A view from the Rainforest from Steven Humphreys

For me May has been busy in part of the Congo basin, the world’s second largest rainforest, and increasingly threatened by human encroachment.  This is a conservation project aiming at offering alternative ways to earn a living for the local communities bordering the national park of Odzala-Kokoua, by supporting and improving their agricultural activities, so they are less likely to continue their traditional income generating activities involving illegal poaching of bushmeat, gold panning, and deforestation.  This area hosts some of the world’s most endangered species, including the Western Lowland gorillas, Forest Elephants, Forest Buffalo, and many rare species of antelope such as Bongo and Sitatunga.  There is really serious pressure on the local fauna, because of poaching and strong demand from the local people for bushmeat, just about everything is eaten.

It’s a big ask since we are talking about behaviour change, and change of use in their ancestral hunting grounds.  Much of the work has involved trying to engage with the indigenous communities, the Ba’Aka and Bakola groups, previously known as pygmies, but now referred to as the Autochtons.  

One of the potential solutions is to regenerate the existing cocoa plantations which were set up 50 years ago,  which have now mostly been abandoned and have been reclaimed by the forest.  This should not have too many adverse effects on damaging the ecosystem, as it will include mostly pruning and clearing of undergrowth.  Cocoa is an interesting crop in that the pods grow directly from the trunk of the tree, and after harvesting there’s a fermentation and drying process that will determine the quality of the chocolate in the bean:

The Republic of Congo only supplies a fraction of the world’s cocoa, and much of it is exported via Douala in Cameroon, work is needed on improving traceability so buyers will know more about its origin, and consumers are increasingly demanding this.

There’s a fine balance to maintain between managing the existing forest cocoa, and clearing responsibly whilst replanting new hybrids, and maintaining sufficient indigenous forest trees that provides a nice high canopy allowing the right amount of shade and sunlight.  The indigenous trees in the forest are amazing, easily reaching up to 50m high.

The other crop we were looking at was cassava, the main staple in the Republic of Congo, and if we can encourage local communities on the edges of the protected areas to improve husbandry, and therefore yields, this is going to up their incomes, and hopefully encourage them to desist looking for bushmeat to sell.  There is also a lot to do on introducing some basic mechanisation, especially for processing, as this is done mostly by hand, and mostly by women.  We’ll have to find low cost machinery for crushing the roots, to make both dough and starch, which rapidly add value to the product.  At the same time we don’t want to take away employment from rural areas, so trying to introduce new technology hoping business in general will increase, and therefore employment

Whilst the logging companies are continuing to exploit their concessions, and these valuable tropical hardwoods are now mostly harvested sustainably, they open up new forest tracks continually and this gives easy access to the professional poachers.  Our job is going to be to show that sustainably managed agriculture is the way forward for all these threatened areas, but there’s a long way to go still.

The Government has very limited resources to put in place the right control measures, so it relies on the international community through several donor funded conservation NGO’s to promote good practice.

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Our winter barley harvest started a little earlier than usual,  though only one day earlier than in 2018, all 113ha was Maris Otter, and most came off at around 13.5% moisture, with good grain size (low screenings and retentions, it did not need screen cleaning).  The yield was the best ever here for Otter, at 6.2 t/ha.  Big heap feed barley growers might scoff, but Otter (bred in 1966) is a consistent performer for us, the margin is always up there with the spring barleys in a normal year for base price and premium.  We enjoy growing it, in particular testing the results once skilled brewers like St Austell, Flack Manor, Butcombe and the Dorset Sixpenny brewery have done their best with it.  

The oilseed rape was ready on 14^th July, very similar to 2018 but a good deal earlier than most years.  It did not need spraying with glyphosate, it had ripened evenly and in good time, with seed moistures between 6.5 and 7.5%.  The yields were good where allowed to grow undamaged by animals, (over 4t/ha in some fields), but terrible where the farmer had insisted on grazing with sheep for all sorts of sound reasons like weed, insect and disease avoidance, the only downside being yield avoidance. After 3 years of this experiment, initiated with Innovative Farmers as part of the search for OSR survival techniques in face of the flea beetle onslaught following the ban on neonics, we have got the message.  The sheep have been sold, so it won’t be happening again. 

Driving back from a bad news session at our local tractor dealer last Saturday, my eye was caught by a very pretty field margin near Dewlish, Dorchester.  Closer examination revealed cornflowers, corn marigolds, ox-eye daisies, poppies (!) and others, mostly annuals. The richness of colour and the buzz of the bees helped to sweep away the blues induced by being told that one of our tractors has a near terminal condition, terminal either for the tractor or the bank account, we just have to decide which.  How is it that a 10 year old tractor with just 6000 hours on the clock can be rendered almost worthless by a breakdown due to nothing more than poor manufacturing?  Why do we have no comeback on the manufacturer who happily took £100,000 off us in 2012, and walked away after the original warranty expired? 

Anyway, back to the flowers, I stood there transfixed by their beauty, wondering which is better, a perennial mix, which only needs to be established once, and can be good for 10 or 15 years of pollen and nectar provision, but doesn’t look as remotely colourful as this one, or are annuals better for attracting insects and providing nectar, with the drawback of needing re-sowing every year?  Without doubt the annuals are good for impressing people, planted alongside public paths and roads they are sure to attract the right kind of attention, but for busy farmers who are always time poor, doing it just once is usually going to be preferable. Not so good for the soil to have to resow every year either.

