July 2010 Archives

A crazy YouTube video featuring cows.

Utterly bizarre, it may be, but it's been watched nearly three million times.

What could well be the UK's most unusual coffee shop - Goats on the Roof - is about to open its doors.

What makes it so different - as the more perceptive among you will have already noticed - is that Billy the Bagot Goat and his friends will be living and grazing happily on the turf roof, while visitors graze in the coffee shop below.

Located near Rothbury in Northumberland, this coffee shop and rare breed centre is the dream child of the Remnant family - this new venture a diversification of their original farm business, Fontburn Rare Breeds.  

More info and pictures just in about the Scottish brewery, BrewDog, and its 'dead animal' beer which I mentioned yesterday.

The blonde Belgian ale comes in bottles encased in your choice of a dead stoat ($764) or squirrel ($1070).

Beer sold in dead animals? You really couldn't make this up.

Here it is in a stoat and a squirrel.

Like the look of this?

It's New Forest 28-day-aged fillet steak served with a smoked bacon and cream sauce, fondant potato, carrots and a Loosehanger cheese and lavender crisp.

You've heard of a car wash. Well this is a cow wash.

According to its Swedish maker, DeLaval, it cleans the animals, raises their blood circulation and increases milk yields.

If you're wondering where I've been for the past few days, it's here.

Did you know that 275 million litres of milk from over 35,000 Irish cows from 1,400 farms is used make Baileys Irish Cream every year.

Well, I didn't either - but I've just learnt this fact because the drink maker has contacted me to tell me they're on the hunt for Ireland's finest Holstein Friesian dairy cow.

Their Champion Dairy Cow Competition, launched by model Nadia Forde (left), will take place at the Virginia Show in Co Cavan.

It's happening on Saturday July 31 and there's 8000 euros of prize money up for grabs.

To enter the contest, cows must first have produced 500kgs of butterfat and protein in a 305-day lactation (except for the heifer in milk awards), with a 10% extra weighting given to the protein portion of the entry standard. 

On the day, final judgment will be made by Michael Gould who owns the Woodmarsh Holstein herd in Shrewsbury.

Grey squirrels are a delight for adventurous cooks, according to this article in today's Telegraph.

We've known that for a while here on Field Day. Occasional contributor Caroline even made a video about it.

This painting, Farmer, Blaen Nantmor, sold for £52,850 at a Christie's auction recently.

The oil on canvas - which fetched double its estimate - is by the Welsh artist Sir Kyffin Williams, who died in 2006.

Liz Hurley is going to star in a new reality TV show about her life on a farm.

The model and businesswoman will open the doors to the cameras on her 400-acre Gloucestershire farm where she lives with her husband and son.

She's keen to extol the virtues of organic agriculture in the fly-on-the-wall series, filming for which begins later this year for cable network Living.

Liz has turned the farm into a thriving food empire, selling sausages, pork, lamb and burgers at Cirencester Farmers' Market.

Her brother manages the farm, but Liz can sometimes be spotted behind the till at local farmers markets.

Liz once said: "People always imagine me with perfect hair - but that's not who I am. The first time he saw me in the country, my husband found me in wellies, covered in mud."

Now there's an image to wrestle with...

Speaking of turkeys (OK, it was chickens, but let's not be pedantic) I've just been introduced by an Australian colleague of mine to this creature - the bush turkey.

I rather like it - and think the red, the yellow and the black means it should become Farmers Weekly's official mascot. After the horse Farmer Frank, of course (Farmer Frank, for those of you who haven't encountered him, is Farmers Weekly's agony uncle, but we recently discovered there's actually a racehorse with the same name, too!)

Who says the Lada's day has come and gone. One model is back on sale again in the UK.

I'm sure that'll prompt a few old jokes to be resurrected, if nothing else...

It seems that our Tim isn't the only one flexing his literary muscle at the moment.

We've been sent so many books over the last couple of weeks my desk is starting to resemble a library. Or at least the agriculture section anyway. As it stands, the line up includes:

Not On My Patch Lad, by Mike Pannett
The Bad Beekeepers Club, by Bill Turnbull
Welsh Ponies and Cobs, by Dr Wynne Davies
Badger, by Timothy J Roper (topical...)
Starks' Harvesters, by Robert S White
Both in it Together - a Farmer's Life with Foxes, by John Carter

There's even one for the kids - a farm-based adventure story called The Phantom Dog, by J R Valks. (Although after having a quick flick through the pictures, I wouldn't recommend it for any kids with a nervous disposition. Or a history of having bad dreams. Or with a fear of dogs)

Rather than gathering dust on my desk, the books are up for grabs in our latest caption competition on FWiSpace. Check it out.

