David's Digest

"We wondered if you'd ever considered blogging?" they said.
"I might have if I knew what it meant", I replied. "Oh, really", they went on, "in that case we had better explain".
I was then treated to a summary of what you, dear user, know only too well, otherwise why are you here?
"There must be lots of things you'd like to include in your column," they continued, "but there isn't enough space. Blogging would give you the opportunity to get such matters off your chest."
Sensing my hesitation and attempting to appeal to my vanity they said "You do realise FW Interactive has a million hits a month, don't you?"
"Isn't it rather presumptuous," I asked, weakening a little, "to think users would want even more of my thoughts rammed down their throats?"
"The only way to know is to try it and find out", they retorted, "You start next week".
So, here I sit in my deep litter office in front of my steam driven computer preparing pearls of wisdom for your delectation. If you feel like it, watch this space.

Last night's Channel 4 TV programme "The Great Golbal Warming Swindle" turned everything we have recently heard about climate change on its head. According to several scientists from around the world those who blame carbon emissions for the rise in temperatures have got it wrong.
Its not carbon dioxide that causes global warming, say these intellectuals, but sun spots. When these cause temperatures to rise emissions of carbon increase. So the politically motivated scientists who say different are promoting the opposite of the real facts. Moreover. they are using these spurious arguments as an excuse to raise taxes and inhibit development in the Third World. Or so said the climatologists who appeared on Channel 4 last night.
Even the founder of Green Peace, who resigned several years ago when his colleagues started exaggerating things in order to continue confrontation with the establishment, agreed with them.
Meanwhile politicians are meeting in Brussels to try to agree yet another EU action plan to deal with the received wisdom that most people have come to accept.

In these days of so-called democratic government the removal of the hereditary entitlement to sit on the red benches was probably inevitable. But an entirely elected House of Lords - as last weeks Commons vote may have presaged - would be to take reform too far.
We would end up with a weaker version of the Commons, which is, for the most part, ineffective against the power of the ruling party and its whips. And the valuable scrutinisation of bills, hastily and imperfectly dealt with by the Commons, would be all but lost as Party took precedence over all other considerations. In other words a waste of money and space.
OK, the House of Lords is far from perfect as the current cash for honours debacle illustrates. But jokes about superannuated peers are unjust. Age does not necessarily dim the intelligence of people with years of experience in industry or government - qualities that sometimes seem to be the least criteria needed for membership of the Commons.

Anglia Farmers Ltd the Norfolk based requisite buying group with purchasing power in excess of £100million/year (through which we buy most of what we need to run this farm) has entered into an agreement to supply the Diocese of Norwich with a variety of items.
Negotiations began when the Bishop of Norwich, who was president of the Royal Norfolk Show last year, visited the Anglia Farmers stand at the June show. Since then nearly fifty sub accounts have been established through which individual churches and clergy can place orders.
Purchases so far have included a new bunded oil tank for St Peters Church, Blofield, together with heating oil to fill it and electricity for St Mary's Church, Happisburgh. Ray Sanders of St Mary's said "It's early days but it looks like we'll save £100/year and that's the equivalent of several coffee mornings".

A week ago as I dragged my feet through mud while rain ran off my cap down the back of my neck I commented to a colleague that it would be two or three weeks before we would be able to get on the land. But suddenly it's Spring. The sun has shone for the last few days and yesterday and today temperature's here in Norfolk have been around 19 degrees C. Recently saturated dark brown land has whitened over and the air has filled with the sound of tractors preparing seed beds.
On this farm it so happens that most of our spring drillings of beans and sugar beet are scheduled for our heaviest and therefore slowest drying fields, so a bit of patience is called for to avoid compaction. But we've applied first top dressings of nitrogen onto the latest drilled fields of winter wheat and we've done the oil seed rape as well. If this weather holds we'll be spring seed drilling very shortly.
Oh, silly me. In my old fashioned habit of thinking about production agriculture, I nearly forgot. The environment is what they want us to look after most these days, isn't it? Thankfully I've always been a closet environmentalist so it's no hardship.
Anyway the buds are bursting, the birds are singing and the primroses on the banks are blooming. All seems well with the world. What a difference a week makes.

Why do so called celebrities allow pressure groups to make fools of them by allowing themselves to be used to publicise causes about which they know nothing?
In case you missed it Heather (Mills) McCartney recently took time off from her divorce proceedings from ex Beatle, Paul, to invade a Somerset pig farm alongside the vegetarian pressure group Viva. The purpose of this trespass was to "expose" farrowing crates as prisons for sows.
The sows can hardly move, she said, and they are unable to nuzzle their piglets. She then went on to explain, quite rightly, that the devices were intended to stop the sows from rolling onto the piglets and killing them. But more of them would survive in an open pen, she claimed.

