Food for Thought

The Royal family is known for it support of the farming industry so I was expecting a sympathetic, rather than challenging, speech from the Countess of Wessex as she opened the Royal Show.

Instead came the stark message that farmers must “move with the times”, because if they don’t foreign farmers will. She also said retailers are changing their attitudes and are doing much to support British farming.

It was all a bit of a surprise.

I've just come back from a press conference at the Royal Show - it's been called off for tomorrow.

Unrelenting rain over the past few days has made it impossible for the organisers and you really do have to feel for them.

The car parks are a quagmire and it was taking some people two hours or more last night to get off the site, including a colleague who's car was so clogged up with mud he couldn't do more than 40mph the whole way home.

This blog is dedicated to everyone who battled the mud, the ruts and the rain in Car Park Two at the Royal Show on the evening of Monday 2 July. Other commentators will wrangle and dispute the future of the Royal Show itself. Farmers Weekly’s own columnist David Richardson made an admirable start this morning with his blog (David’s Digest, Tragic Royal Washed Away).

We've just launched the Farmers Weekly Kids Connect campaign which aims to reconnect children with the countryside and explain how their food is produced.

But some joker in the office has just asked whether people will think we are campaigning to improve the social lives of baby goats...

There is a lot of negativity about this year's Royal Show but there were some positive elements:

Sheep aren't the cleverest of animals at times, so I'm intrigued by this tale of a sheep on FWi which might be able to turn a tap on and off.

What do 'ewe' reckon?

I've been rubbish in the past few days, But the reason for my absence on this blog is Farmers Weekly's brand new forum called FWiSpace. It is very swanky with blogs and picture galleries too. Very exciting!

A great place to chat with other farmers and swap pictures.

FROM WHERE I STAND….. I can tell Stepan Otvinovsky is enjoying himself. He is an enthusiastic tractor driver, who works 11 hours a day, driving a brand new 300hp John Deere 8430 with a 6m Horsch cultivator behind.

Stepan is trained, provided with health care and on a significant bonus scheme. He earns £200/month and is thrilled to do so.

Stepan operates in Ukraine, where the average office/factory worker earns around £60/month. Typical living costs, with rural homes costing less than £20,000, are £50/month per person, including food, power and water. Stepan is a happy man.

The big question is whether you’d like Stepan to drive your John Deere. He can turn out 100ha/day discing and cherishes the machine he shares with two fellow drivers as they keep it running 22 hours a day, and 340 days a year, bringing abandoned land back into cultivation.

They''ll probably be some people who get a bit sniffy about the NFU joining forces with Weetabix to run a straw sculpture competition. But I happen to think it is a really good idea.

Straw scupltures aren't new but they are a really effective way of grabbing the attention of consumers and people will travel for miles to see a really good one.

You can spend hundreds and thousands on advertising campaigns but I bet a few well-placed straw trains and straw men will have far more impact.

They'll do what the industry needs them to do: Remind the public that farmers are out there producing the food they eat.

They might even convince people that farmers have a sense of humour too!

From where I stand sodden fields, damaged crops, flooded buildings and cancelled farm shows have a clear story to tell: Climate change is clearly happening.

And if farmers must suffer the downsides of climate change, they should also be able to extract every possible upside it has to offer too.

Rhetoric about the biofuel opportunity is well rehearsed. Farmers can profit from fuel crops - but like so many things in life it isn't a black-and-white opportunity.

New information is emerging as fast as plans for new biofuel processing plants are announced. In the current issue of Crops you can read how proposed EU rules could set challenging standards for greenhouse gas and carbon savings, environmental footprints and net energy savings. Meeting those targets will be paramount to the success or failure of what could be a crucial underpinning of UK commodity markets in the years ahead.

FROM where I stand…. It is all too apparent that biofuel interest is booming, but its future is set to be far from smooth and it is distinctly likely that UK farmers could miss out on much of the action.

In the words of the BBC's former rural affairs correspondent, Tom Heap: "British biofuel is proving to be a monstrous challenge to get off the ground, not only as an industry, but as something that is actually being used on the roads."

Environmentalists and the media are eager to test claims on energy saving and greenhouse gas production. "It's on a knife-edge. Biofuels have to be climate neutral not just as a fuel, but also as the infrastructure involved. There is nothing journalists like better than false claims."

Messages to the public need to be robust. "If you are driving your biofuel car at the expense of someone else's hunger there isn't going to be much of a feelgood factor."

Farmers Weekly has been alerted to some possible sculduggery down in Ambridge. And for once it has nothing to do with Brian...

Fans of The Archers will know that David Archer last week lost four cows after they ate some yew clippings that had been fly-tipped in his field.

In compliance with the animal by-products regulation, which prevent the burial of fallen stock, David used the services of the National Fallen Stock Company.

Except it turns out he is yet to pay his membership fee...

Biofuels for transport are developing fast and there is every reason to expect UK farmers to benefit from the surging interest in the sector, explains the NFU’s new biofuels and climate change policy advisor Jonathan Scurlock in the current issue of Crops.

There are powerful reasons why the UK needs biofuels, the main drivers being climate change and energy security. Indeed, the government's chief scientist, Sir David King, has asserted that climate change is a more serious threat to the nation than terrorism.

Former DEFRA minister David Miliband stated many times that our future energy supply needs to "decarbonise and decentralise" to tackle this problem. The NFU firmly believes agriculture is part of that solution, and is lobbying hard to ensure farmers benefit, Dr Scurlock explains.

But messages must be managed with care to ensure opportunities are not lost. In particular UK farming must show it can meet new EU renewable energy targets with UK-grown crops.

