David's Digest

Last night was a big night in London. It was Farmers Weekly Awards night at the Grosvener Hotel, Park Lane. Everybody who was anybody in British agriculture was there - and so was I.

It was a superb party and I congratulate all the winners and finalists and the people who organised it. It illustrated all that is good about our industry and amounted to a huge encouragement to anyone aspiring to succeed in it.

I was seated between Archers producer, Vanessa Whitburn and the chap who plays David in the long running series, Timothy Bentinck. As the finalists for each category were announced and their achievements explained they became more and more enthusiastic. By the end of the evening its fair to say they were gobsmacked.

As they admitted, they spend most of their time pretending to be farmers. But here were real people who had overcome many real adversities in recent years and come up trumps.

Later in the evening I saw the pair, together with the actors who play Brian Aldridge and David's wife, Ruth and one of the Grundy's, with their heads together in deep discussion. I suspect they were debating how they could reflect the infectious atmosphere that pervaded the Grosvener Hotel in some future episode. Given that their virtual village of Ambridge and the farms (and other activities, not necessarily agricultural) are the only window most British people have on agriculture and country life, it was important they went away with a good impression - which they did.

Whether they will or can incorporate some aspect of Awards night into the radio programme I don't know. But I do know that the event had an extremely positive effect on them and, I suspect, on everyone else there. It made me proud to be associated with Farmers Weekly.

Driving round the rape fields again this morning with my gun (we have more pigeons than for years) I was struck once more by the beauty of autumn leaves. Some have fallen into colourful piles under the trees that bore them; others cling to the branches waiting for the next breeze to blow them off. All exhibit wonderful autumn colours; reds, browns and yellows, in various shades. I felt how fortunate I was to be able to enjoy them at such close quarters.

My feelings of well-being were enhanced by the fact that early drillings of winter wheat are looking well and that more recent drillings (after sugar beet) are just emerging. We plan to plant a few extra acres when more beet have been lifted in a few days time. But otherwise we are well up to expectations with our autumn work.

Funny, isn't it, how you can have such an awful year of weather and yet forget the droughts and the floods and the dreadful harvest and the poor yields when you have one season as ideal as this autumn is proving. And having wondered a few months ago why you took up such a frustrating profession all thoughts of packing up are banished by a morning like this.

"Are you busy this afternoon?" said my east Norfolk friend on the phone. Not particularly, I said warily, not wanting to let myself in for something I might not enjoy. But in truth it is pretty relaxed around here at present after such an ideal autumn and the only thing I had planned was to write another blog. "Well, a few of us are going duck shooting on my lake", my friend continued, " and I wondered if you'd like to come?".

I'd heard about his duck shoots although never before been on one. He's close enough to the marshes and the Broads to have a lot of duck of all kinds and it was clearly a chance not to be missed. The blog went by the board and I gathered up my shooting gear and set off east. This was yesterday afternoon.

An hour or so later I had met with my friend and his six other guests and well before dark he settled us into our hides beside the lake. The action was slow at first with just a few high mallard skimming over. But as the sky began to darken great flocks appeared. Teal flashed by almost too fast to see and my swing wasn't fast enough to even fire at them.

Then a formation of geese flew over. The host had said "have a go at the geese if they come", so I did. And I got one! Probably because they were bigger and slower than the teal.

By the time our host blew his whistle to signal it was too dark to continue I'd had a lot of shots, I'd brought down a few mallard and a few teal to join the goose. A team of dogs swam out to pick up what we had shot. Not a big bag but we'd all had a lot of fun. Thanks James.

It's at times like this that I'm glad I'm no longer a livestock farmer. How on earth do you deal with EU regulations that allow livestock movement one day and then, with no further spread of disease, prohibits it the next. If it were as simple as that farmers might be able to get to grips with it in time. But its much more complicated to the point of virtual unintelligibility - if there is such a word.

After getting it wrong once it's easy to understand officials don't want to make the same mistake again. And everyone wants to avoid a repetition. But its five weeks since the last case of F&M for goodness sake and even more to the point, the feed situation on some farms is getting desparate, never mind the cash flow. How much longer must the affected areas suffer especially now they are becoming aware of DEFRA's parsimonious attitude to proper compensation?

What makes all this so unreasonable is the double standards the EU appears to use when dealing with Brazil. It has just been announced that an investigation by the EU itself has revealed that Brazil has no systematic audit system for animal health at either state or national level; that there is no programme to monitor F&M vaccination; that the reliability of records on where animals have been for the 90 days before slaughter and export is, to say the least, questionable; furthermore, that animals ineligible for export have been exported.

As readers of FW will discover next week I have been to Agritechnica in Hanover, otherwise known as the DLG. A friend and I decided we could spare a couple of days and not having been there for 25 to 30 years thought we needed an injection of machinery mania. You don't get it much in the UK these days what with Smithfield closing and the Royal being so poor.

So, we booked some flights to take us from Norwich airport via Amsterdam to Hanover and back. The only trouble was we had to get up very early in the mornings (4.00am) to catch both outward and return flights. However, that did not turn out to be the biggest problem.

KLM were late leaving Norwich and equally late arriving in Amsterdam so that, even though the onward flight was also KLM, we missed our connection by 3 minutes. Needless to say this caused some strong language to KLM staff and I have already demanded compensation. But we found ourselves having to fly to Hamburg and then catch a train to Hanover. So, to cut a long story short, having rolled out of bed in the middle of the night we did not arrive at the Show until mid afternoon.