I am definitely not the best person to send out for the weekly shop, I always takes far too long.  Starting at the newspaper rack just inside the door of our local supermarket, the blood pressure begins to rise simply on reading the headlines across the selection of daily papers lying there.  Stupid puns abound for starters, but what really gets me going is the tribalism and narrow mindedness shown by so many of them.  Mostly the mouthpieces of very rich people with axes to grind, I can’t understand why people buy any of them at all. 

Moving on into the fruit and veg aisle, things don’t improve, with apples, carrots, tomatoes and mushrooms for example.  They all grow very well indeed in the UK.  The technology for fresh produce storage is amazing these days, you can still buy English apples in July that taste nearly as fresh as the day they were picked.  And in less than a month the new crop will be available.  Why then are we shipping in apples from South Africa calling them seasonal, the appalling French granny smiths, or worst of all Gala apples from Argentina and calling them organic. 

English carrots are available for a great deal of the year, they are stored in the ground for months, and dug as required to suit the market, presumably they can also be kept in cold storage.  Why then do we need to import ‘Tendersweet’ carrots from Guatemala in July ?

Mushrooms, as far as I can tell, are like many people, kept in the dark and fed on bullshit, and this can be done anywhere.  There used to be a large mushroom farm not far from here, near Sturminster Newton, but they gave up the unequal fight with their supermarket customer a few years ago.  They also used to provide a useful source of compost for neighbouring farmers to purchase. Why are we importing them from Poland and selling them in identical packaging to the English ones produced in Cambridgeshire?

And lastly tomatoes; If our greenhouse is anything to go by, July is UK peak tomato season.  Modern techniques and innovative heat sources have extended the tomato season hugely over the last 10 years, for example using waste heat from AD plants or from sugarbeet factories.  However the tomato shelf in our local is dominated by Moroccan, Polish and Spanish tomatoes, even in July, the only UK ones are the premium range, with a limited number of sizes.  

I know I should shop more widely, and only spend where I will give the right signal to the market with my purchasing, but sadly convenience has a value too, and there is not much choice in Blandford.  It also gives me something to rant write about. 

So much for taking back control, for levelling up, and for ensuring fairness in the marketplace.  Our mean-minded and mendacious government has squirmed out of allowing parliament the chance to debate the Australian trade deal before the summer recess, and the Tory majority will nod it through.  They seem to be happy to see our own food industry slowly strangled to death, and I haven’t even reached the meat and dairy aisles yet. 

For a complete change in style and content, an old friend from Wye College days has very kindly written an account of his current work in The Republic of Congo, not to be confused with the Democratic Republic of Congo, its five times larger neighbour. Steven Humphreys is working as a Consultant there, after a long career stretching over many countries and many issues. So much of my ranting on these pages relates to first world problems, Steve’s tale will take us into the rainforest and explain some of the issues there, where the ground rules are so very different.

Jump to The View from the Rainforest with this link

In case you missed it, and meant to go back to it, here again is the link to Steve Humphreys’ piece: The View from the Rainforest

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The View from the Hill                                                                       26^th June 2022

Congratulations to our Devon colleague Richard Tucker and his family for keeping their cool last week, when descended upon by the Prime Minister and his entourage at short notice, in full campaigning mode.  By the time this hits the doormat the by-election will be history, but it was a masterstroke catching the PM with his snout in the trough, something many of his colleagues are renowned for, especially the ones who receive gongs for huge donations to his party.  But enough of sleaze, this is a farming page, where farmers are honourable and public spirited, such as during the recent jubilee celebrations, many farmers hosted Jubilee parties on their farms, or beacons which lit up across the country, or as in Durweston, providing vintage transport for Jubilee royalty and local characters in procession from one end of the village to the other, culminating in a huge tea party in the village hall.  Great fun was had by all, featuring a tug of war between neighbouring villages, egg and spoon and three-legged races on the playing field, a scarecrow competition and heaps of cake.  You don’t have to be a royalist to take part and enjoy such joyous public occasions, community spirit has had a huge shot in the arm, and we are all the richer for it.

Most farmers must feel they are in some kind of dream right now, or nightmare, depending where they sit in the industry.  On the one hand there are the sectors who have enjoyed the certainty of public support for producing food at below the cost of production, a role performed for most of their productive lives, who are now finding the rug being steadily pulled from beneath their feet, and a whole new rule book to get to grips with.  Going some way to dull that pain, some are seeing prices for outputs that couldn’t have been dreamt of less than a year ago, even in their wildest dreams.  Although dented by huge cost inflation across the board, predicted margins still look positive. 

On the other hand there are those who never had the public support in the first place, whose markets are dominated by a very small number of seemingly ruthless buyers who  refuse to recognise the imminent threat to their supply lines.  Egg producers are not placing orders for pullets, laying sheds will empty when older hens reach the end of their production cycles, elsewhere productive sows are being sold off in huge numbers as pig farmers try to regain some solvency whilst pork prices are a bit healthier than they were a few short months ago, and while they can actually shift animals off the farm.  So many have haemorrhaged such vast amounts of cash buying expensive feed, holding on for the pig cycle to correct itself, that they are now saying enough is enough.  A doubling of feed prices with near static output returns is simply not survivable.  As a nation our productive base will shrink, feed grain producers will lose valuable markets.  And none of us have a clue what awaits us around the corner.  How to plan for the years ahead with any certainty? 

