February 2008 Archives

Last night was the Grower of the Year Awards in London. My Dad and I were invited as guests of one of our flower customers. Dad is definitely hot social property at the moment, I think people must be angling after a ride in the menoPorsche or something (just another week and the new concrete will be dry enough for him to retrieve it from where it is stranded).

It was a good night. I caught up with a few friends that I hadn't seen for a while and the night became a bit longer and more boozy than it had any right to be.

Hope that you like the new title. You can imagine how much pressure it was placing on me to devise a ripping pun every time. I think that we reached the pinnacle of human creativity with Flora and Sauna actually, it was always going to be downhill from there wasn't it? This is why I've decided I'm going to just use the date from now on. This might help me to structure this a bit more like a diary too.

There is so much going on at the moment that I'm getting behind with telling you all about it. This is what public sector workers refer to as "slippage." It's a good word for making laziness and overspending sound acceptable.

Right, down to business. It transpires that I am probably living over the next San Andreas fault. Obviously the entire farm has been reduced to rubble by the earthquake.

I can't believe that Lincolnshire is actually in the news.

We are about 30 miles from, Market Rasen, the"epicentre" here. it still didn't wake me. I am sleeping like a baby log at the moment for some reason. You could send a marching band through the bedroom at 2.00am without waking me. In fact I think I could stand a clobber on the coconut with a saucepan without rousing.

Hey, here's a thought. I could have had the title "Undercurrants in Market Raisin" That would have been an excellent pun. Bugger. I should be working for the Sun really.

I appreciate that I am in Field Day territory here.

This isn't even to my comedy taste. In fact to me it was full of pathos. Clearly the fox is dead. I'm guessing that the person who took this photo wears camouflage trousers and drives a very old 3 door Landrover Discovery with lots of stickers in the back window. He (it was surely a man) is probably a Roy "Chubby" Brown fan. What do you think? Could I have been a criminal profiler?

Once again another first class pun as a title, I'm setting you up for a disappointment at some stage.

I'm at work today loading daffodils into the coldstore. A bunch of ramblers have just walked along the road; they had become split into 3 little groups and were only about 20 metres away from me across the dyke/ditch/drain in front of our yard.

I'm not in the least territorial about access to the countryside or our farm in particular. Generally I think this sort of thing is good and I love to see people making use of the countryside in this fashion.

I said "Good afternoon" in a bright and clear vocal style to each little group but they all blanked me. What a prize bunch of twits, I thought to myself. I think that I thought it. I might even have said it out loud, I seem to have very little self control anymore. If I did say it, they ignored that too.

Presumably they were Daily Mail readers who were taking the sensible precaution of ignoring a stranger in case I was a paedophile, a migrant worker or a cause of cancer. I wish the world was a friendlier place. What a bunch of twits.

Another fantastic pun in the title there, all will become clear on this in a moment.

So where have a been for nearly two weeks? In Finland of course. Oh and I've been on a leadership course at the Royal Ag. College in Cirencester.

I've got loads to tell you and not much time today. My fears about the sauna were justified. I hadn't realised, however, that we would also all be required to jump into a lake through a hole in the ice wearing only our nude bodies.

I will try to write a proper article about this experience for the magazine so that you can learn all the terrifying and degrading details. I suspect that there will be quite a lot of opportunities for innuendos and knob gags. We definitely have some interesting tales in the group.

We had a great few days and there are plenty of stories to share when I get the time. I hadn't eaten moose or reindeer before. Or driven a snow bike. Or driven on a tractor test track. Or dried myself on a towel that was frozen solid. I will try to stick some photos on here tomorrow and tell you more.

Had a great time in Cirencester. I will write a little bit about that too.

We will have a very busy week ahead get flowers harvested in time for Mothers Day. We are working through the weekend with around 50 flower croppers at work tomorrow. The concreting work in the yard has been delayed by the frost so we are having difficulty getting the forklifts to the coldstores. Otherwise things are ticking along quite nicely.

Hope that you like the title. Usually my titles are rubbish but this one is a pun which is actually based on the contents of the entry. Wow.

Daffodil cropping continues apace. The cool weather in the mornings is slowing them down and keeping the pressure off. The famous photographer, Tim Scrivener is in today taking a few snaps of the flower fields for the FW magazine. (Peel your eyes for those next week). I hope that Scriv can weave the same sort of magic on the fields that he did for the glamour portraits that he has done of me for the Opinion page. He's got his work cut out this time because there are few less attractive sights than a field of unopened daffodils on a foggy morning in the Fens.

Having said that though....

I've just been faffing around sorting out what I need for the trip to Finland for the Worshipful Company of Farmers course reunion next week. The week after that I am in Cirencester for the Institute of Ag. Management Leadership Course. I had been looking forward to both these things but the hot weather has set the daffodils speeding out of the ground and so it looks as though we will be busy and the timing of all this is pretty awful.

We have started cropping daffodils. Some people think that this means Spring has arrived but in my experience it means that hail storms are on the way.