The Today programme ended up broadcasting that poem of mine this morning. Needless to say, I've had plenty of ribbing already.

When their instructions to skin and gut a rabbit brought more than 60,000 hits to their website, Simon Whitehead and his partners in a rabbit-meat supply business saw an opportunity.

The result is a new dvd, From Field to Fork, which shows how to take wild rabbit, through all stages of processing and cooking to the table, with recipes from a trained chef.

Simon, together with Marie and Steve Taylor, set up Pakefield Produce last year to deal with the 'by-product' which he catches in his rabbit control work. They now produce high quality meat for pubs and restaurants.

"Once, any country person would know how to deal with a rabbit in its fur and the best way to cook it," he says. "That has changed over the last 50 years and the knowledge has been lost.

Went to the BBC studios in London this afternoon to record the poem. They're tell me it'll be aired tomorrow morning on Radio 4's Today show, probably between 8 and 9am.

I fear there may be some ribbing coming my way tomorrow.

More stars are lining up to promote milk.

First it was Gordon Ramsay and Pixie Lott and now I hear The A Team and Usher are also backing the Make Milk Mine campaign.

The campaign, which promotes the health benefits of low-fat milk, will see the singer and four "soldiers of fortune" appear on posters across the UK.

My first few blog posts have all been about cows, and my mum always told me "if it aint broke, don't fix it, so...

A new series starring celeb farmer Jimmy Doherty begins on BB2 tonight, starting with 'The Private Life of Cows'.

According to the blurb on the BBC2 website, "Jimmy Doherty embarks on a quest to reveal the hidden lives of farmyard animals."

Now this might sound like the premise of some kind of dodgy Jeremy Kyle farming special, where Jeremy goes undercover to expose the sordid details of what Daisy and co. get up to every time the farmer turns his back, but it's actually the Beeb's latest offering under the heading of "agri-documentaries".

Essentially Jimmy visits a farm in Devon to find answers to questions like, 'how does a cow work out who is the boss?' 'Why have 1,000 people been injured by cows in the last ten years?' and 'Why are cows so sensitive to sudden movement?'

Catch it tonight at 8pm on BB2. If I get home in time to watch it I might even follow up with an expert review tomorrow...

Why do I agree to these things? Why didn't I just, simply, say: No?

A lady's just called from Radio 4's Today programme. They've been covering the controversy over the polytunnels in Herefordshire. She said that some people are claiming the polytunnels are wrecking a view immortalised by Wordsworth in his writings. They wanted someone to write a short poem (it could be as tongue-in-cheek as you like, she said) imagining Wordsworth revisiting the area now. Or something like that.

I volunteered. She accepted. Apparently, they're going to broadcast it. Oh dear.

There was me, bemoaning the lack of freebies - and guess what arrives on my desk this morning: free pork scratchings.

They accompanied a press release about a soon-to-be-published book called Higgledy Piggledy - The Ultimate Pig Miscellany.

Now I might have been swayed by the free pork scratchings (I told you this job was all glamour) but it looks a fascinating book and one that would make a perfect birthday present for pig lovers.

Priced £14.99, it's billed as "the ultimate anthology of porcine trivia".

It covers such areas as the influence of pigs on language and literature, piggy appearances in the media, pig-related quotes and celebrity pig owners.

The author, Richard Lutwyche, is secretary of the Gloucestershire Old Spots and British Saddlebacks Breeders' Clubs.

Think this is an incredible picture. It's a downed German plane during the Battle of Britain. 

No sarcastic comments about budget airlines either, thank you!

Collies vs Huntaways vs Kelpies.... a colleague of mine, Aly, has been considering the respective merits of each.

This is a shame: a giant rhea which has been on the loose in Suffolk has died after an attempted resuce by the RSPCA. Here's how The Telegraph and The Mail report the story today...

This is a great story in the Daily Telegraph - apparently, cows exposed to Shakespeare produce more milk.

And here's how the Kent Messenger cover it, along with a short video.

I don't get as many freebies in my job as I used to years ago. The free lunches have become more infrequent, the trips abroad all but disappeared.

I still get sent quite a few books for reviews and get the occasional product to test. But, just in case you think they're all expensive, glamorous items, here's what I was sent this morning. A bag of Universal Bedding and Litter.