May 2007 Archives

Good Lord it's been a busy day today. We have had a little bit of sunshine and the world seems like a wonderful place once more.

The sun also means that the delphiniums are bursting open again and we are getting busier in the fields and the packhouse. I am trying not to look at the mess that the tractors are making on the headlands as they cart the flowers out of the fields. We should do around 10 000 stems today but we are still a fair way off the peak of our production.

We also started cropping peonies today (if you don't know what a peony looks like - you heathen - then click on the link to see how gorgeous they are)...

It has been raining nearly all day. The forecast said fine today.

Back in the day only me and Dad worked here. We used to have a wet day procedure then...

Poor old Zheng Xiaoyu, the Head of the Food and Drug agency in China. They have had a few health scares over there and now he's been found guilty of taking bribes.

So what has happened? "Well he's obviously been promoted to Foreign Secretary", I hear you say. Wrong, have another go. "Has he been suspended on full pay pending a phoney investigation?". Wrong again.

He's going to be killed of course.(article here)

It has been raining like crazy to day. The poor flowers are looking a little bedraggled (we all are in fact) and so we have decided to stop cropping until the morning to give them a chance to dry off.

Otherwise progress is good and you should be able to find us on the shelves in Waitrose tomorrow.

I have implemented a new colour coding system this week. We produce different lengths and weights for each supermarket. This makes things very confusing for all concerned. Most of our flower team are from Lithuania so my heart sinks when I have to explain an intricate change to a supermarket specification.

This week I had a thought of such blinding simplicity that I should have been hailed as a genius. Was I hailed as a genius? Did I get hoisted up onto the team's shoulders and carried on a lap of the site with a laurelwreath on my head? Did I heck. I'll tell you what I got. I got four blank looks, three sighs, two tuts and a shoulder shrug.

So how does it work?

I am agonising about inflation. It's keeping me awake at night. Although not last night. Last night it was a vivid nightmare about a runaway oil tanker heading down Moulton Common with the driver (who I seem to remember was David Hasselhoff) shouting "Help me" out of the window.

This may also have been a premonition about inflation I suppose and the price of fossil fuels. It was appropriate to be thinking about this in North Norfolk where house prices have quadrupled in the ten or so years that I have been going there.

There is absolutely no question that we will soon see sharp inflation in food prices. I am convinced of this. Food has been economically and emotionally undervalued by consumers for some time.

We have had the illusion of low inflation in this country. Although taxation, wages, fuels and property values have escalated dramatically we have still been able to import cheap consumer goods and the retailers have used their buying power to give shoppers a great deal. We all know about this. I'll make no judgement on that now.

My problem is that I am wondering if I ought to go out and borrow a vast sum of money. If we are about to have massive inflation then that would virtually write off any debt wouldn't it? I'll always be a rubbish businessman because I hate borrowing money but I have loads of things that I need to buy at the moment - the new coldstore, the refurbishment of the flower packhouse, the reedbed, the new graders, the biobed, the yard extension (and dad keeps talking about sports cars). I normally invest my profits as I go along. Rightly or wrongly, this prevents the business growing too quickly.

Am I missing a chance to let inflation pay off my debts? Can anyone advise? And are there any dream interpreters amongst my imaginary readership who can explain the symbolism of "the Hoff"?

I have started reading the Sunday Telegraph again. I abandoned it after they redesigned it a couple of years ago. (A bit like when Coronation Street got rid of Lynne Perrie for having a double collagen implant).

I'm not entirely comfortable with any one newspaper. I try to avoid the Times because I don't like the thought of giving Rupert Murdoch any of my money. I try to read the Guardian or the Independent beacause they have a lot of features on food and the environment but I get the uneasy feeling that these papers disapprove of me somehow.

Anyway, today it was the Telegraph. There was a good article about Wiggly Wigglers in the business section. Heather Gorringe at Wiggly is one of the most inspiring people in agriculture today. She has demonstrated that being successful needn't involve supermarkets, drudgery or compromising your values.

I am not suggesting that my own experience of supplying supermarkets has involved drudgery or compromise. How could you think such a thing?

My bank holiday started at 5.30pm on Saturday afternoon, and finishes tonight. We had a very busy day on Saturday with higher orders than we expected to get through the potato packhouse and a lot of flowers to harvest. So with our customers happy, the coldstore full of flowers and a forecast of cool, wet weather for the weekend, we decided not to crop any flowers today and to wait until tomorrow (Monday).

