August 2010 Archives

Apparently, a sport called mutton bustin' is growing in popularity among country kids in America. Think rodeo, with sheep.

Here's what the Daily Mail has to say about it and a video of some youngsters in action.

Smallholder-turned-artist Malcolm Lindsay is paying homage to rural England at a solo art exhibition in London on 10 September.

Entitled Disagreeable Cornish Art: Paintings from the contractor's tea-hut, the three-week exhibition touches on the changing role of the farmer as well as politics, religion and man's relationship with nature.

Building a tiny bridge across a busy bypass in Wales: £190,0000
Preserving a endangered species for generations to come: Priceless.

A special 'mouse bridge' has been built in Pontyprid, South Wales, to allow a protected species of dormouse to cross a new bypass without coming to harm.

All together now, ahhhhhh.

picture credit


A few weeks ago Tim reworked Wordsworth's poem Tintern Abbey and recited it on BBC Radio 4 (he's very modest so you might not have heard about it. Oh no wait, he blogged about it...)

With a view to nurturing his burgeoning poetic career, the first thing I'm going to do when he gets back from holiday next week is suggest he books another one to the Lake District.

According to the Telegraph website this week, stretches of water in the region have just been voted the 'best views in Britain'. It's probably no coincidence that some of the very same stretches influenced the writings of romantic poets like Coleridge, and Wordsworth himself, so where better to go for inspiration?

As well as Buttermere and Derwentwater in the Lakes, Wastwater, Seven Sisters and Stonehenge also scored highly in the survey, which was (somewhat oddly) carried out by car company Chevrolet.

No, this isn't the opening gambit in an obscure farming joke.

Staffordshire baker Sarah Gayton (pictured left with a batch of her famous Oaty biscuits) is so passionate about using the Olympics as a platform for British food, she's set up a Facebook group called Farmers on Film - Feeding the Olympic Dream.

Farmers and food producers are being invited to post videos and pictures, in the hope that it'll convince the Olympic Committee to put home grown produce at the heart of the Olympic menu.

Sarah, who is also a member of Staffordshire Women's Food & Farming Union said, "Small businesses like mine should be able to provide food for the Olympics and encourage all the athletes and visitors to visit rural Britain, boost our tourism in rural areas and see where our food really comes from."

Hear hear.

Supermarket shelves are awash with alternatives to cow's milk. Off the top of my head I can think of goat's milk, sheep's milk, soya milk and rice milk. An old housemate of mine even used to force down oat milk, which had a horrible tendency to separate into water and a grainy goo, no matter how much you shook the bottle.

But I wonder how long it'll take for this to be accepted by the milk-buying British public.

Camel milk is being produced at a farm in Dubai using specially designed milking equipment, and sold under the (frankly genius) brand name 'Camelicious'. It's already widely available in Dubai supermarkets, but if the company's expansion plans are anything to go by it could be available in Europe in a matter of months.

A quick glance at the Camelicious website reveals that the milk is lower in fat, higher in vitamin C and less inclined to curdle than cows milk. Which is sure to give Brit milk producers the hump (sorry, couldn't resist)

As you may have noticed, Tim has a penchant for posting cute cat pictures on this blog. But as he's off taking a well deserved break for the next week I thought I'd break from tradition with this impossibly sweet picture of a hedgehog.

It's been nicknamed Trifle by staff at St Tiggywinkles hospital in Buckinghamshire, who are treating it for three broken legs.

Conclusion: cats are cute, hedgehogs in plaster casts are cuter.

Farmers are a hardy bunch. They have to be - the job involves being outdoors, in all weathers, round-the-clock, 365 days a year.

One farmer's son thinks that getting his hands dirty on the family farm has had the added bonus of helping him achieve an impeccable school attendance record. Incredibly, 18-year old Carwyn Jones hasn't missed a single day since his first day of primary school in 1997.

"I think the farm has toughened me up to be a bit more robust!" says Carwyn, who seems considerably more mature than I was at his age...

You can watch a video report on the farming wunderkind on the BBC Wales website:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-11007357

Forget pop, hip-hop, indie, electro and rock - the new musical genre talking YouTube by storm is 'rural'.

Irish band The Corrigan Brothers have just posted their latest song 'Part Time Farmer', which laments the woes of being (unsurprisingly) a part time farmer.

To date it's got nearly 2,000 views, but will it match the success of their breakthrough song - 'There's no one as Irish as Barack Obama' - which notched up over 5 million youtube hits? Only time will tell.

Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service received an emergency call early yesterday morning from two birdwatchers who had found a cow stuck in a bog at Woolmer Common, Longmoor Ranges in Bordon.

A group of Young Farmers are going to be doing something with this plane. Find out what.

Remember those wonderful straw mammoths at Boston in Lincolnshire we reported on a while back? Well they've inspired a children's book.

Designed and built by Nikki and Paul Grant and David Sharpe, they won the national Weetabix bale art competition.

The project started out as a bit of family fun, but became a huge hit with the public and media and was a great opportunity for the family to raise the profile of British farming, food, Boston, and public art.

Having seen the level of interest, Nikki's mum - Linda Whatton - then decided to fulfil her lifelong ambition to write a children's book.

The Magic of Mammoth Hollow follows Mambo on his journey from appearing in Boston to helping children raise money for a local charity.

The family will rebuild Mambo on the weekend of September 11-12 so everyone can see him again, plus launch the book. Meanwhile, Mambo's even got his own Facebook page.

"Mambo the mammoth has touched the hearts of many people, and has been a really fun, almost magical journey for our family," says Nikki.

There'll be more details of the book (some of the proceeds from which will go to Macmillan Cancer Support) on Field Day in due course...