You couldn't make it up. The Rural Payments Agency, with 25,000 outstanding cases from 2005 still to sort out and most 2006 caims only partially paid has decided to upgrade its public relations department. And it is doing it at a published cost of nearly £245,000 per year. Whether this comes out of the money allocated to farming or from some other source is not clear. But it can only ultimately come from taxpayers who are being abused almost as seriously as those who should have received the full payments due to them.
The first job the new department will presumably need to tackle is to try to justify why it has been brought into existence in the first place. And after that, what?
Predictably it will try to persuade the populace, including farmers, that the Agency is doing a wonderful job. If the new department can do that it will certainly earn all that money. But unless the people on whose behalf it will be spinning improves their performance exponentially I, for one, will not believe them.

I used to love walking around the farm in spring. I still do if I am honest but the enjoyment of seeing winter sown crops grow, spring sown crops germinate and spring flowers emerging along ditches and banks is tempered these days by the detritus left by fly tippers.
I don't know how bad it is in other area's because I only walk this farm in detail. But the amount and variety of rubbish left in gateways and on roadside banks around here seems to increase annually. When the hedge cutter has tidied up last years growth and before this years has had time to sprout and cover up some of the evidence the mess looks worse than ever.
This year we have had tyres of all sizes, matresses, cupboards, heaps of tin cans, a calor gas cylinder, refrigerators, TV sets, garden rubbish of various sorts and on a neighbouring farm someone even tipped a load of gravel part way across a lane so that traffic had to drive up the opposite bank to pass. The Council even brought cones to surround it so that cars would not drive into it in the dark. But did they clear up any of the above? Good gracious no, that's down to local farmers.

Suddenly the GM debate seems to have begun again. After years of virtual apathy by the popular media because its own antagonism had killed off serious discussion, the subject is cropping up all over the place. In recent days there have been articles promoting GM in a number of newspapers, some of them, admittedly commenting on a series of TV programmes about genetically modified animals which also exposed the subject to public view. It would be inaccurate to suggest that all comments have been favourable but I have not yet heard the level of hostility that ruled a few years ago.
Today a new development is reported. American scientists at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, have apparently discovered how to genetically modify mosquitoes so that they can be used to combat the dreadful tropical disease, malaria. Concurrently another group of scientists at Imperial College, London, have created another strain of GM mosquitoes that mate normally but have no offspring. The males of this new type can be readily identified and separated mechanically from ordinary insects because they have fluorescent testicles.

We managed to get a little spring drilling done at the end of last week - a few sugar beet and a few beans. Even that meant working through the weekend but seedbeds were good and they went in pretty well.
Then the balmy sunshine ended and we were back to winter again. As elsewhere, here in Norfolk we had sharp and unpleasant showers of rain, sleet, hail and snow and no further land work has been possible. Nor does it look likely before next weekend and by then another lot of rain is forecast.
It is of, course, too early to panic. It is only three quarters of the way through March. But my father (and probably his father too) used to say that March dust is worth a guinea an ounce and, decimalisation apart, that is as true today as it ever was.
The best crops are usually those that have the longest growing season and early drilling is a prerequisite. Once the calendar rolls round towards April thoughts inevitably turn to "cuckoo barley" and lower yields. So, let us hope the end of March is as good as the beginning and allows us get our 2007 crops off to a reasonable start.

First I skimmed today's newspapers and confirmed that Gordon Brown's budget will leave me worse off, not better. No surprise there then.
Then I turned to my post. There was a flyer inviting me to subscribe to an expensive travel magazine published by Conde Nast. There was, of course, a prize of a free holiday in Mauritius if I got lucky and a free gift of a "stylish" carrier bag if I didn't.
Next I opened a communication from Barclay's Visa. I watched a programme
called "Whistleblower" on TV about some of Barclay's practices last evening so I was immediately on my guard. The enclosure offered me special deals at venues so expensive that I wouldn't visit them in any case.
Then a thicker package tried to persuade me to buy a series of herbal products. They "guaranteed" to be able to stop my knee's from aching, arrest my ageing, improve my sex life and feel more vital altogether, so long as I bought the pills on offer at prices ranging from about £30 for a months months supply.

