Top of the crop but a laughing stock with animals

It has become quite obvious in the past few weeks that my flatmate has very little interest in livestock.

We were discussing favourite breeds of cattle earlier, to which the inner agronomist immediately burst out with “mine’s got to be a Jersey Royal”. It’s fair to say that I won’t be taking him to a cattle market, but I think the problem extends to wild animals too.

For example, there was an awkward moment the other day when he couldn’t tell the difference between a badger and a panda on the TV. To be fair to him they are coloured reasonably similarly, but this close-up was on the 6 o’clock news and the last time I checked, the infamous Welsh panda cull hadn’t quite reduced TB levels as much as many farmers had hoped.

Identification of animals may be a problem for my flatmate, but identifying myself is the main issue for me at the moment. The kind people at the DVLA in Swansea have kidnapped my driving licence – not for any kind of misdemeanour I might add – but because I’ve recently passed my car and trailer test. It’s a strange set of rules that allows you to drive a 24t tractor and trailer but not a Land Rover towing a bag of fertiliser, but at least I’m now legal.

Back at Sutton Bonington and I’m afraid to say that there is a mountain of deadlines looming. I’ve put them all in my diary and judging by the amount that are all on the same page, I’d say that there’s a fair few sleepless nights in the library ahead. As chairman of SB’s Students Union, for some reason I’ve also chosen this term to try and push through the biggest reorganisation and restructuring of our committee in recent history. It’s a lot of work, but hopefully the changes will directly benefit the campus in years to come.

The drill is ready and raring to go at home with a reasonable area of marrowfats and cress to get over in the next few weeks. There’s also the sugar beet land to prepare, though in all cases the lack of rainfall in the East is a true worry.

None of our field drains have run in well over a year, which at the beginning of March tells the story in itself. In fact I was unreliably informed the other day that the subsoil is so dry in south Lincolnshire that “they might even have to close two lanes of the local swimming pool”.

As it happens, I’m also having some water issues of my own at the moment, though fortunately they don’t require a trip to the doctors. I’m doing a module called management consultancy, and my project involves looking into the detailed prospects for reintroducing field-scale veg to University Farm. With such light land and no current irrigation infrastructure, the economics of such capital-heavy crops are looking doubtful.

If it’s the little things that make your day enjoyable, then yesterday must have been a very good one. I received an email requesting that we refrain from using ‘SB’ as an acronym for Sutton Bonington because “in some languages it means idiot”. In fact, it wasn’t just me who received the message, because it seems to have been sent to all 2,000 students based here.

It’s a salient point though. Maybe we should think more about the abbreviations and acronyms we write and how they affect other people. In fact I’m so worried about offending anyone that I’ve set up a new system to safeguard against it: I’m going to kindly ask the author of the email to Please Inform Someone Sensible Of Future Failures.

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COLMN