FROM WHERE I STAND…. Dinner has been a mighty fine experience at the Grand Hotel in Lviv, Ukraine’s western-most city. It has most definitely not been the jaw-aching experience I have experienced in Romania and Moldova over recent years.

The cold meats starter was tasty, the “medium” steak just that, yielding to the knife and succulent, a far cry from the unidentifiable “meats” consumed in Eastern Europe just a few years ago. Indeed, it was streets ahead of the chewy £15 steak I endured in London’s Covent Garden just two days before.

Most striking of all the three-course dinner, including drinks, cost under 70 Hrivna. That’s equivalent to less than £7!

FROM WHERE I STAND….. the flat lands of western Ukraine stretch out before me. And to Ukrainians this farmland matters.

It matters a lot. Seven million fellow countrymen starved to death when Stalin sought social change in 1933, so the land’s productive ability is very close to the hearts of Ukrainian folk.

Golden wheat fields beneath an azure blue sky comprise the national flag[. They reflect this young nation’s status as bread-basket of Europe and the Soviet Union in recent decades.

Getting into the Royal Welsh Show is a bit of a battle - the press are normally allowed to park in the judges and stewards' car park but conditions are so muddy that the message was 'park wherever you can find and then walk'.

Other visitors are also reporting lengthy queues to get parked. But as the morning progresses the crowd does seem to be swelling.

Despite the difficult conditions spirits are high and there seem to be lots of happy, but very muddy, young farmers walking down from the Young Persons Village. It's a contrast to the Royal Show where the wet weather just seemed to make everyone depressed.

Let's hope the optimism and 'let's make the best of it attitude' lasts!

It's still raining and from what we're hearing the car parks are getting pretty bad.

We may have got in, but are we going to get out?

My surname may be Davies but I have to admit that I'm a bit of a stranger to the Welsh language.

So I find the press conferences at the Royal Welsh Show really interesting - as they tend to be conducted in both Welsh and English.

It's nice to know that there are so many Welsh speakers around. The only problem is that any briefings do take twice as long as normal...

This year's Royal Welsh Show couldn't be more of a contrast to the 2006 event.

A quick scan of the FWi archives shows that in 2006 temperatures reached 37.1 degrees celcius and organisers had to find extra water so they could hose down the cattle to keep them cool.

And let's not forget the young lady who did an impromtu strip in the cattle lines during a party for Welsh Black breeders...

The one thing that is the same, however, is the quality and range of stock on show. Don't forget you can keep up-to-date with all the results on FW's Taking Stock blog.

I know I am starting to sound a bit obsessed with the car parks at the Royal Welsh Show, but to be frank it is hard not to be.

And this is why:

It took me two hours to get from my hotel (five miles away) and park and I had to be towed onto the field. My Renault Megane is not built for these kind of conditions.

Yesterday was a sea of umbrellas. Today people are strolling around the show in T-shirts eating ice-creams.

And while the gate may have been down yesterday, attendance figures for today should be pretty good. It's taking ages to walk across the showground because the walkways are so jammed.

The YFC stand is proving particularly popular. Right now there's a crowd of at least 1000 people waiting for a dancing competition to start.

It had been looking like attendance figures for the Royal Welsh Show were going to be well down as result of the weather.

But we are getting word that the a shortfall of 17,000 visitors on the opening day has now shrunk to 6,000. It would seem that thousands of people came in later in the day - enjoying a generous concession being offered by show organisers.

The other good news is that rumours that someone had fallen in the river in the early hours of Tuesday morning turned out to be false.

Rescue services were lining the banks on Tuesday morning, with binoculars trained on the swollen River Wye.

But the search was called off in the afternoon when it emerged that the reported 'incident' was a hoax Two youthshave since been fined for wasting police time.

FROM WHERE I STAND…… the babble of an intensely busy airport rises before me. This is Kiev airport, just out of town from the modern city centre (pictured) and it is a definite step into the east. Cyrillic sign-writing is a drastic and baffling departure from Western Europe and flights arriving from Minsk, Tbilisi, Moscow and Kharkov confirm this as a major cross-roads, where east truly does meet west.

So what, you ask? So, big deal. Ukraine stands at the frontier between EU members Poland, Hungary and Romania and the Russian-led Commonwealth of Independent States, stretching east through Belarus, Georgia, Tajikistan and on through Uzbekistan to China.

To the east lie endless tracts of potentially productive land, low cost labour and yet to be awakened economic demand; to the west our high-cost, high-margin homeland. This is where farming in Ukraine comes into its own.

This mocked-up picture of a Gold pea group viner (allegedly) being moved out of the mud by a Chinook helicopter has been sent in to Food For Thought by Julie Calam from East Yorkshire.

Apparently, the image has been whizzing its way around the 'pea world' even landing in the in-box of the head of Birds Eye.

"It has really cheered the men in the field up during what has been one of the worst pea seasons I've known," said Julie.

Research shows that people still like to think of farmers chewing on a straw and leaning over a gate while the word passes them by.

The truth - as we know - is very different. Farmers are very keen to adopt new technologies - they embrace new husbandry techniques, seed varieties and bits of machinery with enthusiasm and you would be hard-pushed to find a group of people who are keener on their mobile phones.

But are they blogging?

If we're honest, in the UK, not many are. But we've a few pioneers who are dipping their toe into the blogging waters and finding that they are enjoying it.

There are some who see that it's a great way to connect with consumers and help spread positive messages about agriculture on their own terms. There are others who have identified that writing a blog is a useful way to promote their own business.

Here's a few of our favourites but we'd be interested to know about any more:

Wiggly Wigglers
Farming Friends
Letters from Transylvania!
AllyR's blog