Black Sheep Blog

Crop circles ... ahh, wonderous crop circles!

Sadly, the golden age of crop circles has past - puzzled locals, conspiracy theorists, vomiting dogs, even 6 o' clock news coverage.

I blame the internet for spoiling our innocence. I personally was a much happier man believing super advanced aliens had travelled lightyears across the vastness of space to make pretty patterns in a field before flying off in search of other gormless cereal growing species.

However, either our benign arable grafitti artist aliens have returned with greater creativity or some bounder's had a couple of shandies and sort to revisit old times ... because ... the crop circles are back - and with something for the ladies this time.

The warning "Don't play with your food" can clearly be applied to all stages of the production process

Thanks to Brian Clark for spotting this lurking in a field.

SC: Here on the Black Sheep we're always keen to help you with a bit pf problem solving. One such problem came from a Robert Price from Shrewsbury, who contacted us with a particular issue regarding cross compliance.

He wanted to know whether the picture below would impact on his cross compliance entitlements. We think it just might...

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 ...).

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 ...

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.

Had these images sent in from Ben Parsons from Leominster and couldn't help but laugh.

The story goes that Ben and his brother bought their dad an old Fergie 2 furrow plough for a Christmas present this year on the internet,

It was delivered to Ben's house. However he found the thing a tad difficult to move on his own, so telephoned a friend to ask him if I could borrow a tractor for the afternoon to move the plough to their father's house.

The friend kindly agreed, so off went Ben to pick up the tractor only to discover that it was a great big Fendt 926!

Well, it should fit they thought, and it did, but with a comedy looking outcome!

Funny picture of a calf with a question mark marking:

Disco Stu stumbled across this on Googlesightseeing - an example of crude crop writing just beside Edinburgh Airport.

See the big picture ....

Ploughing can create some unusual shapes but we were impressed by this huge chicken that farmer Mervyn Bulled created.

The chicken measured 50 metres high and is going to be used to head an advertising campaign for Lloyd Maunder.

A 50m high chicken! What will be next, a 100 m high penguin?

Mr Europe Editor has been sent these two images of people who have unusual methods of carrying large quantities of material. I think the grass rider is trying to camouflage his/herself, but unfortunately the undergrowth 'look' is unworkable in a city street. As for the egg guy, it sure looks impressive, but if he has to stop quickly he is definately going to get egg on his face (sorry but it was too good of a pun to ignore)