David's Digest

Its been a long time coming and even now its not exactly exciting. But British Sugar, the monopoly processor of all the sugar beet grown in this contry, has finally accepted that if it wishes to have sufficient critical mass of beet grown in Britain to run its factories it will have to pay more for roots than was originally negotiated a year ago.

£17.50/t plus a few pounds ex the SFP was the base price set by the EU. British Sugar added a pound or so to that and said that was all it could afford. Take it or leave it. Oh yes, and they also agreed to an escalator clause that would add a bit more if the price of wheat rose to £95/t.
This at least was recognition that for farmers to want to grow beet it would have to be competitive with grain.

Then, of course, the price of wheat went up. And suddenly the £95 escalator clause was irrelevant. Growers, myself included, said negotiations should be re-opened and account taken of the new situation. Well, eventually they were as British Sugar realised that the habit of growing sugar beet, so ingrained in east anglian farmers, would not be enough to keep them growing the crop.

I know I am not alone in being concerned at increasing numbers of rabbits this year. Like the rat population they have benefited from a series of mild winters and few casualties from cold weather and now they are everywhere. We poison rats around the farmyard on a regular basis and have kept them down to manangeable proportions. But there are still plenty out in banks and hedges ready to infest buildings if we get a cold spell. And although we shoot rabbits at night whenever we can, effectively controlling their numbers often seems like a lost cause.

So, I was interested to hear of an American device, now available in the UK, that might help to control all troublesome rodents. Last week I went to see it demonstrated.

Called a Rodenator it consists of what looks like a giant oxy-acetaline welding gun with rubber tubes attaching it to canisters of propane and oxygen. The nozzle of the gun is placed into a burrow (or rat hole); the adjacent holes are pushed in and sealed with a spade; then the mixed gas consisting of 3% propane and the rest oxygen is turned on for about 45seconds, or more if the warren is a big one. After a suitable period the gas supply is turned off and a button is pressed to activate a battery powered spark plug which explodes the gas in the tunnel.

The idea is to destroy the burrow (or rats nest) but any "residents" are destroyed as well. It is simple and safe to use, so long as the rules are followed (despite delays in granting it a Health and Safety certificate). And from the demonstration I saw it looks like it does the job for which it is intended.

A recent report in Norfolk's local newspaper, the Eastern Daily Press, which was of vital importance to all its readers, gave statistical information of a most personal nature. It told how the average Briton spends more than three months during their lifetime sitting on the loo.

Women, apparently, spend most time in the bathroom using a total of one and a half years in there during their lifetimes. Having stood and waited for some of them to emerge I can well believe it. But while men spend less time showering and brushing their teeth they spend more time sitting on the toilet.

Who on earth calculates such things? And does it matter?

Well, perhaps it does. Productivity can clearly be influenced by such habits. And Dianne Montague, a friend who used to own and write the newsletter Agricultural Supply Industry, always said her weekly four page publication "had to pass the loo test". In other words it had to be possible to read it at one sitting.

So, in these days of shortening attention spans perhaps toilet statistics are more important than I facetiously implied.

It wasn't quite in tune with Farmhouse Breakfast Week (Jan 20-26) but it reached more people than the average farmhouse and communicated with them very well. It was arranged by the Norfolk Branch of the Womens Food and Farming Union (WFU) and took place at last Saturday's Farmer's Market at Ellough, near Beccles.

As the husband of one of the WFU members I was asked along to provide moral support. But as we approached the venue, through miles of open country, I asked my wife "Where on earth are you taking me?" It seemed a most unlikely place to hold a market. But as we drew closer the number of cars made it clear that here was a hive of activity.

The market is held in an old helecopter hanger, built when there was much more aerial activity on North Sea oil rigs. The business closed down several years ago and was taken over by a local farmer who lets it and generous parking space to the Farmer's Market for its twice monthly events. It is organised by local WFU member, Margaret Hall, who started it from scratch eight years ago. It normally attracts between 30 and 40 stalls, the majority of which sell a wide variety of locally produced food together with a handful of craft stalls.

The place was buzzing with activity. Local people, anxious to obtain supplies before the stalls emptied, were feverishly selecting the fruit and veg and meat and whatever they wanted. Stall holders were continuously busy. "How many customers do you normally get" I asked Margaret who was busy selling beef from the Sotterly Hall Estate where her husband is a tenant. "It varies, obviously", she said, "and we don't count them regularly. But a few weeks ago on a typical Saturday we counted 750 cars and with an average of two per car that makes 1,500."

We had a months rain during the first fortnight of January. And we were lucky. Other places had more than that and were flooded for the third time in less than nine months. But the improvement began just before the weekend.

The sun came out and the breeze helped dry out the land. News came that this month looks like being almost as mild as January 2007. You could see the results across fields of winter wheat and oil seed rape. They were growing already, just like they do in March most years.

On Friday, my wife and I set off south for a weekend away with friends. The weather stayed perfect and it was really enjoyable. It perked us up no end. When we got home the garden seemed to have bloomed in three days. The snowdrops and crocuses had come out and daffodils were budding. If this is global warming I rather like it - for the moment anyway and until I am reminded of the disadvantages of a very early spring.

In the house on the doormat was Saturday's post. One envelope was marked Rural Payments Agency. When I opened it I discovered that our SFP was about to be or may even have been paid into the bank. My cup runneth over.

You may have missed it but I knew you would want to know. According to yesterdays Daily Telegraph the Tory MP, Mark Hoban, asked in Parliament how much it had cost to display photographs of DEFRA secretaries of state at its London HQ over the last five years. During that period, may I remind you, three politicians have held the top job there - Margaret Beckett, David Miliband and Hilary Benn.

Jonathan Shaw, a current junior minister at DEFRA, replied that the cost of updating the displays over the period had been £11,000. Further, that the present posters are shortly to be replaced by electronic alternatives "which are cheaper to update and have less impact on the environment". So thats alright then. Although I would have thought they would get a better deal at Boots.

Isn't it great to know that DEFRA's funds are being so well spent! That despite the £300mill fine imposed on the department by the EU for incompetence over the administration of Single Farm Payments and the resulting cuts in research, compensation for imported animal diseases and other vital departmental activities ministers can still find the funds to massage their own ego's.

My father employed two landgirls during the 2nd World War. One was the daughter of the Chief Rabi in Norwich and the other came from an even more genteel background, also from Norwich. Their urban upbringing meant they were not immediately very useful, although one of them was quicker to learn than the other. She was the one who later had an affair with the head cowman. I still remember his wife coming into the farmyard and giving her a good thrashing. I was just a boy at the time with no great understanding of such matters. But as far as I know the land girl left to work on another farm, the affair blew over and everything returned to normal.

The above might seem to indicate the said ladies were more trouble than they were worth. There is no doubt some of them did cause problems and perhaps my father was unlucky with the ones he was allocated. But others in our village virtually ran the farms on which they worked. They became stalwarts of the War effort and contributed significantly to the Dig for Victory campaign.

More than 60 years on I doubt if many people realise how close this country came to starvation. At one point, after German submarines had sunk whole fleets of merchant ships bringing food to us across the Atlantic, we were within just a few days of running out. Of course, we didn't find this out until well after the conflict was over. But it was a close run thing.

At the peak of their employment in 1944 some 70,000 land girls worked UK on farms. There were few tractors in those days so it was mainly hand work and using horses. Can you imagine what that meant to girls reared in towns who had never before been near an animal bigger than a dog?