Merry Christmas...

...with apologies to Noddy Holder!

Are you banging on your tractor with a hammer?
As your starter motor gives up with a stammer
Has the lock froze on the cab door?
Has your battery turned and then died?
Are you kicking at your tyres as you cry..

So here it is flipping Christmas
It's enough to freeze your bum
Look out you turkeys
Coz it's only just begun

Are your cows all baying loudly for their grub?
As your quad bike struggles through the icy sludge
Now the yard is like an ice rink
And the chickens can't be seen
As the ducks glide by like Orville and Dean

So here it Is blasted Christmas
It's enough to freeze your ears
Look on the bright side
For it's only once a year

Did the school play seem like fourteen hours long?
And the carol service's endless hum-a-long
Have the kids all pinched the best chairs?
Have your wellies been chucked out?
As you try to smile while eating Brussel Sprouts

So here it is tacky Christmas
With its cards and fairy lights
Twelve days of humbug
And an overload of rhyming trite!

And of course, Henry the horse, dances the waltz…

When we first moved to Cornwall in the seventies, it was to be near the iconic North Cornish coastline and to a little cottage that was only a couple of miles from the picturesque natural harbour of Boscastle where we had spent many of our happy family holidays.

Beautiful as this area is, it was then (and is now) a hard place to make enough money to keep a family and I clearly remember my Mum and Dad – a couple who up until then had regarded Battersea Park as the great outdoors – attempting lobster fishing and relief milking amongst other things in order to make ends meet.

We didn’t have much spare cash at that time but nearly all of my parent’s new friends had horses, and so despite Dad having turned 50 and Mum in her mid-thirties they began to learn to ride. The locals were very generous with their time and nags and riding became a big thing for all of us – with the highlight being the occasional chance to ride up on the moors.

Bodmin Moor is the perfect riding country. Miles of wide open spaces that are much flatter than many of our other uplands and littered with ‘wild’ ponies. The draw of this was so strong that in the end my parents sold everything they had and then borrowed a bundle to buy a very run down moorland farm called South Penquite.

I clearly remember on the first day we moved in, one of our new farming neighbours rode up to introduce himself. His bridle and stirrup leathers were both made of baler twine and his pony look like it hadn’t been fed for a week – but it nevertheless scared the pants off me as it bolted down the lane when I foolishly accept “a go”.

The moors were, at the time, a genuine horse culture where the farmers often had more ponies grazing than sheep, when the two annual pony sales were the biggest dates at the local market, where Land Rovers were scarce and quad bikes unheard of, and where riding was the preferred means of transport for everyone. My parents were in heaven, and even when I joined the army I would come home every leave and break in ponies and help on the farm.

My Dad had a new horse that was straight off the moors and broken by one of the local lads. Jumping Jack Flash (or just Jack to his friends) wasn’t big, but carried my father literally to his grave. He was riding Jack right up until the week he passed away and we buried them both in the same corner of the farm – but that is another story.

What brings me to reminisce about horses are two events that have happened last month. Firstly it was a day of mixed emotions when I helped some of the local rough riders round up about 40 wild ponies on one of the more remote areas of moorland. It is perhaps a sign of the times that whilst one farmer of over seventy turned up with his horse, tacked up and ready to ride in the back of his cattle trailer – a couple of the younger generation turned up on scramble bikes. Anyway after an hour or so of galloping round and after another hour of horse trading we were left with 22 unwanted and unmarked moorland ponies.

Having literally no value, these ponies were actually threatening the viability of our major conservation scheme on the moors, where we are paid to reduce the grazing to help restore the heather and wetlands. So, with no other options left we called in the knacker man and spent a harrowing afternoon humanely disposing of them.

On a more cheery note, I have known for a while that I would need a “Jack” of my own to see me into old age and so I have purchased another moorland horse (from the son of the farmer Dad got Jack from) and am now showing him the moors and getting him used to the livestock on a daily basis. His name is Henry.

Scrub-a-dub-dub

While the economy stubbornly refuses to grow, the wet weather has led to an extraordinary amount of growth around the farm.

I distinctly remember scratching my head in April and seriously wondering where I was going to put the cows next, as the drought-like conditions killed off any spring grass growth and left me feeding hay well into May.

We were saved of course by the Jubilee double bank holiday, when it started raining and seemingly didn’t stop for the next six weeks. The resulting flush of greenery has left the cows and sheep wading knee deep in grass and I have been forced into going around the farm with the tractor and grass cutter to keep on top of it all. On the campsite I have already notched up twice as many hours on the ride-on mower as I did for the whole of last year, and on my early morning strolls I find myself picking off thistles with my machete that have put in a foot of new growth since I first swiped them down in June.