The Great South West (so say the Local Enterprise Partnerships of Devon, Dorset, Somerset and Cornwall) is going to lose £883 million from the economy by 2027, as BPS (the basic payment scheme) is withdrawn.  There are plenty of new schemes available to make up the shortfall, says the government, but the difficulty is that many of them require cash injection from the farmer to match the grants, which for those already on the breadline, is no help at all.  The environmental schemes are attractive but have many strings attached, and in some cases represent a bit of a con trick to those who have been in such schemes previously.  Hold on tight for the ride.

Environmental campaigner and journalist George Monbiot has somehow acquired himself an extraordinary amount of media coverage recently, maybe something to do with having a new book to sell.  He has really placed himself with the zealots this time.  As always with George, (see previous efforts with books like Feral, and How did we get into this Mess, and films such as How Wolves change Rivers, Apocalypse Cow and Rivercide) there is an uncomfortable truth behind much that he says, but at the same time he manages to seriously wind up the very people he needs to bring onside.

In his latest book, Regenesis, he attacks head-on pretty much every aspect of modern agriculture, the headline being that we should simply stop farming animals.  He drew a substantial audience at Groundswell last week, and sparked a good deal of lively debate.  Soil health is the focus of much of his attention, but then he moves onto animals.  He loves attacking farmers, painting us all with the same brush, the people who, as society evolved, became the managers of the land, the keepers of animals, and the growers of crops to sustain the growing population, and according to George the wreckers of our natural resources, mostly by farming animals.  There are others in the environmental movement, such as Allan Savory, who maintain that the best hope for halting catastrophic climate change lies with managing the tens of millions of hectares of grasslands around the world (which all too often are now deserts) with large numbers of grazing animals.  He has proved this in his home country (Zimbabwe) by returning land that had become desert, back to grassy health, and hence a valuable carbon sink, by careful management of herds and flocks of animals, mimicking the previously numerous numbers of the wild animals that once roamed the great plains, moving ever onwards to find fresh grazing, and to keep ahead of predators.  The process of grazing, trampling and manuring as they go stimulates pasture growth, and has been shown as essential to restore such lands to a green and fertile condition.  We are trying to replicate this on a small scale by mob grazing our herbal leys here at home, aiming to improve the organic matter content of the soil, which in turn increases moisture and nutrient holding capacity, hopefully reducing the need for artificial fertiliser in the future.

Last month I covered how we are now in a position where we cannot sustain the human race without fertiliser, having grown so huge by using it.  Sadly George ignores this uncomfortable fact, and tells us that we should simply stop rearing and eating meat animals because they are so damaging to soil, environment and climate.  Instead he declares that we must survive on food derived from genetically edited bacteria grown in huge vats, fuelled by water, carbon from the air, a ‘sprinkling’ of nutrients, plus a considerable amount of electricity. 

It is sad too that he fails to acknowledge all the good things being done by so many farmers who are learning to produce food in a far more environmentally friendly fashion than just a few years ago. 

There are clearly several issues to address here; how best to remove carbon from the atmosphere, how to feed the population without wrecking the planet, how to halt the decline in biodiversity and how to do all these at the same time.  Very much in the public arena at the moment, we will no doubt return to the subject very soon.

https://www.instagram.com/tv/CfRs1YIr0nM/?igshid=MDJmNzVkMjY%3D click for a short video

A dung beetle seminar was enjoyed by members of our cluster group recently, a vet from Shropshire came armed with a supply of rubber gloves to get us delving into the world of coprophages.  There are dwellers and tunnellers and many others, we heard tales of what we can do to help them to help us.

A prickly visitor came a trotting around the garden a few days ago

https://www.instagram.com/tv/Ce_8xkML9F2/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=. click for a short video

I grew up learning that Tiggers don’t climb trees, and was always pretty certain that sheep didn’t either, if they did they must be a goat.  These young mules though, are doing their best to reach tasty lime leaves.

A selection of orchid species is appearing in places we’ve never seen them before, a clump of southern marsh and pyramid orchids have emerged in a stewardship corner that hasn’t seen an arable crop for the last 15 years.  Can the seeds really lie dormant for this long, waiting for conditions suitable for re-emergence?

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The View from the Hill                                                                       15^th May 2022

When does the hare population shift from “I like to see a few of them about” to “Might have to consider doing something about them” ?  Seven or eight in a bunch constitutes grazing pressure equivalent to how many sheep?  However when our local friend Alan Wicks can produce photos like this I just want to celebrate.  They look like a bunch of  greyhounds racing hell-for-leather around a track, but what would the hares be chasing, a stuffed whippet on a piece of string?  I think they are just doing it for fun, Alan tells me that he has seen them rough and tumbling in a heap sometimes.  I know that some areas suffer from much larger numbers of hares than we do, and that action does indeed need to be taken, but here, hare numbers have been low to modest for as long as I can remember.  What is the key fact that limits them, there is no shortage of food?  Has it been due to the presence of too many predators of the leverets, like buzzards and crows, or is it that we have been too successful in controlling small weeds in crops, which I have long understood are vital for the survival of young ground nesting birds, surely a young hare can graze on wheat from the day it’s born?  It is very difficult to get the right balance between a few weeds sufficient for skylark and lapwing chicks, and a wipe-out of crop due to runaway weed infestation, the chems we use are very efficient at their job, and if you use reduced rates you risk encouraging resistance to the sprays in the weeds.

