November 2008 Archives

We have been busy at the main yard with a major cleaning operation.  We have pressure washed all the buildings and the concrete and are resurfacing and extending the box storage area.  It looks immaculate, I feel dead proud.  I'm just waiting for some muppet to come in with a filthy vehicle and drop a load of mud in the middle and drive through it in a dirty protest.

We are reconfiguring the packhouse as well.  We have taken down a wall to give us a bigger storage area and a putting in one of those speed doors to link up with the coldstore and dispatch area.  I'm strangely excited about this too.  These doors are old news but we have always been behind the game here.  Hang on, I'll try to find a video

This isn't a video of our door, I just found it on youtube, but it's pretty representative of what goes on at our place right down to the racket in the background, the yorping workmen and the gormless twonk in the tie who looks as though he actually wants to get crushed by the door.

Just driven back from Scotland.  I spoke to Kelso Farm Discussion Society last night and then had work to do further North today.

It's a bloomin' long way, you know.  I was getting pretty tired by the end of the journey. 

I flicked on the telly when I got in and caught the end of Jimmy Doherty presenting a Horizon special on trans-genetics.  He presented a point of view which was very balanced.

He had done some filming in Uganda to demonstrate how this technology can help to solve some of their problems.  There was a bit when he was eating some yucky old gunk made out of boiled green bananas.  Bless him, I was right there with him on that one.

I'm drinking some of that hot, salty "porridge" out of the bowl.  You can see from my expression how I am savouring the flavour.  I'm thinking "swallow it, just swallow it" but my throat keeps having a little gag.  Look at the way that I am being studied as I drink it.

Ecomnia is my new phrase for an inability to sleep brought on by the global economic meltdown.

It's stupid a.m. and I have come downstairs for a glass of water and to jot down the stuff which is keeping me awake.  Hopefully in the morning this will seem daft or obvious and it won't keep me awake tomorrow.

Actually I could do with a good night's sleep, I've got a lot of driving to do this week.  My mind and my body don't seem to get on very well with one another these days.

Right.  Here's what's troubling me.  This increasing government debt, what assumption is it built upon?  I had always assumed that the economy was driven by population growth and that rising prices were caused by increasing competition and that was fine.  But when you think about it, where can any extra money actually come from?

The amount of natural resources on the planet are finite.  Water, Oxygen, Oil, Gold, whatever, there is only so much of each of them.  As the population increases, the value of these increases because the market for these becomes competitive.  In reality, though, we have less each.  There is no increase in prosperity, so how can we keep consuming more?

This is all obvious, isn't it? 

I just can't sleep for worrying about the ridiculous situation that we find ourselves in.  Since we only have a limited amount of resources to share on the planet, our units of currency need to be finite too.  If we traded in gold or silver, we would be unable to get in this mess.

Printing extra money is symptomatic of the disrespect that we have for our natural resources.  If we get through this crisis, and I'm increasingly hopeful that we won't, then we are only delaying the inevitable.

Our only hope is renewable energy, that would be genuine alchemy.  Instead we depend upon oil from politically-unstable nations and print money to buy it from them.  What the hell sort of legacy are we creating for the future?

How can anyone sleep?

 This is good.  This is REAL good.

Supergroom 2008 was last week.

I am soooo excited. (You can see that I am constantly getting diverted from writing my Africa stuff and keep needing to refer back to Western excess on the net).

You remember all those exquisitely trimmed poodles from earlier in the year.  And when I locked horns with Poodle Pam.  Well this was all after I used pictures from Supergroom 2007.

We should have a whole new set of pictures very soon.  I.  CAN'T.  WAIT.  There are no photos up yet.  There must be some technical problems.  

Probably the groomers are resting their hands after their three day orgy of snipping, back-combing and spraypainting and can't manage the little buttons on their digital cameras. 

Possibly something terrible happened after someone tried to dress a German Shepherd as Dolly Parton and it ate all the groomers.  It was a miracle if at least one of the dogs didn't try to resist this abuse, are they drugged first or something?

Anyway.  This year according to the official Supergroom website they have got Sasha as an official guest.  Uh huh, that's right, THE Sasha.  Groomerist par excellence from Serbia. 

Look at the state of that fluffy, coiffured poodle.  Isn't that the campest creature that you've ever seen? And then look at the dog that he's holding. That picture's not slipping under your gaydar is it? 

Actually old Sasha bears a slight resemblance to Jimmy Doherty.  Hang on, you don't reckon that....

