In need of a change of scenery
We hosted a shoot the other day. The bag was a bit disappointing. Inevitable, I suppose, in a year when most of the wild bird hatch had heavy rain on their backs when they were too small to withstand such weather and perished. It had rained most of the previous night so the land was saturated and clung to rubber boots like glue. It made walking to pegs hard work.
Despite this, the mood of most of our guests was better than I expected. One was a machinery manufacturer and when asked how sales were going after the awful harvest, replied that they were healthy.
“We always do well when grain prices are high. It gives farmers confidence in the future. Yields are almost irrelevant.”
The rest were farmers and they had either decided to forget the frustrations of the year and enjoy themselves or had sold a smaller proportion of their grain forward than we had and were able to benefit more from those high prices. We had taken pundits’ advice and, in retrospect, sold rather more than we should before values peaked.
I’d travelled from Norwich to London on the train three days previously and been appalled at the poor rape crops beside the line. I only saw a couple of fields with what looked like adequate plant stands. The rest were patchy and had either not germinated when drilled or been eaten off by slugs, like some of ours.
So, unlike our guests, I was feeling a bit depressed about prospects – a mood not helped by the fact that we still have a lot of sugar beet to lift and wheat to drill and the forecast was for another wet week. I am clearly in need of a change of scene and fortunately I have something to look forward to.
In co-operation with my friends at Field Farm Tours, I have been planning a couple of Farmers Weekly Tours for next year. The first is to Egypt during the last week of February and the first week of March. We’re pretty much guaranteed warm sun there at that time of year, so it will shorten the winter. More particularly, for those with an interest in the history of our industry, it will provide an opportunity to look at the cradle of agriculture as we know it.
The Nile Delta was almost certainly the first place in the world where, five or six thousand years ago, the nomadic lifestyle was abandoned and farmers settled on land to grow crops and trade the surpluses around the Mediterranean. The tour includes traditional farms where old-style irrigation still takes place alongside the most modern centre pivots imported from America.
Key to all this activity in a desert region is, of course, the vast water resources of the River Nile, down which we will take a short cruise and we shall visit the huge Aswan dam. If mummies are your thing, there’ll be a chance to see a few of them, too.
Our second, seven-day, tour next year is to Iceland at the end of May. I’ve never been there before, but know many people who have and they rave about the uniqueness of its volcanic scenery and the friendliness of its small population. We’ll seek out the farming there, too. It will be quite a contrast to Egypt.
If you’d like to join either or both of these tours please email me on whiterails@paston.co.uk and I’ll send you the details.