All too often when walking, biking or paddling along local rivers, one comes across weirs and sluice gates that are woefully neglected.  How much of the flooding that so many tears are shed over, and the millions of pounds spent clearing up the resulting mess, could be saved if the rivers were better managed?  Current river policy seems to revolve roughly around re-wilding, oh yes, and let’s bung in a few beavers for good measure, there won’t be any flooding then.  Will there ?  How long before a dislodged beaver dam gets washed down to a dodgy old bridge, turning it into a bigger dam, causing flooding upstream, or a tsunami downstream following its collapse?

I am sure those responsible for intelligent advanced planning have borne all this in mind before launching into the Great Beaver Release Gamble that is approaching; at least five such releases are planned for Dorset.  No-one seems to operate the precautionary principle any more, there are numerous tales of beaver trouble from Scotland, who as so often are ahead of us in this game, but has any notice been taken ?  Apologies for all the questions this month, will someone have the decency to try to answer them ?  Oops there’s another.  I look forward to the outcome, luckily I live on a hill.

The school visit season has begun, so far in pretty co-operative weather, sometimes a group will bring a picnic, after which they will enjoy running or rolling down a nearby hill, before resuming their tour around the farm, asking plenty of questions along the way.  Didn’t Mother always say you should let your lunch go down before such exertions……? 

Whatever you might have thought of Jeremy Clarkson in the past, since he began to share the trials and tribulations of learning to farm with his huge audience, he has surely been a force of good for the industry.  His first series from his farm Diddly Squat was highly entertaining, and brought many tales so familiar to long suffering farmers to the attention of the population at large.  His piece in the Sunday Times today (15^th May) is well worth looking up, he is publicising, in his entertaining style, what our (NFU) President has been trying so hard to ram home to our wise and wonderful clueless leaders for the months since the war began in Ukraine, about the impending crisis in food price and availability around the world.  What he doesn’t get around to is pointing out all the micro decisions we are making at farm level, to control risk, and to preserve our livelihoods, which are very likely to result in reductions in production.  Speaking to many farmers it is easy to find those who have reduced their usage of fertiliser this year, accepting that output may fall.  This year could be ok, many bought fert at what now seem giveaway prices, and we can currently sell grain, milk and meat at prices well above where we were a year or two ago.  (With apologies to pig and chicken farmers). Ask about next year though, and you get blank looks all round.  How do we make sense of such a huge change in circumstances?  Should we buy (very expensive) fertiliser for next season now while we can get it, and we can back it up with cracking forward grain prices, unfortunately that doesn’t work in the meat markets, or do we wait and see?   In terms of the environment, and climate damaging emissions, it couldn’t be a better time to rein back on fertiliser applications, and test the result.  With the ongoing war though, shortfalls in exports of grains from Russia and Ukraine are suggesting the opposite.  At farm level, I suspect we are likely to be cautious, with production likely to fall. 

Ammonium nitrate causes damage to the atmosphere in at least 3 distinct ways, firstly during manufacture, the haber-bosch process uses enormous quantities of energy to fix atmospheric nitrogen with hydrogen from natural gas over an iron catalyst at 450 degrees C.  The resulting ammonia gas itself causes atmospheric pollution if it escapes.  Ammonia can be reacted with nitric acid to form ammonium nitrate fertiliser (AN).  When applied to the soil, nitrate fertiliser will degrade and produce nitrous oxide gas in wet conditions, which finds its way into the atmosphere, it is a potent greenhouse gas.  Nitrate is also very soluble, and vulnerable to leaching through the soil, and can end up in groundwater.  AN is at best 50% efficient, meaning that only half of it gets used by our crops in the growing season, the rest gets leached, gassed off, or might remain to feed a following crop.  Not only this, but AN will oxidise organic matter in the soil, sending more carbon into the atmosphere as CO2, and it upsets microbiological activity, damaging soil health.  AN will also cause acidification of soil, altering the soil’s ability to release other nutrients to plants, therefore lime needs to be added to many soils to keep the pH around the optimum level.

And if that is not enough, the overwhelming issue we have with artificial fertiliser is that it has enabled us to grow the world population to double what it might have been had it not been invented, that is a hell of a problem, we are now in a position where we cannot sustain the human race without, having grown so huge by using it.

There are a few things we can do to improve things:

1. Stop over-use of fertilisers, by more accurately matching rates to crop need and soil nitrogen supply
2. Improve the organic matter content of soils, which will improve nutrient holding capacity, and reduce leaching
3. Make better use of the organic manures available across the industry, spread more evenly across more land
4. Cut down on the allegedly 30% wastage of food across society around the world, then we won’t need to produce so much food in the first place.
5. Cut down on damaging cultivations to soils where possible, cultivation oxidises organic matter reducing the ability of soil to hold nutrients.
6. Learn how to sequester carbon from the atmosphere into the soil in such ways as by maintaining green cover as much of the time as possible, with active roots in the soil, photosynthesis enables plants to push carbohydrate into the soil through their roots, which feeds beneficial fungi which form synergistic relationships with plant roots and hence build organic matter.

