Farmer Focus Arable: Robert Law’s New Year starts with a bang

2010 started with the completion of our early lambing, which always brings the farm to life at a time when things are normally quiet.

The recent partial thaw makes a welcome change from spending two hours a day thawing pipes and carting water to the housed stock.

The adage that the Oxford Farming Conference is the way to start the New Year was certainly true this year.

Over the two days, we were treated to a thought-provoking range of speakers from around the globe.

There were 450 delegates at the conference who had also travelled far to attend, ranging from farmers, solicitors, bankers and accountants to government policy officials and NGOs.

One delegate was attending the conference for a 52nd consecutive year, while another, an Australian, was witnessing snow for the first time.

It was his first visit to Oxford and he remarked that the city looked the same as watching Inspector Morse on TV back home.

David Brownhill a cropping farmer from New South Wales, Australia, produced a wonderful paper about farming with a much more variable backdrop than we experience – a volatile climate and fluctuating commodity prices, without support payments and accompanying red tape.

A memorable quote was that on his 11,000 acres of cropping he needed 1.65 tractors but had to manage with two.

This month, I’m spending time in the farm office sorting out problems with the Single Farm Payment. These include never-ending entitlement issues going back to previous years and fields disappearing off the RLR.

Also, I am trying manfully to meet the day of destiny on the 31st in the continuing absence of my 2009 SFP.

Escapes from the farm office to the rugby field on Saturday afternoon haven’t materialised due to bad weather, so I’ve renewed my gym membership to compensate.

For more from Robert Law click here or read more from our other Farmer Focus Arable writers.