Opinion: A refreshing reminder of yesteryear
Farming is going through one of its periodic bouts of insanity.
Prices of almost everything we produce are tumbling. Vital chemicals are under threat – often, it seems, on the flimsiest of a Greenie’s evidence. I won’t be able to apply whatever we can use because I haven’t been on the right course. It is rumoured that next year’s SFP will be so complicated that they’ll make the early IACS forms look like join the dots – no wonder the biggest smiles at Cereals could been seen on the consultants’ stands. And the world of social media has gone crazy because someone a bit famous ate a rabbit.
Thank goodness for haymaking. No exams needed, no paperwork, no chemicals – just an informal bet between me and God that the next five or six days will be fine.
We haven’t made hay for a dozen years, so the cutting and spreading kit was long gone. And having decided to keep faith with the tried-and-tested combination of 6ft drum mower and 10ft haybob (we’re only cutting 15 acres), I managed to pick up the pair brand new for less than the cost of the soon-to-be-banned fungicides used in a good day’s wheat spraying. We’ve even got a Polish postie to help translate the handbook that came with the mower.
On Monday, I did the mowing. It was overcast and drizzled occasionally, but I felt the weather was settling down. I’d forgotten how therapeutic it is. You can’t hurry, you just concentrate on keeping straight. I was dead chuffed when I managed to estimate three completely parallel lands. Unfortunately, there was no one to impress except myself.
After an hour early on Tuesday to finish mowing the short work, it was out with the hay tedder in the now-brilliant sunshine. The work rate doubles, even if it was a shame to see those arrow-straight rows of laid grass vanishing in a silver-green flurry of tines.
On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, it was the same story. Out at lunchtime after the dew had lifted, and three or four hours of fluffing. Every day brought the same fantastic weather – hot, sunny and with a howling northerly wind that kept my conscience clear about not being in the sprayer. The simplicity of the whole operation was a joy. No protective clothing, no forms to complete in the evening, no worries about bystanders – people enjoying the Wayfarers’ Walk (which goes right through our hay meadow) were suddenly all thumbs-up and wavy. Haymaking doesn’t gather the instant disapproval that crop spraying does.
Our shopping spree hadn’t stretched as far as a baler, so Mac arrived with his vintage Deere on the Saturday. Luckily I was an hour ahead of him, tines reset and rear gate shut. By sunset, the field was finished. Just short of 1,500 bales of occasionally varying size and weight – poor old thing (that’s the Deere, not Mac).
It was a week’s sanity away from the modern farming world, a way of doing things that has hardly changed in five or six decades. And not a single rabbit was harmed in the process.
Charlie Flindt is a tenant of the National Trust, farming 380ha at Hinton Ampner, in Hampshire.
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