September 2009 Archives

Waitrose has just announced a deal with Boots which will see them selling one another's products.  They also have some plans do open some more service station stores (as M&S Simply Food have done successfully)

As a supplier, I think that has to be a superb opportunity.  I seem to remember reading that Boots has the UK's largest market share for prepared sandwiches, I'm not sure if that is still the case.  I guess that the high street locations are ideal for selling lunch stuff to office workers.

This looks like a positive step for Boots, too.  Like Woolworths, and indeed most of other High Street brands, they seemed a bit anachronistic in the modern world of ecommerce and out of town retail parks.  Do people still buy corn plasters and hair curlers?

In fact I can't remember the last time that I went into a Boots.  Still, there are two thousand stores out there though so presumably there are more haemorrhoid-stricken, office workers who need their holiday photos developing than you realise.

The Telegraph in one of their spurious little polls, are demanding the Tories make a pledge over a referendum for our EU membership.

Didn't we decide all this years ago?  Aren't we pretty much integrated anyway?

Perhaps the majority of people ARE against EU membership (almost certainly the majority of FW readers are).  Just because you are a majority, it doesn't make it right.  The majority of people are in favour of capital punishment.  The majority of people read a tabloid newspaper with a lady wearing her boobs on page 3.  The majority of people like watching Bruce Forsyth and his dancin' competitions.  Majorities, by their very nature, are made up of people who don't give a great deal of thought to things. 

Don't we all want to live in a world where everybody has a single language, a single currency, a single time zone (you just go to bed when it's dark or when you're tired, OK?), a single "religion" and a single moral commitment towards one another.  Now we have planes and phones and televisions and internets and twitters and stuff, isn't this all a real possibility in, say, one thousand years time.  Is it right to stand in the way of ths dream?

THERE.  Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

This is like one of those features in a Sunday supplement where people talk about their perfect weekend or what they are into.

I thought I'd show you my clothes line because it just amused me.  My wardrobe is so logically conventional that most people consider it eccentric.  They ask me if I have Asbergers Syndrome.

Basically I always wear blue shirts for work and white shirts for "going out."  This means at the weekend I do two blue washes and one white wash.  (Ha, ha, ha I've just realised how truly petty all this sounds.  Does anyone really still read this?).  So, you can tell what sort of week I have had from the shirts on the clothes line.  At work if I have anyone coming to meet me I wear one of our blue, Oxford shirts (our corporate workwear is like the state-issued garments from a communist country).  If I am not meeting anyone I just wear a blue polo shirt.  If I am going out somewhere in the day or evening I wear a clean, white, Oxford shirt.

As you can see from the line, there are seven blue polo shirts.  This means that I have been doing practical work all week.  Could there be a more visual statement about the impact that the credit crunch has had in agriculture?  As an image which captures the zeitgeist it's worthy of the front page of the Telegraph and (had I bothered to clean the lens on my camera) it could have become as iconic as the sailor and nurse havin' a little kiss on VJ day. 

God alone knows why I feel compelled to tell you this stuff.  I think that someone put a truth serum in my coffee

No potato harvesting today.  The soil is as dry as a witch's... wait....a bone.  It's a dry as a bone.  This is a family blog.  (That reminds me of a poem about Old Mother Hubbard and I'm not going to put that on here either.  Thinking about it made me chuckle on a Sunday morning anyway.)

So, as I was saying before I so rudely interupted myself, we are harvesting potatoes very cautiously because the soil is so dry that they are in danger of bruising.  We have made a number of adjustments to the harvester and fitted it with a watering system to spray the tubers.  It is so gentle that I would handle live hand grenades on it with confidence but I still daren't use it on a crop with a dry matter of more than 22%.  We are hopping from one field to the next and waiting for a downpour.

So we all get a day off and I am doing odd jobs around the house. 

And so we belatedly record the passing of the genius geneticist, Norman Bourlaug.  A life which lasts 95 years and saves a billion lives is worth a mention. 

Bourlaug was a rare species, a scientist who carried pure research to its ultimate, practical conclusion.  His new plant varieties made the world a better place.  This chap, writing in the Guardian, should be smacked on his bottom with a slipper and sent to bed without his (organic) dinner for suggesting otherwise.  The problem is not in Bourlaug's work, it is that the next generation did not develop it further.

