David's Digest

Its obviously been a thin week for news - so long as you exclude election speculation which is becoming more repetitive and boring the nearer we get to the event. In any event the Easter weekend's newspapers, in an attempt, no doubt, to mark the bridge between winter and spring in the countryside, have filled many column inches and in some cases whole pages with chit chat about the growing list of rich and famous who own farms.

Time was when this sort of thing annoyed me. Why do reporters go to such fly-by-night, hobby land owners who suffer none of the financial or physical hardships of proper farmers in order to write about food production? Most of them don't have a clue about real farming when they invest some of the millions earned from pop singing or taking off most of their clothes for the camera's and yet suddenly they become, in the eyes of the press, representatives of long established rural residents with whom they have nothing in common. Furthermore most of them have the luxury of persuing outlandish systems of farming and claiming they have discovered the Holy Grail.

There, that's off my chest and I feel better.

On further reflection perhaps I am generalising and being too critical. Over time our celebrity neighbours, or some of them, do learn about the realities and a few begin to start talking sense. And like it or not, the media listens to and reports what they say. On balance then, with those that look and learn and eventually see the light, it is possible that such people might do our industry more good than harm.

But I am talking about the ones who join in with rural life and genuinely try to learn and help communities. I still can't be doing with the ones who turn up once in a blue moon in their helicopters without even giving the time of day to their less fortunate neighbours. The quicker they return to their penthouses in the City the better.

Three weeks after drilling our sugar beet they are beginning to emerge. They're pretty vulnerable at this stage and I see the skylarks that proliferate around here have already found them. I hope they don't create too many gaps in an otherwise relatively full plant stand. But given the unpleasant wet weather we've had since they were put in its quite surprising they are up already. The secret, of course, is that temperatures have been quite reasonable, even at night, and that and plentiful moisture has encouraged the seedlings to peep above the soil surface.

And although we've not been able to do any land work since we drilled the beet, today we are again busy planting combinable peas. Once again we are benefiting from early ploughing and easy soft seedbeds guaranteed by the winter frosts. Walking behind the drill a few minutes ago I was very happy at the way they were going in after one pass with the seedbed maker. The Cambridge rolls are following the drill to leave level land for the combine in four or five months time and also to help preserve moisture. If the rest of the growing season goes as well we should be able to harvest a useful crop.

Isn't it grand how a bit of sun on your back makes everything seem better?

About ten years ago the Agricultural Editor of the Eastern Daily Press (Norfolks daily paper), Michael Pollitt, came to those of us running the Norfolk Show at the time with a bright idea for a new event. How about a show for children during the Easter School Holidays? he said. Its usually too cold for the beach at that time of year and after a couple of weeks of having the kids round their feet parents and grandparents would jump at the chance of having somewhere sensible to take them before they go back to school. 

We immediately realised what a good idea it was and the annual Spring Fling was born. Run in association with the daily paper it attracts over 5,000 people these days and is judged a great success by virtually all of them. This years event took place last Thursday.

We realised from the start that an event for children must be interactive. We invited firms and organisations from the county to think up educational activities that were fun for the children and interesting for the adults who accompanied them. And its worked a treat. The kids queue up to make collages of different grains while learning, along with their parents and grandparents, where those grains come from and what foods they make. They can all take tractor and trailer rides around the site, looking at sheepdog demonstrations, dog training, and other rural persuits as they go.

There are competitions and activities all around the showground with stands from outfits like the NFU, Bernard Matthews and the John Innes Institute alongside a local dairy farmers giving away small cartons of milk, LIPS ladies offering freshly cooked sausages and the Young Farmers showing how to decorate bread with tast spread, then toast it and eat it. There's more. much more and at the end of the day everyone has some pork in a roll from a hog roast.

Spring Fling has become one of the most wotthwhile events put on by the Royal Norfolk Agricultural Association and the idea has been copied by several other shows. Once again my proud (yet modest) county has demonstrated that it remains at the forefront of our great industry!

Its 8 years since Alexia Robinson launched British Food Fortnight. She says she dreamed up the idea while rowing down the Amazon so she swapped one mammoth task for another. Today it is a fixture in the agri-food calendar and her efforts have contributed significantly to the growing tendency among British consumers to buy more home produced food. This years event runs between Sept 18th and Oct 3rd and seems set to be an even bigger success than those that have gone before.

I popped in to the launch of this years BFF activities in London yesterday afternoon. And Alexia had not only gathered a bunch of ecstatic restaurant owners, hospital and school caterers and supermarket buyers and other interested parties but also The Hairy Bikers and HRH The Duchess of Cornwall - in a wheelchair having broken her leg.

They were all there to ensure this years BFF gets off to a good start but also to announce the fact that in Olympic Year, 2012, the dates of BFF are to be changed from the "Harvest Festival" season in the autumn to the last week of July and the first week of August to coincide with the Olympics.

As Jan Matthews, who is in charge of catering at the Olymic village, said at the launch the event is probably the biggest catering opportunity in the world. And as Adam Leyland, editor of The Grocer added, it provides a chance for the British food industry to show just how much it has improved in recent years. "I reckon our food is better than French these days", he declared.

 The Duchess then told the assembled company that she was a passionate believer in great British food and said how pleased she was to have been associated with the initiative.

So well done to all concerned. Now we - farmers, food processors, supermarkets and restaurants - need to get into training to cash in on this great opportunity. And its very relevant to note that the Olympic Committee has decreed that where British food is avaiable for those who participate in the games and who visit them, it must be used. Foreign food except exotic fruit perhaps, is set to be outlawed.

As April draws to a close I note from my records that we've had about half of average rainfall for the month. For most of the month, here in Norfolk, we had no moisture at all. Last week we had a couple of short spells of rain but together they only added up to a few millimeters. Still, at least they freshened up the spring sown crops of sugar beet and peas. But I fear there's still a bit of nitrogen applied to autumn cereals that has yet to be washed down to the roots and its starting to show.

Last night we had another modest freshener of a shower with a couple more millimeters falling while we slept. And this morning, when I went out at 5.45am to frighten the pigeons off the peas, they were shining bright green against the dark, damp soil, as were the rows of seedling sugar beet in a neighbouring field. But they're going to need a lot more moisture than they've had so far if they are to become decent yielding crops.

Maybe they'll get it. I recently read an article by a top meteorologist who reckoned that after a dry April, in nine out of ten years, there followed a wet summer. If he's right our crops might benefit. But those who anticipated a barbecue summer (as forecast by another weather expert a few months ago) may be disappointed. Perhaps they should arrange some sort of cover for the glowing charcoal to avoid having their cook-outs snuffed out and hope that temperatures stay reasonably high.