The difference between a well managed wildlife habitat and an area of desolate scrub can be a fine one and keeping on top of all the gorse and bracken around the farm in any year is a big job. This year’s crop of pearl bordered fritillary butterflies have already had a torrid time of it with the weather and the last thing they need is for next year’s essential supply of violets to be drowned out in a sea of scrub.

So I am very pleased to report that we will once again this autumn host a working holiday under the auspices of The Conservation Volunteers (formally BTCV). This was a huge success in 2011 when a team of eight enthusiastic helpers cleared a large area of scrub from one of our key butterfly habitats. Our jolly crew stayed in our four Yurts and over the course of a week bonded into a formidable team, swathing their way through a couple of acres of gnarly gorse.

This would have taken me months on my own and would have been a very lonely soul-destroying task, and so last autumn it was a real pleasure to wander down with the dogs at dusk and chat with the workers around the dying embers of that day’s fire. They had come from all over the UK and from very different backgrounds and were thoroughly enjoying the communal work & living.

There are still some spaces left for this year’s break from the 3rd – 10th October, so if you fancy a working week on an organic farm, meeting new people and staying in a Yurt you can find more details here: shop.tcv.org.uk/shop/stock?l=level3;lid=733;sid=9343

Pleasure Hunting

On the 2nd of May 2000 the US military, on orders from President Bill Clinton, made access to their previously restricted Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites available to one and all. So what, I hear you cry.

Well the very next day an anorak from Oregon hid a box full of knick-knacks in some woods and posted on the internet the exact co-ordinates so that like minded anoraks with the right type of GPS gear could go look for it. If it was found the simple rule was “Take some stuff, leave some stuff” - and the pursuit of Geocaching was born.

Fast forward almost exactly twelve years and I was approach by a local geo-nut, (actually a very nice lady who works at a nearby school) who wondered if I would mind if she hid some geocaches along our farm trail. After she had patiently explained to me what it was all about I thought ‘what the hell’ and told her to press ahead. It didn’t seem as if it was likely to do any harm and if it gave a few local geeks a reason to enjoy the farmwalk so much the better.

At midnight on the 5th May she sent me an email saying that the co-ordinates had gone live onto a web site and at 8.30 the next morning I was pleasantly surprised to find my first geocachers in the yard looking for a spot to park. By midday there were six cars parked in a row and ever since a steady stream of walkers and families have been enjoying the hunt.

Not to be outdone, I purchased a Garmin GPS device for son number two’s upcoming 11^th birthday, and on the day he took a couple of school mates around the farm looking for treasure. Now normally when I suggest to any of our brood a walk round the farm, I am greeted by long faces and with their feet firmly in drag mode. However, with the winning combination of a new gadget and hidden treasure to find we all set of with real enthusiasm.

They absolutely loved it and rushed from box to box to complete the 2½ miles in record time. We took with us a bag full of unwanted toys and bits and pieces to swap, and we added our names to the already impressive list in each stash.

Our handheld GPS did knock me back over a hundred quid, but it also has many other useful functions such as a compass, an altimeter and also tracks how far and how fast you have walked. The process of downloading the caches is a doddle and many smart phones can also do this with just the help of the right app.

If you are coming to camp here and have a GPS enabled device, the coordinates can all be found here:

http://www.geocaching.com/seek/nearest.aspx?lat=50.544565&lng=-4.67747&dist=.6

Happy hunting!  

A Shot in the Arm

Having now seen the safe delivery of the first dozen or so lambs and a couple of calves, it is with some relief that I can say that we have not seen any symptoms whatsoever of the dreaded Schmallenberg virus which has received quite a lot of press coverage in the last few weeks.

This particularly distressing condition can easily remain undetected until your pregnant cow or ewe tries to give birth to either stillborn or badly deformed offspring. With cows, very often the case is that a natural birth will not even be possible and an emergency field caesarean will be necessary.

So good news; and with only three report cases in Cornwall so far it looks as though the vast majority of farms will be able to work through until a vaccine is produced.

Now I do try not to sound like the stereotypical whinging farmer, pleading hardship as I swan around in my 4X4, but we had a similar scenario with a disease call Bluetongue a couple of years ago. This was also a new (to the UK) epidemic and I dutifully vaccinated all of my animals (twice – as is required for the first year) at considerable time and expense, only to find that the next year the vaccine was withdrawn as our risk diminished. However, the problem hasn’t disappeared, and the right weather conditions this summer could tempt the infected midges back over the channel so that I can start the whole sorry process again.

And if two midge-born terrors aren’t enough, there are more in the wings waiting for our warming planet to give them the favourable access and conditions needed to invade our green and pleasant land. Akabane & Shamonda are not a hot new line of designer fashion ware – but a couple more viruses who may hit the headlines in the very near future.