JIMMY DOHERTY & PIG                 SASHA & POODLE

If the suggestions in the Sunday papers are correct, I'm going to be in a right old mong tomorrow.  I wish that that gormless, dark- eyebrowed, £$%*("!, &^%$£, ("^$, Alistair Darling, had decided to cut the VAT rate BEFORE I negotiated our cut flower prices for next year.

Here's my prediction.  The net prices we have negotiated will stay the same.  The gross retail prices for our flowers will not alter one bit either.   Retailers will pocket ALL the extra margin.  Yay, what a result.

Well done Darling, you %$£".  (I don't want your job, btw)

Had a productive day.  Normally we have a couple of quiet months on the farm at the end of the year.  We have less staff than this year than last and there seems more to do.  We are trying to fit some new equipment in the packhouse for a new project and there is extra tractor work to be done around the farm.  It hasn't helped that I have been swanning about the globe and that I have to travel up to Scotland next week for a couple of days.

I have had to cancel a couple of things this weekend that I had been looking forward to just so that I could get caught up with my work.

Tonight I am trying to write up my account of the Farm Africa trip while it is still at the front of my thoughts.

There were just a couple of bits that I wanted to share.

I heard on the radio this morning that someone or other is hoping to reintoduce the White-Tailed Eagle to East Anglia.

This sounded pretty good to me initially so I dug out my RSPB bible from the office.  This species is also known as the Sea Eagle and they live on fish and seabirds.  Occasionally they catch hares.  They can live for 20 years and have a wingspan of up to 8ft.

It would break up a day's tractor driving to see one of those beauties swoop down in hot pursuit of a hare, wouldn't it?  It would certainly beat the three manky looking herons that were hanging around on the headland yesterday while I was winter ploughing.  They looked like a bunch of joyriders or glue sniffers loitering about in my way.

I will never, ever get bored of telling you how much I hate herons.

This is what your White Tailed Eagle looks like.

Majestic, huh?

Being a little bloke, my only worry is what they will start eating when they have gobbled up all the rabbits and hares.  I wouldn't fancy my chances if an 8 ft bird descended on me and grabbed hold of the back of my collar when I'm out walking the flower fields with my ipod on.  Perhaps I should get some heavier boots or some tranquiliser darts.

Here's one for you then.  I have just got back from two days at the Farm Management Conference in Oxford.  It was very good, I have written a bit of a report on it in my next FW column.

Anyway I was chatting to someone I hadn't met before at the bar.  We were discussing different things that we had done and people that we had worked with. 

He said to me "Have you ever met (insert name of person from high up in a farming organisation)?"

"Oh yes" I replied "I was with him a few weeks ago and he had really sweaty armpits and he kept putting his hands behind his head"

"Well, he's my godfather" said the bloke.

"Oh"  I wasn't expecting that one, let me tell you.  I started backpeddling and said

"It didn't smell, I think that it was fresh.  He must have been working hard.  Maybe he picked up deodourant instead of anti-perspirant etc"  My own pits were getting rather sweaty too at this point.  Why was I born with a mouth?  It only gets me into trouble.

The other thing that might interest you from the conference was that the after dinner entertainment was provided by this bloke.

The downturn in the economy has finally hit Moulton Seas End.  I have just noticed that we now have Tesco "Value" toilet paper in our executive washroom and not just in the canteen loo.

Painful times ahead.

I've got a really rotten feeling about the economy, I'm one of the people who thinks that it's going to be REALLY bad.

I don't like the government's policies, they are putting off an inevitable judgement day and committing us to a tough future.  David Cameron sounds completely out of his depth on economic matters.  His inability to resist a smartarse line (like the awful one about tax cuts being for life not Christmas) make him sound like a sixth former in a debating competition.

Vincent Cable is coming out of this looking pretty good in my opinion.  I've always been a big fan of Ken Clarke as well (we both share the same birthday, well not the same year, obviously he is much younger than me).  Here's what he's got to say at the moment.

I meant to tell you yesterday about my new campaign.  I want to ban reclining seats on flights.

I flew back from Nairobi on a night flight departing at midnight and landing at 5.30am (GMT) in the hope that I might be able to get enough sleep to have a full day on either side.

Within a few minutes of the plane reaching altitude, the chubby Yankee in front of me reclined his seat pushing my newspaper into my face.

The trouble with this is that once one person reclines their seat, everyone needs to recline.  It's a bit like being at a concert when people stand up, then you all have to stand up.  I can remember going to a Blur concert (in the early 90's before they had become irritating) and the person in front of me stood up before they even came on stage.

What's the answer?  A mosh pit at the front of the plane?  Making the reclining person lay flat in the overhead locker instead?