We could debate if Bourlaug's work actually saved a billion lives or created them.  The conclusion that I draw from the organic lobby's criticism of this humanitarian pioneer is that they would prefer to prevent population growth by starving the world's poor.  While I don't believe that a global of 10 billion is desirable, I am not comfortable with enforced population control.  Food, healthcare and education would slow child birth rates in the developing world as they have in the West.  More food is the first step towards this.

As Bourlaug stated when accepting his Nobel prize

There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort. Fighting alone, they may win temporary skirmishes, but united they can win a decisive and lasting victory to provide food and other amenities of a progressive civilization for the benefit of all mankind.

Well said, that man.

Jack Thurston has written an interesting piece here in the Telegraph about EU subsidies.  I'm inclined to agree with him on most of it (I'm always less quick-witted and more compliant at this time of year - I'm too punch drunk from the harvest season to bother arguing with anything.  I'm off to Africa once we are finished to find my mojo again).

Here, also, is a link to the Daily Mail website.  I say this to give you an opportunity not to click on it.  Obviously anything written in the Mail is guaranteed to be total nonsense. 

Today they are "blasting" quangos.  The "headline quango" that they have selected is the British Potato Council.  No doubt this is because it sounds amusingly esoteric.  (I could write a much longer entry moaning about the Potato Council but that is not my point.)  There are a million things that the government could shave spendings on - the £6.5 million that the Mail is moaning about equates to 10p per person in the UK. It is negligible.  Potatoes are an absurdly cheap form of nutrition and anyone who takes that for granted is an idiot who should be banned from ever being allowed to buy food again and forced to grow their own or to forage for it in the wild.

Obviously you would expect me to respond like a protective parent towards the reputation of my beloved potato.

In fairness, though, the Mail did come up with the phrase "Quangocrat" which is an absolute blinder.

Milk farmers are protesting across Europe, then.

What a crappy situation.  What a difficult industry it is to work in, we seem to be over-supplying everything at the moment.  What a triumph for the consumer.

Would a dog in a wig cheer you up?  I'll go get one....

Lordy, Lordy.  Now this is a whole lot better.  It's a video of a dog milking a goat.  Feast your eyes on this.

(I can't hear the audio on this PC so I can't hear if there is any music to accompany it.  I hope that it's not got a lot of cussin' or anything.)

Chris's 4x4 went for its first service yesterday.  Look what they lent him.

He is ACTUALLY covering his face, that's not irony - he was genuinely ashamed.  Look at the bloody thing, we had that parked outside the office all day.

Here have another look.

I know that I should be proud of the Union flag but I am of the generation that is a bit sqeamish about such things.  It looks like it ought to have a loudspeaker on the top and a couple of goons handing out leaflets for the BNP.

Had dinner with a supermarket buyer last night and the conversation turned to wellington boots; we were analysing the popularity of Hunter wellingtons in particular (with subjects like that you can see what a natural raconteur I am at the dining table, can't you?  I'm like a latter-day Peter Ustinov on the subject of wellingtons.)

"But how many other makes of wellington can you actually name?" he said.

I effortlessly came up with seven others.

He looked stunned (by the sadness of the feat) and an "only in Lincolnshire" expression slipped from his face. 

I decided to keep quiet for a bit and concentrate on spilling linguine down my shirt. 

If ever you need to hire a bon viveur, just look me up in the phone directory.

I've bloomin' cut myself shavin' again.  I'm always doin' that.

I reckon that Action Man must use Tesco's cheap disposable razors like I do.

I was reading the paper while I had my breakfast and spotted this.  If you click here you may be eligible to take a 6 month free trial in an electric Mini.

Actually I had completely forgotten this until I started writing but my first car was a yellow Mini.  I think that I'm correct in saying that Mr Bean was originally based on me.  I had it for bombing around the farm when I was about 12 (which makes me sound like a bit of a red neck), it had been converted for stock car racing by a neighbour so had a roll cage, a racing seat and a fire extinguisher and everything.  I'll see if I can scan a picture in at some point.

I've always had a special affinty with Minis because like me they are very British and very cool.  What do you mean you're not havin' that?  What about ...Like me they are very British and very small.  Oh so you like that do you?  You think that's funny, do you? 

My sister had a Mini Cooper S and it was a lot of fun and I considered a Mini Cooper D last time I changed my car.  It wasn't actually much cheaper or more economical than the Golf that I ended up with and my cash was going to end up in Berlin either way.