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The View from the Hill 28th April 2022

Where have all the flea beetle larvae gone?  There we were hunting around in flowering rape for evidence that there had been any flea beetle attack this season, eventually we found one larva embedded in a stem, far short of something to worry about.  Long suffering readers of this column have heard my endless tales relating to the different things we have attempted since the neonic ban, to outwit the little devils.  We have applied smelly manures, sown companion crops to distract them, sown early, even grazed the rape off with sheep in the hope that the sheep actually eat the larvae in the plants.  We ran a field lab with Innovative Farmers 2 years ago, which proved that grazing can indeed reduce larval numbers, but it also proved that grazing reduces yield, no prizes for predicting that.  This year we have grazed some, and not grazed the rest, and there is no question that this year the ungrazed is streets ahead of the grazed, in growth stage as well as yield potential.  We have recently taken part in a NIAB nationwide survey of larval activity, the results came in last week.  Of the 6 fields surveyed, two had been grazed, and 4 had not.  The highest larval numbers were found in one of the grazed fields, (9 larvae per plant) and the lowest number was in an ungrazed field (1.5 per plant).  In contrast to such contradictory findings, the trial in 2020 had revealed 26 per plant in the ungrazed plot, and 8 per plant in the grazed, more in line with what we had hoped for.  Overall numbers were lower in 2021, and are lower still this year, the 4^th since forsaking  insecticides, can we dare to believe that beneficial predators are making a comeback, now we aren’t repeatedly killing them off ? 

So far there are no clear pointers from the 500 samples collected from rape fields across the country this year, as to which techniques can help combat the beetles most effectively.  It remains as clear as mud, with many more questions to be addressed with further research.

The above is but one example that demonstrates the importance of the continuing support of the AHDB (Agriculture and Horticulture Development Boards) for our industry.  We are right now at a perilous stage in the evolution of R&D for agriculture, we have had a very good model for support in the sectors of the AHDB, in the form of grower and producer levies on a % of sales, some seem to be more widely supported than others, but I believe passionately that to let them wither, as with the potatoes and horticultural boards, due to largely to levy payer indifference, would be a tragedy.  Apparently over 10,000 farmers have registered to vote in the current survey, which I hope is enough to give the result credibility.  I do not believe it was wise of the Secretary of State to require this series of votes, which have the ability to destroy whole sectors at a stroke.  AHDB evolved from the amalgamation of HGCA with the MLC and all the other sector bodies, and needs to be allowed to continue to evolve, under the guidance of farmers and industry specialists as board members, to be a beacon of excellence in directing levy payers’ funds into agricultural research.

Voting closes on May 9^th, before this reaches doormats, I hope as many as possible do their duty.

Three new pig shaped arrivals were greeted with disdain by our small tame sheep flock, interest was shown to start with, but a respectful distance is now kept.  The pigs were 9 weeks old when they arrived, and are growing fast, the sheep are due to lamb in a couple of weeks.  Always late lambers here, the plan is to shear them shortly before lambing, already on the warmer days they end up panting under their thick fleeces.

In a vain hope to encourage a bit of rain in May, is it appropriate now, on the 29th of April, to have a good moan about the very dry, cool and windy, weather?  Our spring barley is seriously struggling, it was sown into rapidly drying seedbeds, which in spite of our intentions to direct drill had to be cultivated to make a half decent seedbed.  A return to the field with a heavy flat roll this week has been required to try to encourage some late germination where there are gaps, and to conserve what little moisture is there.  The spring beans, usually more sensitive to lack of moisture than most crops, are holding out at the moment, we managed to direct drill some of them into the kinder soils, and in two small fields we are using them as a break with which to improve some worn out permanent pasture.  Direct sowing the beans into the turf has so far worked well, leatherjackets, that would otherwise have demolished a cereal crop, are not interested in beans, and will have hopefully hatched and left the field before we sow a wheat crop in the autumn, before we establish a long term herbal mixture in the following year.  Digging down below the turf finds some still usefully moist soil, protected from the wind and sun by the old turf.

Defra have announced some long awaited answers for farmers recently, firstly their response to the urea fertiliser consultation that they issued a year ago, which had left farmers who are accustomed to using urea fertiliser with no idea whether they could buy, let alone use any urea this year.  The decision means that previously announced restrictions on the use of urea are being postponed whilst the industry tries to cope with the enormous rise in fertiliser prices that has occurred in the last few months.  Urea has traditionally been used as a cheaper form of fertiliser than the more widely used ammonium nitrate, but a major drawback is that it can lead to the emission of more ammonia into the atmosphere than AN, it should be applied only in cooler weather and when there is plenty of moisture about.  Both contribute to global warming, but urea is worse.  The decision seems likely, in the longer term, to lead to a regime which will restrict urea use, and force farmers to adjust the timing of applications and to only apply it in conjunction with an inhibitor, to help reduce emissions.

The second announcement relates to the ‘Farming Rules for Water’, devised and policed by the Environment Agency (EA), which aim to control pollution from farmland to waterways and ground water.  These rules have been contentious from their inception in 2018, when the EA announced a clampdown on manure spreading in the autumn.  The implication was that farmers who produce organic manures would not be able to apply them to any more than a narrow range of permitted crops in autumn, the time when traditionally many millions of tons of manures are applied to newly sown crops, and lots more storage capacity would have to be built to carry it safely through until it could legally be applied in the spring.  There are many reasons why this draconian ruling didn’t make sense, and I plan to return to this subject soon, but to put it concisely, DEFRA have asked the EA to look again at this, and work more closely with farmers to make the system more sensible.  For a start, they must now acknowledge the difference between high available nitrogen manures, (like neat pig and chicken manures and cow slurry, which have a much greater risk of pollution) and low available nitrogen manures (such as straw based farmyard manures and some digestates, which are lower risk). No farmers intentionally allow their manures to get into water, they are far too valuable to do that, a confrontational approach helps no-one, and I very much hope now that we can move forward with an environmentally responsible, and economically justifiable blend of common sense and practical regulation.