This is the earliest that we have ever harvested daffodils. If (as is madly suggested here by Professor Stott) global warming WAS purely invented by Margaret Thatcher, then she has even convinced the daffodils that it is happening; (she hasn't fooled you though, has she Stotty?).

With such a warm spell of weather the prospects look better for the daffodil trade. The big three in the flower world are Valentines Day, Mothers Day and Easter. Since the last two are very early this year and with the Kenyan situation in the rose growing areas, it could have a beneficial impact on this year's daffodil trade. (I'm not sure that there will be a beneficial impact on you, however, if you are only buy your Valentine a bunch of daffs.) The exchange rate against the Euro is also in the favour of UK exporters for the first time in years which is great news.

We have finally started laying the concrete in front of the new flower packhouse. We have had quite a bit of rain here in the last couple of weeks so it is a bit messy at the moment.

That said, and despite the time of year, the conditions are almost ideal for the job. At this rate the concrete will be set in a week's time and Dad will be able to retrieve his menoPorsche from the bottom coldstore where it is stranded.

I am always delighted when I get a reaction to anything that I have written. Because I tend to trade in opinions rather than hard facts, there is always room for a bit of discussion.

Probably it's a Catholic thing, but always enjoy being criticised. You can always make use of a criticism, whereas there is very little that you can do with praise (I guess, I'm hardly overwhelmed by it). The more that you are asked to defend your opinions, the better and more consistent they become.

This was why I wrote a provocative piece about inheritance tax for the magazine last week. I've copied it out below for anyone who missed it but go buy a magazine next time, you stinge.

Anyway. Today I received a fantastic letter in response to the piece from Robin Deasy, an Irishman who farms just up the road. Hopefully it will find its way into the magazine next week so I won't ruin it for you.

Robin, in the most charming way, alerted me to something I wrote which on reflection could easily be construed as xenophobic. Namely where I wrote that Each year a bit more of our farmland falls into foreign ownership.

I farm in Moulton Seas End. Hilariously, this is a good five miles from the coast. So too is the nearest town, Holbeach. More than anyone, I should realise that this is thanks to the Romans. I even drive along a Roman sea defence to get to work everyday. Without the Romans all of our land would be underwater. Mea culpa, Robin.

The Dutch had a similarly pronounced effect on the drainage of this area. They also introduced the flower bulb industry to the area. Most of the physical work in the food and flower industries in this area is now done my migrants too.

My point in the article, although I didn't qualify it at the time, was that foreign investors are often interested in making money from an area rather than for it. I now realise that it was such a sweeping remark that it meant nothing. I have no objection at all to economic migration and the benefits of it are huge. In the past I certainly haven't properly credited the beneficial influence of international migrants on our own farm but I am fully awake to it now .

I was invited for lunch yesterday by my friends Jeremy and Boo. They are both fantastic cooks and it was a phenominal lunch.

It reminded me of a nightmare situation at their house some time ago and I thought I could exercise my demons by writing it down here. It's a bit puerile and toilet-humourish. If you are German it'll be right up your street...

I had half a day in the studio at Turnip FM this week with Clare, Ian and Tim recording a few bits for our podcast. Stay tuned, I promise that we will get it out eventually.

I really enjoy being with that little gang and it was the highlight of a naff week.

Anyway. It was hilarious to see that Tim's photo was used to launch the Farmers Weekly Awards in the magazine this week. Tim looks like a proper farmer so was the perfect choice. The poor old boy was photographed with a scarecrow which was dressed in a suit made from the Union Flag. Clearly the crows in Shropshire are frightened of the BNP (and with good reason).

As you can imagine, I wasn't the first person to ring Tim to "congratulate" him on his star appearance. In fact I was the seventeenth person to say that the Union Flag trousers suited him.

Tim, you were lucky that the photo was published after the recording.

As we used to say at school, I've got a right monk on today. Nothing is going right this week and things are beginning to get on top of me. Since your role in our relationship is unpaid therapist, it's time to unburden...

There is an alarming report here which sounds completely believable. Kenyan flower growers are sending flowers to the airport with armed security to ensure that the riots over there do not break the supply chain in advance of Mothers Day.

I am sure that I have written despairingly many times already about UK consumerism. Surely shooting someone for getting in the way of a Kenyan rose finding its way into a £2.99 supermarket bunch of flowers, is a new low.

I am sure that some would argue that trade and the flower industry have been forces for good in Kenya providing a valuable income and facilities and I share that view to some extent. I am in no way qualified to write about Kenyan politics. Things are clearly very hairy out there and it's not my place to say how anyone should protect themselves.

As ever I think that this is a matter for consumers' consciences. At some point we need to stop and look at our consumption in the UK and clearly distinguish between our needs and life's luxuries and value them accordingly.

The idea of non-essential items coming out of such a distressing environment should detract from their appeal. Our greedy and obsessive consumer culture has forgotten what luxury means.

Reading a news article like this one makes me start to feel that the industry has completely lost its way. Flowers should be an occasional treat and a celebration of the beauty of nature. Corporate flower production, armed escorts, air freight and the cheap and crappy bouquets that litter the front of garage forecourts and low-end supermarkets do not spell luxury to me.