Anyway.  Here comes the point.  Mini, on the website that I linked to at the top, are suggesting that the electric Mini has "zero emissions".  That appeals to me greatly but we need to remember that the electricity has to come from somewhere and the probability is that it will be from a great big power station.  Until we harness solar/hydrogen/wind//water power efficiently, then these are actually Coal-powered Minis and they are not carbon neutral at all. 

This is one of the products which we have been busy with for the last few weeks.

These are how the delphiniums leave us for Waitrose.

We always have visitors wandering on and off site, you know the sorts, sales reps, delivery drivers and the like (I can't afford a commissionaire in a peaked cap and epaulettes to keep people out yet).  They all saunter up to the bouquets where we are packing them (probably hoping to get a freebie) and nearly all of the say the same thing.

"Mmmm" they go (screwing up their noses) "I wouldn't pay THAT for 'em." 

It's almost a catchphrase now.

I try not to get too offended.  I don't set the price after all and there are all sorts of costs to come off before I get my (suprisingly small) hands on the (suprisingly small) amount which remains.  I'm not complaining. VAT, retailer overheads, transport, packaging and stuff have to be paid for. 

Plus if I was compiling a focus group made up of your average Waitrose flower shoppers, I wouldn't have many long-distance truck drivers in it. 

Here is one of the new cut flowers from our trial site.  Although they look completely artificial, these "brains" were grown using only natural heat and light.  I first came across them in New Zealand.

To be honest, they terrify me.  I wouldn't dare have them in my house - they look as though they could turn carnivorous at any point (plus I don't have any pink colour schemes and anyone who says otherwise is lying).

Come on you lot, let's eat weeds.  Let's all have a great big weed-eating party.

Can you remember a while back that some guerilla gourmet called Kev left a comment on here saying that I should eat ground elder?  Well blow me, I've found a whole website dedicated to recipes for weeds.  It's called Eat Weeds and it's here.  Please go there now and start eating weeds with immediate effect.  I really can't see why we need this farming lark at all - let's just eat thistles, pigeons and rats.

Tomato, Stingin' Nettle and Ground Elder Soup, anyone?

Guess who's blogged over on Catchat?  The Relfster has sat back in his chair, put his feet up on a cat-shaped footstool (probably wearing cat-shaped slippers) and has let someone else have a go.

I thought that we could have a game of charades to work out whom it is.  Or you can just have a look here if you hate charades.

Me:    (pinches earlobe with thumb and forefinger)

You:   "Ear"

Me:    (shakes head and pulls a "duh" expression")

You:   "Oh yeh.  Sounds like"

Me:     (nods over-excitedly and points at the fruit bowl)

You    "Bowl.  Sounds like bowl. Um.  Noel.  Noel Gallagher?"

Me:     (shakes head and points more vigorously at the fruit bowl)

You:   "Noel Edmonds then?  Is it the banker off Deal or No Deal"

Me:    (goes over to fruit bowl and picks up the orange.  Points at orange and pinches ear lobe once more)

You:   "Fruit? Citrus? Orange?"

Me:    (touches end of nose with finger.  I seem to recall Lisa Goddard doin' that in Give Us a Clue)

You:   "Orange Juice? Is it O.J. Simpson?"

Me:    "NO IT'S NOT BLOODY O.J. SIMPSON"

You:   "You're not supposed to be speaking"

Me:    (looks angry and starts aggressively manhandling the orange about.  Draws a "G" in the air with finger"

You:   "Oh.  Gorringe.  It's Heather Gorringe isn't it?"

Me:    (nods and slumps into chair in mock exhaustion a la Lionel Blair)

I had a chat with my mate, Piglet, today.  He was fitting the header to his combine, I was coupling up a plough.  There was a bit of phone  tucked between shoulder and ear action going on (in his case he has one of those Blueberries, I just have one of those basic Nokias that parents buy for their nine year old children).

We were bemoaning the unpredictability of modern commodity prices.  Ian had assessed the wheat market for the year ahead quite carefully (he spent several yaers as a commodity trader in the city) and based on the expected UK yield he sold a block of wheat.  The unexpected slight firming of wheat prices as shown in the FT at the weekend happened subsequently and his decision has cost him a fair bit of money.

I'm not complaining about rising wheat prices (they could double and it still wouldn't be too expensive) but it seems that we operate in a market which hardly ever rewards thoughtful decision making.