There’s been a bit of clear felling in a small patch of woodland nearby, it is a sorry sight right now, some 5 acres of 60 year old beech trees have been taken down. With luck the land will be replanted with new young trees next winter. Is it really so different from farmers planting seeds every year and harvesting the resulting crop the following year? Why is it though, that leaving a mess in freshly harvested fields like this seems to be ok for foresters, but if farmers made such a mess they would expect be in big trouble. The damage to the soil, otherwise undisturbed for many decades, is not pretty or good for soil health. As a farmer one doesn’t try to work on the land when it is sodden, so why is it that foresters think it is ok?

The UK imports 80% of the timber it needs, we have many forestry plantations and clearly need more, if we want to become a little less dependent on imports, so we need to accept that from time to time trees have to be cut down. Thinning operations don’t look as violent as a clear fell, which of course is the final stage when the trees are at their economical optimum. Some might argue that all the carbon stored in the trees should be left there, but if we accept that the land has to earn a living for its owner, then like on a farm, the forest will need to be harvested. The government is launching initiatives to encourage tree planting, what is important is that the trees are the right sort, and in the right place and pests such as squirrels and deer will need to be dealt with, otherwise the trees will not reach a useful mature shape and size.

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The View from the Hill                                                                       20^th March 2022

All we wanted was a few dry days and a bit of sunshine, and finally it arrived last week (21^st March).  Being farmers of course means that it is no time at all before we are starting to worry that it will never rain again, and it becomes a rush to get the beans planted, rolled and sprayed, so we can push on the with the spring barley, which is far more important.  Direct drilling is a challenge at this end of the sowing season; wet soils are painfully slow to dry if you don’t move them first.  Thank goodness we didn’t have any manure to spread this spring, which would only slow the process, and make horrible wheel marks in the seedbeds.  I hope the Secretary of State is listening, he who seriously seems to believe (and announced on television last week) that we don’t need artificial fertilisers because there is enough manure and digestate in the country to sufficiently fertilise all of our crops.  What planet is he living on?  He is implying a) that we have been wasting fertiliser all these years because we never actually needed it, and b) we must have millions of tons of FYM hiding somewhere that we accidentally haven’t been using. The fact is that we already use 48 million tons of manures on our crops in the UK every year, and 1 million tons of nitrogen fertiliser. You would need 57 tons of manure to replace the nitrogen in one ton of manufactured fertiliser. To think it is possible to replace all manufactured fertiliser with manure is clearly ridiculous, we have nowhere near enough animals. (And we keep being told that animals are bad for the climate, but that’s a story for another day).

I must be an idiot to have ever taken seriously anything that George Eustice has said, I have tried to convince myself that public money for public goods will really make sense when we see what it means, that ELMS will eventually arrive just as BPS expires, with an administrative system that works first time, complete with a functioning mapping system, and that the disconnect between Farming Rules for Water and creating healthier soils will be mended.  I generally try to be a ‘glass half full’ person, but when faced with such bare faced dishonesty and ignorance such as has been spewed out recently I find myself really struggling to remain calm.

Seed cleaning update: As a consequence of our experiments with mixed crop plots last summer, we have had several odd seed mixtures sitting around in bags and piled in corners here and there.  It couldn’t be put off any longer, we had to have a go at separating them.  Starting with the easiest first, separating linseed from beans turned out to be very easy through our ancient Rutherford shake cleaner.  The quantities were not huge, but should be enough to bulk up our cover crop seed stocks, which was the whole point of the exercise.  5 bags of linseed (approx 100kg) separated from around 3 tons of beans was quite straightforward.  After that we had to fix up something a bit higher tech than the rickety old Rutherford, so we hired a bulk cleaner set from our local seed cleaners Evans and Pearce Ltd.  This machine did a great job with the peas and oats mix, not the usual 85% purity one expects from purchased seed, but good enough for cover crops, along with a few stray beans, well who was going to clean the combine out between every 2 acre plot?

Vetch/phacelia worked well, resulting in a pretty clean sample of both, but vetch/oats was the biggest challenge, running it through several times, varying the speed of running through and playing with the auger screens, yielded reasonably clean samples though not as good as I would have liked.  There’s quite a few split vetch seeds in the oats, and still too many oats in the vetch.  If doing this again a return to the Rutherford and a search for some 3.5mm screens might be required. 

