June 2007 Archives

Would it be an abuse of my position if I were to advertise my house on here. Click here for the details . I might even do a special price for an imaginary blog fan.

They say that moving house is very stressful, it's the first time that I have attempted it. The most stressful bit for me is having to be tidy at all times. You can be summoned back for a viewing at any time. I always get a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach when I show people round. Worries like, Is the bedroom floor covered in underwear? and if so, whose?

Solution is perhaps to stay away from the house at all times and to stop wearing underwear.

Expect these entries to get odder as the house move approaches and as insanity takes hold of me.

I am taking full advantage of the wet weather (incidentally just because I am not writing about potato blight, waterlogging or delayed daffodil harvesting doesn't mean that I am not thinking about them) and this week I paid ...

I spent the day with the delphinium committee at the Royal Horticultural Society garden at Wisley on Wednesday. It was another opportunity to indulge my (increasingly nerdy) passion for these flowers. The rain held off for almost the whole visit and I had a fantastic time looking at all the trials.

The Royal Horticultural Society is a wonderful institution and the gardens at Wisley are a credit to the nation. Even in the rather crumby weather there was still a large number of visitors.

So much for the dry summer. We have just walked all the potato fields this morning and every field has now got a full canopy. If conditions stay like this there will be some large yields, both for us and all of our neighbours.

I can never remember such serious potato blight pressures as we have this year. We are having to spray them at six day intervals at the moment.

The potatoes are now around 45mm in the most advanced fields and tuber counts are good.It is too early to say what the impact of the prolonged wet weather will be on the potato quality. Presumably the dry matters will be lower. I saw some burst lenticels but generally the skin quality was very clean.

I hope that the Potato Council has got some good ideas up its sleeve to increase consumption!

Yesterday I was invited to become a Non-Exec Director of Business Link. You sometimes hear a farmer described as a "Committee Man." It's never normally meant as a compliment.

I've done stints on various ...

Look at this article from today's Independent.

Check out that new phrase "Agflation". Also hidden in the article is the phrase "these trends imply, quite unexpectedly, that the recent reform of the Common Agricultural Policy was a mistake". This will have many farmers rolling in the aisles.

I am amazed that anyone could ever have thought that the reform of the CAP was anything other than a mistake. Each and every imaginary reader of this column knows how much I have always hated the Common Agricultural Policy. It has rewarded mediocrity by providing guaranteed returns for unexceptional producers but the CAP did offer the benefit, to the taxpayer at least, of keeping the price of food low

So now we have a system where payments are decoupled from production and food is going up again. Will the taxpayer want to carry on paying for "environmental good" when food is twice as much money as it is now? Or will everyone want to start eating the lapwings?

Excellent news to see the coolest and most loved dairy farmer in Britain, Michael Eavis, has been awarded a CBE. A knighthood would have been more appropriate in my opinion.

Mr Eavis is a true farming hero.

In his position I am certain that I couldn't have resisted setting up a Glastonbury brand to sell my milk to supermarkets. This highlights not just the innate decency of Mr Eavis's generation but also the crass capitalist instincts of generation X, the children of Thatcher's 1980's

I normally run a mile from twee stories about animals. In fact I would go as far as to say that I bloomin' well hate it when people anthropomorphise animals. You know the sort of thing; the kind of pictures that you might see in the Daily Mail of poodles wearing sunglasses or a cat wearing a ballgown and a tiara. I even hate captions and thought bubbles on pictures of animals telling us "what they are thinking."

The internet and email have made it too easy to share these sort of images. I pity any imaginary readers of this blog who have ever had their email inbox clogged up (as I have) with a picture of a chick in an eggcup or a cat and mouse in bed together.

That saidThis article really made me giggle. It shows that rather than animals being like us, we are actually like them.

Here's an odd one. Two fairly pikey looking individuals were leaving the site as I arrived back this afternoon. They had erected a poster for a local circus in our reception. Not sure if this was a subterfuge for "casing out the joint."

The poster looked really rather tacky so I took it down immediately (but put it up in the canteen where it was received much more warmly). There was a heap of half-price tickets on the reception desk too. No one here wants them so please drop in if you want one or if indeed you wish to advertise anything by bluetacking posters all over my recently-decorated office.

A plane crashed into our farm yesterday...

Spent yesterday morning at Cereals after...

I haven't been sleeping very well lately...

Can I just say how very horrible the new logo is for the 2012 London Olympics. Observe it here, if you dare. This is an awful piece of branding, was it designed by a farmer by any chance?

The camera crew came back. I actually got to do a little interview to camera this time. Get me! How exciting has my life become...

As if the episode with the Waitrose photographer wasn't enough today we have had a visit from the Gardeners' World film crew today ...

Listen to this

A relevant episode of Farming Today where the Head Food strategist for Merril Lynch explains...

An article on the front page of the Sunday Telegraph suggests that "Food flown from far away is miles better for the planet"...

I once had a photo taken of me that I liked. It was about 12 years ago; I can't remember what became of it.

Since then every photo of me has been monstrous...

It is good to finally hear Bush talking about acting on climate change. Clearly he has waited until his last term is nearly over before he opened the dialogue.

He takes a bit of pressure off himself by talking about the threat of pollution from China and India. I really dislike the argument of ...