Country people are all over the telly at the moment. First it was Dragons' Den - now I see Gok Wan was stripping some farmworkers off last night.

On the eve of the Glorious Twelfth (the start of the grouse shooting season), researchers from the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust are predicting a bumper season.

Apparently, the birds have thrived, despite the harshest winter weather conditions for 30 years so they reckon this year's season is going to be a great one.

The grouse themselves are presumably less enthusiastic about the coming season...

In the news - the dog that collects litter, the alpacas used to guard chickens and the dormice threatening a supermarket project.

Kingston Maurward College is hoping to see two Dartmoor mares adopted and two foals fostered which are currently in the care of the campus.

The two foals - Maybelle and Nymph - were born on the Dorchester campus this summer as part of a scheme by the Dartmoor Pony Heritage Trust (DPHT) to try to save the native breed from extinction.

The DPHT charity loaned the pregnant mares to the college as a safe place to have their foals, and it is hoped the youngsters will one day return to Dartmoor.

"Mums, Lupin and Elfin, are both 16 and need new homes where they can be companions for other horses or to keep an individual company," said Barbara Holden, animal technician instructor at the college.

"For their babies, we're looking to temporarily place them with people with their own horses and some form of equine qualification."

The ponies will be ready to move at the end of October. To find out more, call 01305 215003.

We've talked about animal adversaries before - like the jackal/vulture, the magpie/sea eagle and the squirrel/pigeon.

Now it's a woodpecker/squirrel head-to-head.

You really couldn't make this stuff up - it's the annual pig squealing championships in south west France.

A Devon dairy farmer has created a giant outline of a cow on the side of a hill to remind people of the important relationship between organic milk and the landscape.

The earth carving, nicknamed 'Murial', depicts a stylised cow in the shape of the Moo milk logo and is the same size as its inspiration, the ancient Cerne Abbas Giant in neighbouring Dorset.

Got a call this morning from a chap called Richard Cornock who wanted to tell me about his book, A Year on a Dairy Farm.

Richard kept a camera in the pockets of his overalls and just snapped shots whenever he saw something striking.

The result is this collection of photographs, capturing the day-to-day workings of the farm in Gloucestershire which has been in his family since the 1840s.

Originally intended as a personal book for immediate family only, this is a great record of what makes a dairy farm tick at all times of the year and in all weathers.

It's priced £16.99 and is published by Amberley Publishing. I'll bring you more details once my copy has arrived.

In the news - the shepherds fearful for their sheep as wolves colonise the Pyrenees, the rare orchids inadvertently chopped down by a government workman, the return of the swallowtail butterfly and a how-to-make-bread video.

If I owned 900 acres of prime land in Tuscany I'd open a quaint little farm shop and pack the shelves with olive oil, wine, honey and all manner of gastronomic delights that I'd lovingly nurtured from the ground up.

As it happens I don't own 900 acres of Italy, but rock star Sting and his wife do, and that's exactly what they've done.

From today the singer's organic range is available for public purchase from his organic food shop at the end of his estate, just south of Florence. But if that's a bit far to travel for a bottle of olive oil, don't worry - you can also pick some up next time you're doing the weekly shop at Harrods.

What do you mean you don't do the weekly shop at Harrods...?

I'm sure Matthew Naylor over at Mouth of the Wash will be disappointed at my lack of cat-related posts recently, so I figured I ought to redress that.

Remember the moggy we reported on a while back who liked to ride the bus in Plymouth? Well a book about him has hit the shelves today.

Casper the Commuting Cat: The True Story of the Cat Who Rode the Bus and Stole Our Hearts is a 204-page hardback.

Read more and see a short video on the BBC's website.

Some of the celebrity columnists on the national papers and mags have been getting excited recently at Jerry Hall's choice of new man.

The former wife of Mick Jagger - whose previous partners include cricketer Shane Warne and singer Bryan Ferry - is, it seems, in a relationship with - shock horror - a farming consultant.

The Daily Mail has named him as Philip Ferguson and his areas of interest, apparently, include manure management and pollution control. He is, one can't help but imagine, a little less rock-and-roll than some of her previous men.

This picture from World War II is great. I've been sent it by the Imperial War Museum, who are holding an exhibition highlighting how the conflict turned us into a nation of small-scale farmers. Find out more and see additional pictures.

A farmer faced the multi-millionaire investors for the first time in Dragons Den last night.

Andy Fussell from Somerset entered the den on a quest for financial backing for his rapeseed oil venture.

Andy, who has been growing rapeseed for 15 years on his farm in Rode, was seeking investment in his food business Fussels Fine Foods. You can see how he fared on iPlayer, about 28 minutes into the show.

Andy is also one of the finalists in the 2010 FW Awards, so you can read more about him here.

The first person into the den last night (two minutes in) is also worth watching - she was after cash for her falconry company.

It's been a good week for Chinese chickens. Yesterday I learnt that a hen in the Yunnan province reached the record breaking age of 22, and today I hear that chickens in the Liaoning province have taught themselves to swim.

Farmer Zhao Jingming first noticed the unusual behaviour when temperatures started to soar in the region. One of the hens started jumping into the pond for a swim in a bid to beat the heatwave, and encouraged the other chickens to do the same. Zhao believes the birds' black feathers absorb more heat than light coloured ones, forcing them to take to the water to cool down.

I think the lesson here is don't underestimate the not-so-humble hen. Today swimming, tomorrow...?

A farmer in China is planning to apply to the Guinness Records because he believes his 22-year-old hen is the oldest in the world.

Yang Shaofu (himself no spring chicken at 77) of Yunnan province says the bird was bought by his daughter-in-law in 1988 along with four other chickens.