When I was ready to sleep on the flight this week, I thoughtfully looked behind me to see if the person behind would mind if I reclined.  He was reclined and asleep himself and wearing the complimentary blindfold thing that BA provide.  Unfortunately he had left his tray down.  I didn't want to ram this into this belly so I carefully and quietly tried to fold up his tray.  Unfortunately it had a full glass of water on it which I hadn't seen.  I managed to tip this into his crotch.

He woke up with a start.

I spun around quickly before he could get his blindfold off and I pretended to be asleep.  I could hear a lot of fumbling.  He wiped himself down, folded up his tray and put his blindfold back on.  COOL.  I reclined.

Either these seats need to be fixed or everyone has to recline at once.  It's simple enough.

Shall we start a petition or something?

Just listened back to the pre-recorded diatribe about Farm Africa that I gave on the local BBC radio station which was broadcast this morning.  (I'm not sure how empty your life is, but it's here, 15 minutes in, if you want to listen).

I am very enthusiastic about the subject but I realise, having listened back, that I was rather boring. 

It is very easy, when you get really engaged in a subject, to get engrosed in the intricacies of your subject and be boring without realising it. I had to listen all the way through lovely, local Sarah Pettit before my bit, she was being boring about important but heavy European pesticide stuff first.  I was much more boring than her even though she was fairly seriously boring.

There are some subjects where it is inappropriate to be light-hearted and I think that perhaps I will tackle this in future by only giving short answers so that the interviewer has a bit more control over my boringness. 

Good article here from the Science editor in the Guardian which mirrors my own views.  UK agriculture, according to Tim Lang, a professor of food policy at City University, is too focused on feed cereal production and too dependent upon oil.  He has talked a lot of simple sense in the last few years.

He suggests that we need a strategy to encourage greater production of fruit and veg in the UK instead of meat and dairy.

The major issue, as I see it, is that we are over-producing fruit and veg in season.  In most normal seasons, insufficient demand exists when we are capable of producing these crops.  This makes producers weak in the marketplace and is why the supermarkets are able to buy it at low prices.  If anything we will see less of these crops grown.  The primary appeal of cereal crops is that they can be stored cheaply for long periods of time giving the producer more marketing options.

Although it goes against what I believe in, I'm sure that we can only change the national diet with a top down approach from government which starts in schools and is supported by much, much greater investment in breeding and agronomic technology

Why did things go quiet on the potato front, Matthew? 

Last year I was candid about our potato yields and quality as we worked our way through the harvest.  I didn't do that this year.  We were late starting but things went quite well and we finished harvesting a couple of weeks ago.

Dad and I made a decision, based on gut reaction, to sell all of the potatoes as quickly as we could this year.  We normally store a percentage of the best quality and sell them in the next tax year. 

Our yields were much higher than last year - although I decided that it wasn't in our commercial interests to write that in a public place while I was trying to sell them.  We know that this is down to weather conditions rather than exceptional agronomic skill on our part and we assume this is the case for other growers too. 

There are plenty of variables in the potato market and, in the light of the country's economic woes, we are positioning our business in cautious mode.  In fresh produce, and particualrly cut flowers, we are very exposed to retail trends - we need to limit risks where we can.  We also want a bit of cash by us to capitalise on the "opportunities" that the next twelve months will throw up (Range Rover Sport for eight grand, anyone?)  

It is unclear how many potatoes remain unharvested or what the yields are like in the West where they have had even more rain than we have.  We don't know if consumption will be affected positively or negatively by the "recession."  We don't know how the potatoes will store sucessfully after a wet growing season with little sunshine.  Presumably more growers will be keen to sell early and recover cash after the disastrous wheat harvest.  When we are feeling "bearish", it normally means that other growers are too.

So we have sold the whole crop already, the money will hopefully all be with us in seven or eight weeks.  They have ended up split, almost in equal proportions, between M&S, Sainsbury, Asda and Co -op.  It is the first time that we have ever sold the entire crop to supermarket packers.  The prices were nothing to get excited about.  The contracts that we had in place for a percentage of the crop paid a few thousand quid premium over the free market price (last year the same contract cost us £25000 from our bottom line).  We made a profit which, considering that the costs were dramatically higher than our expectations, is something to be thankful for.

In our opinion, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.  Growers with the courage to store potatoes at their own risk deserve a much higher return than we have obtained.  In most seasons they will get it, perhaps they will this year.  I've always been a Nervous Nerys, I'm a happier man than I was a month ago. 