We normally work right through the weekends at this time of year so I have tried to make the most of the break. I dashed down to North Norfolk last night to stay with friends and then headed back to Lincolnshire this morning for the christening of my friends' little boy.

Today I have been a steward at a local Farm Open Day for Schools. It was a massive project organised by Robert Oldershaw and his family who are close family friends of ours.

There were over 700 children from year 6 (Is that right? They were about 11. I'm not a parent and it's all changed since I was at school). Robert and all the sponsors had gone to a lot of trouble to make the day really interesting. There were examples of loads of crops and livestock and representatives from right along the food chain.

This is a busy time of year for us so I was dreading having another day out of the business after yesterday's excursion. But actually I've had a fantastic time. I always find children hilarious anyway and our group was really good fun.

I have been very busy this week and didn't get to see a newspaper and the pictures of the Cutty Sark, or what remains of it, until last night. (Telegraph article here) I find this sort of thing terribly sad.

It was fascinating to read the history of the ship and how it was designed to import foreign food, tea and wool from Asia and Australia. It reminds us how much the Victorians embraced the global food market - this boat was built around the time of the repeal of the Corn Laws. Their policy provided the UK with cheap food for two generations but drove rural communities into poverty.

Perhaps the Cutty Sark had a part in the decline of British Agriculture. There is a suggestion that the destruction of the Cutty Sark could have been arson. Knowing his views on local food, have the police eliminated David Richardson from their enquiries?

We started harvesting the delphiniums this week. In amongst all the other excitement I almost forgot what I did for a living. You should be able to buy a bouquet of these in Marks and Spencer from tomorrow. The majority of our flowers to go Waitrose and we start supplying them on Monday.

Just arrived back from a day and a bit in London at Chelsea Flower Show. We were exhibiting some of our flowers on The UK Horticulture stand. This is coordinated by the NFU and sponsored by NS&I.

Not only did we scoop a gold medal (for the eleventh consecutive year) but we were also awarded the President's Award for the best exhibit in the show.

Good morning imaginary readers. There has been so much going on this week that I've had plenty of choices for a subject each day. Some of the things that haven't made the cut were the excitement surrounding the arrival of the new corporate polo shirts for the packhouse staff, my dispute with a petty lorry driver (who was wearing one of those absurd bluetooth earpieces - funny article here about mobile phone etiquette), the installation of the new bunching line (a bit like this one)our environmental audit and my presentation to a supermarket buying team. I'll try and pick up on these things later on - we might not have so much choice of subjects once we get into boring November.

I thought today I should mention last week's new arrival. The new John Deere arrived on Monday.

The potatoes are now all through the ground and starting to make some growth. We will be applying the first blight spray next week.

This was the first year with the Standen Big Boy planter.

I am told that is the sort of title to attract a few more imaginary readers. We are in the middle of a new building project and I need some more hardcore.

A lot of farmers envy these South Lincolnshire soils which are absurdly deep and free of stones. The only trouble is that if we need any stone for building work it has to be hauled miles. This and the aggregate tax have made hardcore and concrete very expensive.

It wasn't a problem for farmers around here in the past. If you wanted to extend your yard around here in the 1960's it seems you simply bulldosed down a Georgian farmhouse and used the rubble.

I have just received a text from the NFU telling me about a survey they are doing. British Sugar use texts quite a lot too. I am not sure that I like being contacted in this way by a large organisation. In fact I don't like it at all. I hate text messages - they are for youths.

I know that at 33 I am still considered a youth by the majority of the farming community but I am not a youth, 33 is comfortably into adulthood. In some African countries I would be an elder of the tribe (the authority figure - not the tree).

So here it is. The first entry of my new blog. Welcome imaginary readers. I am hoping that in time you might develop into an imaginary fan base or at the very least an imaginary cult following.

I've never been good at keeping diaries in the past. Probably my life is just too dull to justify a daily update on what I've been doing. Well from today you can be the judge of that.

I am looking forward to telling you a bit about daily life on our farm in South Lincolnshire. Think of it as a bit like the Archers just with less sex. Much less sex I'm disappointed to tell you. At least these are exciting times for the farm.