommodate the small army of Eastern European cheap labour which keeps the Cornish crop profitable has meant that the rows (& rows) of flowers are now merely for show.

Meanwhile the increase in tourism has resulted in several new swanky restaurants all demanding local meat and dairy products. This will be quite a challenge, which amongst other things means reintroducing livestock and setting up a small abattoir and butchery. I look forward to flying back in a couple of years and seeing how they are getting on.

Down the Drain

South Penquite Farm — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 14:06:00 +0100

There is a piece of legislation, just a far reaching as the proposed Climate Change Bill, which is already on the European statute books and is beginning to make its presence felt here on the farm. Namely the Water Framework Directive. It was passed in 2003 and states that by 2010 each member state will protect and/or restore the quality of all ground and surface water. Yawn, yawn, I hear you say – but actually this is quite a tall order and nearly 80% of UK water resources don’t yet come up to scratch.

Having just hosted a couple of farmer training workshops about this issue - under the snappy banner of Catchment Sensitive Farming - I feel emboldened to bore you further. Now there are basically two types of water pollution, point pollution (where somebody tips a barrel of chemicals into a stream) or diffuse pollution (the kind of background pollution which has many small or tiny contributors).

Agriculture gets most of the blame for the diffuse problem and so we are being asked to voluntarily clean up our act or be faced with some pretty severe regulations. Solutions can be a simple as fixing guttering, moving a gateway or changing the timing of our manure spreading.

Having sorted all of our water issues long ago with the Westcountry Rivers Trust (for whom we are now a demonstration farm), I thought – arrogantly - that I would have nothing to learn from the workshops and simply needed to serve Cathy’s delicious homemade lunch and pick up the cheque.

Well, while it is true that as a responsible organic farmer I do not spread bags of Nitrogen and Phosphates directly onto the fields, it transpires that 12% of phosphorus that ends up in drinking water comes from detergents, i.e. soap, shampoo & washing powder, and here we are in the summer with over 100 campers a day, using our solar showers and flushing criminal amounts of phosphates into the soil via our soak-away.

As we learnt on the day, the cheapest and most effective way of dealing with any pollution is to stop it at the source. And so from this summer onwards we will be providing free eco-friendly (phosphate-free) shower gel and trying to persuade the campers to use it instead of their nasty wash-and-go. In a long line of environmental measures that will cost me rather than save me money (see entry below), I can only hope that it will at least be tax deductible.