I will leave impressions of the show to my column next week and to the FW reporters who covered the event. Suffice to say it was an incredible event. Bigger than Paris. Arguably one of the most important farm machinery shows in the world. And our injections of machinery mania will last for a while. I would recommend anyone with similar cravings to attend next time it is held in November 2009. But I would not recommend KLM as a carrier unless they improve their service.

I have walked several fields of oil seed rape during the last few weeks. Some were our own, some belonged to other people who had invited me to assist with their seasonal vermin control. The consistent thing about what I have observed is the inconsistency of plant stands and vigour. Now I see from Andrew Blake's article in this weeks FW (p47) that this is not a Norfolk thing but is much more widespread.

On this farm, for example, we used two systems to establish our rape crops. Both could be described as min till. One involved cultivating the topsoil then conventionally drilling into it. I suspect with this system some seeds may have been drilled too deep. In any event the result (on one field) is patchy with some plants well developed and others seemingly not wanting to grow. For the record, another field treated exactly the same has a full and even plant although not as vigorous as I would like.

The second system we used involved one pass with a cultivator and air drill with the seeds being scattered behind fleet cultivations and little attempt to cover them. To be honest, it looked a bit untidy when it was first done and I was worried about it. Now, however, those fields look better than those more conventionally drilled with well established plants and few patches apart from those eaten by pigeons (that are a huge problem in this area this year).

But this week (while on vermin control) I stood on a neighbours field where the same cultivator drill had been used. There was barely a crop and those plants that were there were stunted and hardly surviving. I suspect my neighbour will have to pull it up and replant with a spring variety.

The question is - why? Rape of the same varieties, drilled at the same seed rate on consecutive days using the same equipment, into similar land, following winter wheat, should look more or less the same - shouldn't it? Can anyone provide an answer? We need to know to try to avoid the same thing happening next year.

I have just listened to the Radio 4 programme "You and Yours" which today invited people to phone in with their thoughts on the future of agriculture. This followed a speech by Hilary Benn at a conference yesterday and anticipated Marianne Fischer Boel's "Health Check" on the CAP. It was also set against the background of a year of animal diseases, floods and drought.

I don't know if any of them will read this but in case they do I want to congratulate the farmers who phoned in to the programme for the mature and factual way in which they explained the problems facing them without whingeing and without antagonising consumers. Almost without exception they did a superb job of putting over the case for agriculture and home production.

They even stayed calm, if frustrated, at Benn's announcement that the time had come for farmers to take responsibility for DEFRA's mistakes in releasing the F&M virus from Pirbright. OK, he didn't put it quite like that but that's what he meant and he must not be allowed to get away with it.

Yes, there were a few non farming critics who complained about the price of food and asked why farming should receive any aid at all. And a presenter asked why farmers did not insure against disease. This was dealt with brilliantly by NFU economist, Carmen Suarez, who pointed out that insurance was not available because of the high level of risk. She did not add, but could have done, that insurance companies are as aware as farmers are of the lack of port security for animal health and of continuing imports of meat from countries like Brazil where F&M is endemic.

This was the biggest worry of farmers at Vale & Wallingford NFU AGM last evening where I gave a talk. Like them I would be appalled if DEFRA made the proposal for farmers to pay hefty levies to pay for government blunders into law. We must fight it with vigour and determination.

Just as we began to think some sectors of farming were looking potentially better; that we've had a good autumn after a disastrous summer and that as a result we might be able to drag ourselves out of the mire, it all goes pear shaped again.

DEFRA says it has overspent (probably on consultants fees employed to comment on what previous consultants had already told them) and would need to cut its budget by £270mill. Most of it, we are told, will come from its various agencies, set up to administer government schemes. But it would be a miracle if the effects didn't trickle down to farm level and reduce what was previously due to be paid to farmers.

In the next breath Billery Hen tells us that we, the farmers, must pay for sorting out infectious diseases - the kind that escape from his government laboratories or arrive in this country on infected meat which is not noticed or sent packing by government port inspectors. Furthermore, Billery tells us, it will be so much better for farmers to have responsibilty for this because, after all, it is farmers who benefit most from healthy animals. What kind of distorted logic is that?

Then, from Brussels, we have it confirmed that SFP's will be capped as widely predicted and that bigger farmers will lose some of their entitlement because they don't need the money. The likely loss to British farms will be some £56mill which is more than for any other country because we have the best structure in the EU. Again, it is illogical and sounds to me like the politics of envy.

It is time we had some new management at DEFRA and the Agricultural Office of the European Commission. I know of two people who are looking for work. One is Adam Applegarth, former Chief Executive of Northern Rock. The other is Steve McLaren formerly the manager of the England football team. Well, they couldn't do a worse job than the people we've got - could they?

I did not start blogging simply to criticise DEFRA, even though it might seem like I did. But when a government department makes as many mistakes as they do its difficult not to have a go at them.

This latest own goal concerns the accommodation chosen by DEFRA personnel when they came to Norfolk to supervise the recent outbreak of bird flu. It has been reported and not denied that they booked themselves in to a stately home hotel whose room rates are £185 for bed and breakfast and £310 per day for full board. Not only that but the hotel was in Suffolk, 22 miles from the outbreak, so it wasn't exactly the closest they could have found.

In the same week it was revealed that DEFRA is being forced to cut its budget by £270million because of over spending its a bit rich, don't you think? Do they ever learn? Do they care about public opinion? The answers must be - no they don't, so long as they live high on the hog on money intended to improve the hard pressed rural economy.