Further evidence of the influence of globalisation on us lowly peasants is the news that farmers in Egypt are currently struggling with an outbreak of Foot & Mouth (yes, remember that one!). One of the unintended consequences of the Arab Spring was the collapse of the state’s grip on animal health issues, and the sheer quantity and congestion of cows in the Nile Delta area means that control is going to prove difficult (if not impossible) for the fledgling democracy.

With Egypt once again becoming a popular destination for nearly a million UK tourists it could be that the prospect of Foot & Mouth is now just a short budget flight away. However please don’t be concerned that this will once again lead to pile of burning cattle carcasses littering our countryside – common sense will prevail this time and a vaccine will be made available. Better stock up on those needles!

Panodrama

Have just caught up with all of the fuss around last week’s Panorama documentary – The Money Farmers - about the “scandal” of EU farm subsidies ending up in the pockets of speculators and the very rich and being denied to young new entrants to farming.

There have been lots of commentary post-viewing from interested parties who invariably start by saying that the programme “misses the point” and then go on to completely miss the point themselves. So, for what it is worth, here is my view.

Firstly; any non-farmer who buys up an entitlement to subsidy still has to rent enough land to attract the payments and then has to keep this land in good condition. The “good condition” rules are there to make sure that no subsidised land is actually causing a problem and actually intensive farming can be a real risk to pollution and loss of wildlife - in some cases, without doubt, the less “farming” done the better for everyone.

Secondly; the likes of Her Majesty and the Duke of Westminster attract massive payments simply by being massive landowners. Their respective holdings employ any number of farmhands, managers and gamekeepers, and the new EU rules proposed for 2013 will limit their total cheque anyway. I trust and hope that they and others will not seek to rearrange their businesses to avoid/evade the new rulings when they come in.

I am more concerned with the plight of the young farmers who start out with no entitlement to subsidy.

Now that our payments are no longer tied to animals or crops we should all take a hard look at our farms and only produce food that actually makes sense financially. If, as most farmers seem to do in the film, we use the land payments to “subsidise” the produce we sell to Tesco and the like, then we are merely adding to their profits and creating a market where new entrants cannot possibly compete. Supermarkets need to pay a price which reflects the true cost of production, and as we can all see from their massive balance sheets this need not necessarily mean a rise in the cost of food.

The real scandal is that most of the payments end up in the pockets of the supermarket shareholders and there is then no incentive to pay farmers a price which will enable youngsters to enter the industry. While these payments last, we would all do well to treat them as the speculators do – as a detached investment - and allow market forces to put UK farming on a sustainable footing.

Marked for life

Say to anyone “electronic tagging” and the chances are they may start thinking of ASBO’s and young offenders. Ask a farmer and he will start moaning about the latest EU directive to hit us; Sheep EID (Electronic Identification).

If you can credit it, from 1st January 2012 all sheep will have to have two numbered plastic tags inserted into their ears, one of which contains a micro chip so that the sheep can be identified electronically.

We are then required to keep a list of all of the individual sheep on the farm and keep this fully up to date and open to inspection at the drop of a hat. Reasonable? Ridiculous?? You tell me. Do you as a consumer need to know the exact whereabouts of each of the 16 odd million sheep that graze our green and pleasant land???

I do not want to make my blog sound like a rallying cry for UKIP, so I will put the politics aside for the moment and concentrate on the actual practicalities.

Firstly we have been using ear tags with just the farm ID on for several years now, and while it does little harm to tag a lamb just before it is sent off to slaughter (and indeed probably helps the supermarkets trace their meat back to source) it is a completely different proposition for a ewe to keep one in place for five years or longer. If they are lucky they get away with the tag gradually acting as one of those gruesome modern ear stretching “flesh tunnels” that are so popular with the younger generation. The unlucky ones get them caught in a fence or gorse bush and in a panic they pull back and promptly rip the tag back through the ear leaving it in tatters and flapping in the wind. And all this is done in the name of animal health.

The tags themselves cost around £1.50 per sheep and the fiddly task of matching the numbers of the non-electronic tags with the same electronic tag make the job of tagging a real pain. “So quit your moaning and get on with it” you might say - but here comes the rub.

I have lost two sheep so far in 2012, and despite finding the bodies fairly promptly neither still had their ears which are the carrion of choice for the local crow population. So although I know I am two sheep down - I don’t know which two and the only way to find out would be to get in the other 188 and cross them off the list one by one!

Were I to be inspected there would now be cause to deem my records as non-compliant and some of my Single Farm Payment (European subsidy) could be at risk. Cattle Identification has already been the major cause of fines for farmers over the last five years, and keeping track of a herd of cows is a doddle compared with a flock of sheep.

So all of this will become a major disincentive to keeping sheep at all, and I can confidently predict that as a direct result the national flock will shrink and supply of lamb will be much reduced. Add into this equation the drop of New Zealand lamb available as they shift to selling milk to the Chinese, and the price of your weekly lamb chop (if it wasn’t already dear enough) can only carry on rising.