Farmer Focus: Umpteen jobs and a recycled shed
© Angela Waites Photography Since it’s now distinctly “back end”, and for a change we’re pretty much worked up, focus here has turned towards winter jobs.
Alongside the usual machinery and shed maintenance, we always have a project of some kind here, and always more ideas than time or finances will allow in what for us isn’t that many quiet weeks.
Over the next few months, we will be harvesting sugar beet, washing and loading out potatoes, changing pig batches, carting muck, jetting drains and umpteen other jobs that need doing, alongside having a few days off.
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We haven’t got any small, traditional old sheds here to conveniently put stuff, so the workshop often resembles a deep litter system.
Well, no more – we have recently constructed a mezzanine floor, which we have shelved out, using entirely recycled steel.
The deck was once the double deck in the curtainsider that now houses our potato washing rig.
The legs came from a local collective sale. The stainless-steel staircase from a now retired Lincolnshire machinery dealer.
The box section for the handrails from a local farm sale, and the shelves were once the sides of a potato bulker in our old haulage business.
The only thing new was the plywood covering for the deck, and it was all built in a few days by farm staff.
It took a good bit longer to sort through the accumulation of “treasure” that was cluttering up the place first though.
Suffice to say it feels like achievement, at a refreshingly frugal cost, too.
My hope is that we spend less time looking for things, have a more relevant stock of parts easily accessible, and alongside the efficiency gains, work in there becomes more enjoyable, too.
I could wax lyrical about the excitement of upcoming joys like farm assurance inspections and cashflow predictions, but where is the fun in that?
The next month will see the excellent biennial British Potato event at Harrogate take place.
And not long after, Cupgra conference, both of which I always find thought-provoking.
Positivity builds progress, and without that, the future doesn’t look much fun at all.
British agriculture is facing serious challenges at the moment.
But alas we’ll somehow find a way forward, it’s what we’ve done here for a hundred years.
