Farmer Focus: 100 years of farming calls for celebrations

Time stands still for no man, particularly in farming, and in this, my 50th year, we celebrate 100 years of Wilsons farming on the Castle Howard Estate, which was cause for some celebrations last week. 

We hosted a group from our local village, some Young Farmers, our local NFU farm safety day, and had a birthday party.

It was a good excuse to wash some sheds, lay some concrete and have a deeper pre-harvest tidy-up than time sometimes allows.

See also: Farmer Focus: Jeremy Clarkson – an asset to UK agriculture

About the author

Andrew Wilson

Arable Farmer Focus writer Andrew Wilson is a fourth-generation tenant of Castle Howard Estate in North Yorkshire. The farm supports crops of wheat, barley, oats, beans, sugar beet, potatoes, and grass for hay across 250ha. Other enterprises include bed and breakfast pigs, environmental stewardship, rooftop solar and contracting work.  

Contact:

Email: wilsonbrickyard@gmail.com

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We put together a shed full of exhibits from a knife and drag, fiddle drill and horse plough right through to our current flagship tractor with its on board tech and isobus controlled strip-till drill. 

All groups had a field tour to see how we grow the nine crops in our two farm rotations. It was great to compare the how, why and when of time gone by.  

One exhibit was our 1948 Welger buncher, which we still use occasionally, and is complete with its factory-fitted pto guard.

It doesn’t do a lot of work now, but things were made to last 80 years ago.

Today’s poor plastic efforts cost a bomb, yet some do well to last a couple of years in service before parts become obsolete or repair uneconomic. 

The safety conversations were interesting – not least because key professionals cancelled close to the event, but more the highlight of a lack of practical solutions available to farmers.

If manufacturers would grasp the nettle and fit things like body props on trailers, facilitate the ability to reverse the intake of a baler or the separator on a potato harvester or include bag opening spikes on fertiliser spreaders, operators would be further from danger.

If legislation was more practical around things like man baskets and improve the ability to reroute footpaths to the outside of livestock fields instead of following the direct historic route through them, then maybe, just maybe, the terrible tally of fatalities in our industry might stand a chance of reducing.

We cannot do it alone, and in my view, for all fines are sometimes necessary, all too often the fine restricts the ability to invest in better facilities.

A few well-meant stickers and bits of paper are never going to cut the proverbial mustard. 

Call me old fashioned, but practical solutions are the ones that stand the test of time.

It’ll soon be harvest, so look after yourselves, and here’s to the next 100 years.