September 2010 Archives

My Mum is the local Macmillan treasurer and organises one of their coffee mornings.  She spends about two thousand man hours baking cakes in advance and I (like a miserly capitalist pig) always wonder whether, if she costed her ingredients in, she is earning the minimum wage at £4 per cake.

This is missing the spirit, of course.  It does a great deal to raise the profile of the Macmillan charity and its nurses.

Anyhow.  This year I had to shut my mouth (by stuffing a very reasonably-priced cake into it) because she turned over more money at her coffee morning than I generated in my business that day.  She dragged in nearly £2500 which was a couple of hundred quid more than me.  And most of her's is profit.  And she was home by 3.30pm.

I think that I have seen the future.

Jay Rayner has written a few articles lately defending "modern agriculture" to promote the food programme that he is presenting on Channel 4.  This article provoked the following response from Mr Pete Melchett of Bristol.

Organic farmers and food companies, long used to being attacked by Jay Rayner ("Big agriculture is the only option to stop food riots in Britain", Comment) can take some comfort that we have become, in his eyes, part of a "holy trinity", along with local and seasonal food, that has nothing to do with the "real issues" of food security. What bunk! Of course we should stop throwing away cosmetically imperfect fruit and we must be more self-sufficient, but true self-sufficiency means being self-sufficient in the nutrients and land needed to produce our food, not just importing a bit less of the final product.

The industrialised farming favoured by Rayner decreases our self-sufficiency, because the system depends on fossil fuels and imported phosphates to provide the nutrition to grow the grain, and land from destroyed tropical forests and grasslands to grow the soya, all of which are needed to feed animals kept in industrial units. It is the proponents of industrialised farming who are narrow-minded, not the citizens, scientists, international agencies and governments who recognise that the future of food lies in agri-ecological systems.

Peter Melchett, policy director, the Soil Association

Marlborough Street, Bristol

Maybe they are both right.  They are just arguing about different things. 

Jay Rayner is perhaps correct that food production will need to remain centralised, conducted with large scale and using more technology.  Lord Melchett is also correct that crop producers will look to biology rather than chemicals to solve production problems. 

In the age of green energy, industrial agriculture will no longer be polluting.  Similarly there is no reason why organic methods cannot be used with scale and efficiency. 

The sooner these squabbles stop and we all start moving towards this future, the better.

I have mixed feelings about the proposals for Nocton Dairy and its "How Many Cows Can You Fit In A Telephone Box" Guiness World Record attempt.  I sort of love it and hate it at the same time. 

I just read here that the Ecologist has been rifling through Nocton's application for Rural Development money and, to use a technical term, they might just have "shat their nest."

EU money is usually only given if the applicant can demonstrate that the project would not happen without the grant assistance.   The basis being that if it's going to happen anyway then there's no point giving any public money.  It also has to demonstrate that it will be profitable in it's own right.

This paradox is something which I continually came up against when I was a director of our area's Leader+ grant programme.  If it's profitable it shouldn't need funding, if it's not it shouldn't be funded.  It makes most grants a bit of a farce

Some applicants therefore say that they need grant funding to do stuff which they would do whether they secured funding or not.  The Nocton boys applied for grant aid for some of their welfare improvements saying that they wouldn't go ahead if the grant wasn't forthcoming.  Whoops all round.  I'm guessing that these welfare standards are actually an integral part of their plan and that this was just a bit of poetic licence to satisfy the box tickers at DEFRA. 

Nocton Dairy is exacly the sort of investment and innovation which EU grants are supposed to be stimulating.  It would be a cruel irony if this information gives more ammunition to the opponents of the scheme.

I am watching the food programme on Channel 4.  Jay Rayner is making a perfectly sensible point about the how few English apples meet the supermarkets' requirements.

He has just introduced an apple grower who turned to juice production because he became fed up with the supermarkets demands in 1998.

"1998" I scoffed.  What a wimp.  It was bloody easy supplying supermarkets in 1998.  Since then the prices have only gone down, the standards have gone up.

Supermarkets will hold these standards as long as they can because consumers buy with their eyes.  They will only lower their specification when there are too few apples.  Simple as...

I am feeling completely overwhelmed at the moment.  I have a number of decisions to make and each of them has great potential consequences.  I have never had so many different things going on in my life before.

This is the reason that I haven't been blogging much.  Sorry for neglecting you.

Here's a picture of a dog in a hat and trainers

I'm pleased that we finally have some fine weather again. It is now dry enough for us to resume daffodil planting and there are combines rolling all around us.

We stopped growing wheat over a decade ago and I haven't ever regretted the decision  In a wet and catchy harvest like this one I feel positively relieved; we already have a mountain of work in August. 

Even the current high wheat prices don't stir my emotions on the matter.  Fag packet maths alert, on a low acreage (less than 300 acres, say) I reckon it costs 120 quid a tonne to grow grain on silt land with your own combine.  On the 400 acres that we farm then even selling wheat at 150 quid isn't a Range Rover-shaped windfall.

I still have a great deal of empathy for anyone with wheat still left to get.  The wet and stormy weather last weekend was battered the life out of a 5 hectare patch of delphiniums costing me a lot of money and we are a week behind our schedule for field operations.