Black Sheep Blog

Well the Awards is over for another year - time to start planning for next year's.

No joke, according to Debbie Beaton (FW projects editor and Awards organiser), who was telling me on the FWi podcast that work starts on the 2007 Awards in January.

For me the Awards have matured a wee bit for its second outing. There was more confidence from attendees, organsisers and advocates that this was a true celebration of farming and was a perminent fixture on the agricultural calendar.

And true to Black Sheep style - here's a few choice snaps from the nite:

A cheesy festive feature - a flock of real-life singing sheep from the Lake District are releasing their version of Jingle Bells for the second Christmas running due to popular demand.

The Baarmy Sheep's version is available for download from the Cumbria Tourism website.

Fpor the hardcore fans - there's also a video to go with it.

Enjoy.

As you've probably noticed the Black Sheep has changed appearance some what.

The deal is that after God knows how long we've finally got a proper blogging platform to support our efforts.

The advantages are easier search and navigation, ability to easily leave comments, and it's much easier from an author's point of view so there should be an increase in postings!

Down points - not too many - just that there are some teething issues. It will take a little while to get the archive of Black Sheep postings over on to this new platform, and we've not had the design work done yet so it doesn't really look like part of FWi at the moment. That will change though.

If you've got any comments then let us know ...

What is it with agriculture and dodgy naked charity calendars?

Each year I seem to get sent more and more of the things.

However I've got to admit that, like a wobbly tooth, the discomfort at their presence fails to counter the curiousity factor and they tend to get fairly well thumbed in the office.

Today's "special entry" comes courtesy of Harper Adams Student Union.

The Wardens

Dubiously titled "The future of Rural Britain" its pages are a mixture of unhygenic practices (man arses and bar stools should never meet) and homoerotic soft porn (just how compelling the lifting of a shooting tabbard to reveal cheek can be I don't know ...).

Have been doing a bit more investigation into this naked calendar phenomenon.

There's this website devoted to listing nude calendars.

Besides the content, there's some great titles:

Beauty and the Bass (fishing based nudity)
Men of Mortuaries
Bare Because We Care

Apparently, there's even a calendar called Highway 32 Pothole Calendar where townspeople from Western Canada wereso fed up with the rotten state of their main road that they posing nude in the potholes as a form of protest.

Even more calendar japery with the Essex Young Farmers annual effort to scare the locals:

The guys and girls from the EYFC do this on a habitual basis apparently - don't panic - the local constabulary are well aware ...

If you fancy purchasing a copy to enhance the look of your abode then visit this site ...

The office Christmas party is a fairly reliable source of office gossip - whether it's Mr Farmlife's "busy" hands or the effects of Mr Arable Reporter's "come to bed" eyes.

Sadly this year's celebrations yielded little in the way of shame, probably due to the lack of any dancefloor facilities.

We did randomly stumble upon a shepherdess in Wimbledon Village though who was very complimentary about Farmers Weekly which was nice.

Mr Arable Reporter powers up the "come to bed" eyes

Now that I've shown my penchant for naked charity calendars, I'm starting to get them emailed to me.

Latest offering - the Newcastle University Mountaineering Club charity calendar for Edale Mountain Rescue:

Hanging out ...

As promised the Black Sheep now returns to the fold with a look more appropriate to the FW brand.

Well, it seems that getting this new blogging platform in place has metophorically uncorked farming's blog bottle.

All of a sudden we've got blog interest from all directions.

For example we have fledgling blogs from Mr Farmilife and Miss Livestock Reporter, we've got biofuels from veteran RBI blogger Simon Robinson, and we've got external interest from such bloggers as:

Montana cattle rancher

Also this from Jake Freestone's blog - a cereal farmer from Tewkesbury - who's just been on a tour of the John Deere factories over in America

As we go on I'll add a "Blogroll" to the right-hand sidebar with a permanent link to any blog I feel is worthy of a mention.

During a pretense of doing a bit of pre-xmas work I was clearing out my inbox and stumbled across this image emailed in by FWi fan, Adrian Shingler.

The story is that Adrian's father was a farmer for many years, a one day in 1956 he took delivery of a Massey 65 (the first 50hp tractor in the country) and more interestingly a Claas combine - the first self propelled german combine in the country.

Apparently, once the vehicles arrived, Farmers Weekly contracted Illfords photograghers to go to the farm and photograph the new machine working.

The photographer informed Mr Shingler that the picture would be on front cover of the next issue of Farmers Weekly, and sure enough it was.

Attached is the one of the images but we'd love to hear if anyone still has a copy of the actual issue.