Our local John Deere dealer Smart Ag Services has been taken over by Hampshire based Hunt Forest Group during the last few months, now the vans have had a makeover, and the last vestige of Smart Agriculture sadly seems to have finally disappeared.  Colin Smart set up the business after the demise of Milton Mills Engineers in 1998, and has set the standard for Dorset dealerships since then.  A recent visit to the premises revealed this beauty (an 8RX, tracks all round) on the forecourt, a new take on the 3-400HP range of tractors, though how anyone might consider buying such fancy tinwork in current circumstances beats me.  Rocketing input prices and yo-yoing grain prices leaves us with a very high risk of making bad decisions.  Fertiliser is in the spotlight, not only because of price, but because of supply, how many will go short this year?  Some well-resourced farmers are in the habit of buying their nitrogen requirement almost a year before they need it, and those who did so last year should be feeling very smug right now, prices having risen by a factor of four.  But should they be using all that fertiliser this year, or should they save half of it for next year?  We are often reminded that 50% of the nitrogen applied to a crop gives up to 80% of the yield, NIAB has many graphs demonstrating that the last bit of fert, which we have in the past often applied ‘just in case’, barely pays for itself in more years than when it does.  So is this not a time for experimentation, to see what we can get away with and still grow a profitable crop?  Headline yield is not what we need to pay the rent, it is the margin over costs that really matters, and right now we need to do our sums really carefully.  On top of fertiliser woes, we have a huge headache over fuel price and availability, without fuel we can’t even spread fertiliser if we have any, and let’s be honest, something will grow even if it gets no fertiliser at all, but without fuel, we won’t be able to harvest what has grown, so I know which I consider the more important.  Having said that, for red diesel to be costing more than DERV does at the local pumps once the 47p per litre difference in fuel duty has been taken into account, someone must be pulling a fast one.

As a postscript to last month’s account of paddling on the Thames, which included a foray out into a flooded field of maize stalks:  I had mistakenly believed that we had been in Oxfordshire and that the story wouldn’t come back and bite me on the bum.  It turns out that we were in Wiltshire and the land in question is farmed by a regular reader of the farmers’ magazine where some of this guff also appears, who called me on the day the magazine hit doormats!  Very relieved to have not been severely berated I feel it is only fair to put his side of the story.  Crops have been grown next to the Thames in that region for many years, but it floods far more often than it used to.  As the years have gone by, nearby in the catchment, Swindon has grown exponentially reducing the area over which the river can spread, not only that but there are many trees in the river which no longer get cleared out, reducing flow, consequently the land remains under water for longer periods than in the past.  Also, the farmer tried his best to put the fields in question into arable reversion under his stewardship agreement, but for some inexplicable reason they were turned down.  Surely this kind of sensitive land is exactly what should go into such schemes ?

His final point was that cover crops, if established after the maize has been harvested, could result in even more soil leaving the field, as the soil would not have the benefit of having ‘bedded in’ as it does over the previous months while the maize is growing.  I acknowledge that he makes fair points, although would point out that a cover crop can be planted in maize much earlier in the season, leaving plenty of time for soil to stabilise, and make it far less likely that soil might wash away with flood water than with no cover crop at all. 

A small bunch of sheep went walkabout in the village the other morning, by the time we caught up with them a couple of police cars had joined the chase as well, careering into the village with sirens wailing and blue lights flashing.  It was the usual problem of someone leaving a footpath gate open, so the sheep enjoyed a few hours of freedom, being caught on one resident’s hedgehog webcam and by a neighbour filming them wandering around a garden nibbling bits of this and that, before being escorted back to the field under the eye of the law. Luckily they were pet ones, and happily followed a bucket.

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The View from the Hill                                                                       20^th February 2022

Our first calves of the season arrived last week. As 55 plump cows munch happily on hay and silage from stewardship margins and pasture, indoors, waiting to produce a new crop of calves, their older offspring continue to march through cover crop and turnips outside, waiting for warmer weather and grass growth to wave the magic wand of compensatory growth, and transform them from scruffy and slightly muddy individuals with incredibly pongy breath, into rippling hunks of shiny beef by mid summer.

Would the establishment of a premium market for pasture fed meat split the farming community down the middle?  We would love to retail our own beef and lamb as premium pasture fed, but when 50 beefies fatten over a two month period in summer, and 250 lambs all reach their best in January and February, we would have a continuity problem.  It is fine to proclaim the benefits of pasture fed, but how do we keep the nation fed for the rest of the year?  Fresh is best of course, so freezing is not the answer on such a huge scale. These arguments need to be taken on board by those who would criticise our industry for climate/health reasons.  Ask 10 vegans or vegetarians why they have chosen that route, and you will probably get 10 different answers, some of which might not stand up to scrutiny if we could find out how and where the vegan diet is produced.  It all points to the continuing need for rational calm debate.  Over 55% of the UK is permanent pasture, humans can’t digest grass, but ruminants can turn it into food that is climate friendly, nutrient dense and packed with essentials.

Several days have been spent recently attempting to separate the various seed mixtures we grew last year in our experimental bi-cropping field. We grew 6 different combinations, some have proved easy to separate, such as beans with linseed, where there is a huge difference in size and density of the two species, oats with peas were also not too difficult, but when it comes to oats with vetch, or beans with peas then the job gets really tough. We have used our own ancient Rutherford ‘shake’ cleaner, and have also hired a bulk cleaning rig from our regular seed cleaners Evans and Pearce, which uses air to separate seeds and chaff, but neither are able to achieve the impossible. We have obtained useful samples of peas, oats, vetch and phacelia, but the others will have to remain forever mixed. The bi-cropping theory is that a mixture of species growing together can be healthier for the soil, and the diversity can bring protection from diseases to the foliage as well. More care will have to be taken with pairing choices this year.

A trip to the Oxford Real Farming conference had been planned for the first week of January, so when it went virtual for covid reasons, a couple of mates who suffer a bit of a paddling habit, suggested we still went to Oxfordshire, but dressed rather differently, and that we should take a couple of boats with us. 