I'm not sure if blogs are supposed to be used for obituaries but I want to record my sadness at the passing of an old friend and sparring partner so I will take a chance.
Anthony Rosen, who has just died, was a friend of mine for well over thirty years. In some ways he was a competitor, writing a column in a rival magazine (Farming News - now no longer published); organising and leading farm study tours around the world (he did far more trips than I did); pioneering corporate farming (he was the real pioneer, I followed on in a minor role years later).
We also met as devotees, sometime committee members and long standing attenders of the Oxford Farming Conference and at the Farmers Club of which we have both, at different times, also been committee members.
But Anthony really came to prominence when, following several very successful years in farm management in the south of England, he joined a London investment firm and set up Fountain Farming. In the 1970's the company took on farms all over the country and installed a dairy herd on each.

The man who used to be "the next President of the United States", his joke, not mine, is speaking in Cambridge (UK) today and tomorrow. Inevitably his subject is "An Inconvenient Truth" the video on global warming which, a few weeks ago, won the man in question - Al Gore -an Oscar for the best factual film of the year.
As I suggested a couple of weeks ago it may not yet be certain that carbon emissions from human activity is the main culprit. Certainly there is an influential group of scientists around the world who dispute that analysis.
But even they concede that something is happening to the climate. It's just whether or not we can do anything about it.
Either way Gore's message is hard hitting and stark in it's warning of the consequences. I bought a copy of the DVD the other day (from our local Virgin record store) and have just viewed it. Gore concludes the film with the actions he believes should be taken to avoid catastrophe, although reports suggest he does not follow his own advice all that closely.

I am so angry I can hardly contain myself. I can only hope blogging about what has just happened relieves some of the stress I am feeling and stops me bursting.
I was driving a tractor and seedbed maker on one of our roadside fields when I noticed a pick-up truck stop in a gateway. I and my tractor were several hundred yards away so the occupants of the vehicle probably discounted any possibility that anyone would see them. As it was I was much too distant to read the registration number.
Anyway, the passenger got out of the pick-up and climbed onto the back. At which point the other occupant slowly drove down the lane. As he did so the one on the back began throwing lumps of what I later discovered were bits of broken concrete, probably the remains of a patio - onto the grass banks on either side of the lane. Altogether there were about twenty of these lumps. The whole episode took only a minute or so.
I headed across the field as fast as I could to try to stop the vehicle. But before I could get there, or even close enough to get the number, they saw me coming and shot away at speed. And I am left with yet another lot of other peoples rubbish to clear up.
It will have to wait until spring drilling is finished - we don't have the time or the manpower to do it earlier.
I am still seething that people, and they must be local, can behave in such an anti social, irresponsible and unenvironmental way. The whole situation is virtually out of control and if I did manage to catch them I would be tempted to take the law into my own hands rather than wait for anything official to happen. But the litter louts are usually clever enough not to get caught. Meanwhile I apologise for blogging on the same subject in such a short time. I will now go and sit in a dark room and try to calm down.

I drove over to Cheffin's machinery sale yard near Ely the other evening to chair a meeting hosted by the auctioneers in conjunction with Whiting & Partners, accountants and Clydesdale Bank. The topic for discussion was "Fenland Farming - What the Future Holds".
David Bolton of Cheffins reminded the audience of the huge changes in commodity prices and gross margins since 1995. That year, he said, feed wheat averaged £120/t and with a 3.75t/ac yield left a gross margin of £451/ac. This year he predicted a price of £92/t (a bit optimistic I thought), a yield of 3.85t/ac and a £248/ac gross margin. In other words a gross margin drop of over £200.
He had done similar calculations for sugar beet. In 1995 the price was 40.34/t, average yields were 19.3t/ac and the gross margin was £493/ac. Twelve years later he expects the 2007 price to be £20.28/t, the yield (because of varietal improvements) to be 28t/ac and the gross margin £299/ac. He had omitted Single Farm Payments and Entry Level Scheme from all the 2007 figures because, as he said, they are now decoupled from production.

I listened to Any Questions on BBC Radio 4 last evening. One of the panelists was David Miliband. The programme came from Hampshire so I expected a question on the recent damning report by the all party EFRA Parliamentary Committee on DEFRA's performance regarding Single Farm Payments; a report which, incidentally, DEFRA must respond to within eight weeks.
There were questions on Iran and the British sailors; casino's - if we wanted them and where; global warming and the UK's response; and of course, the Labour Party leadership when Tony Blair goes. But nothing at all about one of the most critical Select Committee reports in history. Was this because no-one in the audience understood its significance or a reflection of the programme producers regard for agriculture?
The greatest personal interest centered around whether or not Miliband would stand for the Labour leadership in competition with Gordon Brown. Yet again, despite pressure from the chairman, Jonathan Dimbleby and other panel members he refused to answer yes or no.