Mike Allwood
Mike Allwood
Mike Allwood is owner-
occupier of 82ha (200-
acres) near Nantwich,
Cheshire. The 175-cow
dairy herd block calves
during May and June.
Besides converting to
organic production, he is
also planning to produce
unpasteurised cheese
AT a time when few people seem to want to work in our industry, it was refreshing to show some bright final year students from Reaseheath, our local agricultural college, around the farm.
Unfortunately, they asked me some awkward questions such as: "How do you control docks?" We currently have two fields on the farm in which the docks are becoming quite bad, so I decided to try and sort one out before they got any worse.
The plan was to rotovate first to weaken plants, followed by ploughing and hand digging during autumn. The field would then be reworked and planted in the spring.
Mistake number one was the rotovating, which succeeded in multiplying the number of docks in the field by 10, as all the little pieces subsequently took root.
To compound the error, the new shoots didnt all poke through at the same time. Consequently, once we thought we had finished digging a patch, new docklets would appear.
What we also didnt allow for was that it takes a lot of people a long time to dig 5ha (12 acres) of well established docks. Therefore, when it became too wet to dig any more, we were only halfway across the field for the first time, and the whole field needed digging again.
Furthermore, by this time more weeds had germinated and a good crop of wild cabbage was established. We could no longer see either the undug docks or the piles of dug docks which we had left to pick up later. These had by now formed thick clumps and were firmly welded to the ground. I am now currently working on another plan.
Before Christmas, I received a letter from the Rural Payments Agency telling me it couldnt send a proper receipt for my claim form for veal subsidy, due to technical problems. It promised to send the proper one in due course.
Presumably, at some point in the future, I might actually receive the money. I would almost rather not receive the subsidy than suffer the thought of the tortuous machinations and time wasting which have gone into sending it to me – almost. *
Why are some fields clean, but others have a real dock problem, asks Mike Allwood.