Bugger, I've just lost the stuff that I spent fifteen minutes typing for you.  Never mind, we'll try again.  This has been my first proper Saturday morning for ages.  I've made toast on the Aga and drunk half of a pot of filter coffee already.  Oh it feels so good to be home.  I have quite a lot to do at work but, unlike most of the year, it is not too time-sensitive.  This means that things fall on poor Chris' broad shoulders again this morning. 

I've had a few weeks of doing rather than writing or reflecting.  This is all exciting, I tend to live in a bit of a fantasy land most of the time.  The potato harvest, personal circumstances and then travelling to Africa have meant living in the here and now for a change.  This is why my input here has been erratic.   

Now I need to spend the weekend getting some of my thoughts down.  I have quite a lot of stuff to get through.  There's a paper for the Institute of Ag. Management Conference next week, an FW column, a couple of magazine articles about Africa, a couple of talks and speeches and I'm painfully aware that I still haven't told you about Clarence.

Writing a blog entry is normally a good way to get the brain rolling.  You don't care what I put, you'll read any old rubbish; the falling reader figures bear testament to that.

Oh and if you are interested, I'm going to be on the Radio Lincolnshire Farming Programme on Sunday morning at 7.00am talking about Africa 100 and Farm Africa.  If you suffer from incurable insomnia, perhaps you would like to tune in. 

I've spent a fair bit of time in planes in the last week (sorry climate, it was poverty's turn to get a look in).

I really enjoy flying if I don't think to deeply about the science involved. It's a good thing that the email below didn't arrive before I left.

I am back from my trip to Sub-Saharan Africa looking at projects as part of the NFU's Africa 100 appeal.

There is loads more info to come about this (videos, photos and audio interviews and stuff) in fact you might get fed up with hearing about it.  I've put a few pictures up on my Facebook profile.

The trip was life changing.  Some of the sights were deeply upsetting and travelling the long distances has been very tiring.  I didn't have a hot shower for the week so it was with some relief that I arrived at Heathrow early this morning.  I have barely slept for 48 hours now and am suffering quite severe stomach pains from eating or drinking something which was contaminated.  And the central heating isn't working at home and so the house is freezing (particularly after the temperature in Kisumu).

Anyway.  I have met a bunch of inspiring people.  More stuff to follow tomorrow.

Normal service will resume in a few days when Matthew is back from his trip to Africa - Isabel (FW community editor)

I'm having a catching up session today.  I blasted out about 12 emails this afternoon, wrote three letters, cleared my desk of tasks and paperwork and sent the final draft of my Nuffield report off to the Nuffield director at long last.  The report is a pretty rubbish effort but I'm sure it's as good as it's going to get.  I've done at least 20 drafts now and they were all a bit chaotic.

I have also finally tackled the Court Summons which has been sitting on my kitchen table for a couple of weeks.  I was photographed taking on my mobile phone by one of those mobile traffic cameras in the summer.  This was pretty unlucky, we've spent a small fortune having five car kits fitted to the vehicles in the last couple of years.  Mine wasn't working that day for some strange reason.

Anyway.  The hearing is while I'm in Africa so I've had to fill in forms to tell them stuff like whether I want to be flogged, stoned or hung in a giblet in Spalding high street.  They have also asked for some really detailed information about my income and expenditure.  This goes right down to itemised details like smoking, Sky tv, shopping catalogues and lottery tickets.  WHAT?  I don't have any of those things.  Have they sent me the form for a blue collar villian?  Don't they realise that I'm a white collar criminal?  I need headings for club memberships, society subscriptions, charitable donations, wine clubs, that sort of thing.

I'm pretty contrite about my offence (I certainly haven't done it again since I got caught) but I'm not very happy about having to give too much information about my income.  This is partly out of embarrassment - I haven't got a blinkin' clue what I'm going to earn this year. 

It's quite a relief to get a few of these affairs in order.  Maybe I will get back into the swing of some proper entries on here now. 

According to a number of news reports that I have heard over the weekend, farmland bird populations have declined in the last three years.  They are reported to be at ther lowest level since records began.

This data stems from the Wild Birds Populations Report 2007.   There is more info here

While I do not dispute these findings, there are a heck of a lot more than the 19 species that were measured.  Where arbitary snapshots like this are taken, it is possible to come up with whatever statistic you wish to.

I would suggest that the extremely wet nesting season last year was catastophic and defeated most of the good work that we have done creating habitats.  This year was wet again although things seem much better across our farm.  I have seen two coveys of English Partridge each with a brood of over 10.  (Oooo, get me with my country terms).