The Thames rises in Gloucestershire, quite near Cirencester, although there is some dispute about exactly where, it is a moveable feast, depending how much it has rained and where the water table is.  It becomes navigable before Cricklade, which is where we began our trip, next to the cricket club.  It had rained quite a bit over Christmas, so the river was still quite full, though its level doesn’t vary a great deal, regulated as it is by weirs and sluices.  Having purchased a licence, we felt entitled to employ the services of the lock keepers as we passed, who were unfailingly friendly, though some were less keen to open lock gates for us than others, so we sometimes had to drag the canoes out of the water and carry them around the locks.  It wasn’t long before one of our number managed to get a ducking when he couldn’t bend enough to get under a low concrete bridge, annoying for him so early in the day, but very entertaining for the rest of us.  Halfway through the morning we noticed that a section of the river had burst its banks, so we paddled off into the field only to find ourselves surrounded by maize stalks, and no hint of a cover crop to stabilise the soil.  Let’s be frank, this was not a good advertisement for responsible farming, the soil will be washed into the river, along with attached nutrients such as phosphate, and cause huge problems in the water, the silt covers the gravels so important for fish and other aquatic life, and the phosphate causes algal blooms which starve the water of the oxygen so vital for healthy water life.  Our cluster group on the Dorset Stour has had many presentations on the importance of keeping soil and phosphate out of water, and any sensible farmer understands that letting his productive soil wash into the river is pure madness.  How can maize be so valuable that it justifies such loss of soil down the river?

Further on down the river towards Lechlade, we met a group of wild swimmers, on their way to take a refreshing dip in the river, cheerful, and dressed in an assortment of brightly coloured gowns, did they really know what they were about to cover themselves in?  Only a few days later the national media took up the story of how much sewage finds its way into the river from Thames Water treatment plants when it rains hard and the plants can’t cope with the volume of sewage, which gets diluted by rain water.  Wessex Water, in our own region, is not very different, it is easy to find information in the public domain about how much outflow emits from their riverside treatment plants through the year.  It’s not pleasant to recall the much trumpeted privatisations of the public utilities in the 1980s, which have resulted in them being owned by enormous international corporations more interested in paying dividends to shareholders than upgrading ageing and inadequate infrastructure.  It begs questions when we find the water companies trying to offset their pollution by paying farmers to reduce their applications of manures and fertilisers and grow cover crops.

For those still mystified by last month’s picture teaser, sadly no correct answers have been received, the close-up shot of little round orange fungi was in fact from a cow pat, and to those who would claim that our cowpats are unhealthy I would unleash a resounding raspberry.

Found in a gallery in the Victoria and Albert museum in London, this lovely picture by John Herring Senior shows a form of traditional arable farming from before the days of no-till. 1855.

And an idyllic harvest scene from a couple of decades earlier, by P de Wint.

The real purpose of the trip to the V&A was to visit an exhibition of the work of renowned Dorset potter Richard Batterham. The route to Room 146 took us through long galleries of art and ceramics from around the world, architecture, decorative ironwork, and almost every element of human culture you can imagine. One of the most spectacular areas is the Cast Courts where you can find casts and copies of some of the world’s most inspiring objects, such as Michelangelo’s David, and a section of Trajan’s column. (The original stands in Emperor Trajan’s Forum in Rome).

On arrival in room 146, we were able to see how the V&A has presented Richard’s work to the the world.

Richard Batterham (1936-21) was one of the most revered studio potters of his time.  In 1959 he married Dinah and they settled in Durweston, where they brought up their five children and together built a new pottery in the early 60s.  Richard spent the whole of his life creating many thousands of beautiful pots, he always carried out every stage in the process of making, mixing and preparing his clays and glazes himself, to create a range of pots, jugs, caddies, teapots and numerous other items, many of which will be familiar to friends in the area who are fortunate to own and use such items. The pots speak for themselves, but the story behind them, of Richard’s work and dedication to his passion, is fascinating.

Richard and Dinah were both kind, friendly and popular people in the village, and in the long years since Dinah’s death, Richard continued to play his part in village life. It was a pleasure to know him and it is a real treat to own and use his pots every day. He was a truly remarkable fellow, whenever one would visit him at work in the pottery he was always happy to take time out for a catch up, and then without missing a beat he would return to creation of his timeless and beautiful pots. I like to imagine the archeologists of the future unearthing Richard’s pots in thousands of years time, as we do now on the farm find fragments made by others, long ago.  He certainly left his mark on this earth.

There are two short films available about Richard and his pots, each is approx 30 mins, and both are well worth watching.   The first: Richard Batterham – Independent Potter, is a delightful, gently paced ‘interview’ of Richard at work:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN3hRRIO4-c

The second: Richard Batterham – Master Potter, is similar but different, and includes observations and comment from students of his work, including David Attenborough.  The main film begins 3 minutes in:

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View from the Hill                                                                                16^th  January 2022

Never ones to miss an opportunity to try out a bit of shiny new kit, on a dry day just before Christmas we were out in the field playing with this crimper from Heva. One day we will hopefully be growing cover crops so huge that they will need one of these to knock them down, so far though, what the slugs left is barely going to be enough to keep all of our out-wintering cattle happy. 

The 10 month old bunch are eating only cover crop, and the 22 month ones are on cover crop with added silage.  We are keeping them moving across the ground on large areas of land to keep poaching to a minimum.  As for the crimper, it did a pretty useful job, and when we have more cover crop than we need to graze, it may have a place knocking down the crop, which, once shrivelled up, will give a single shot of glyphosate a better chance of hitting all the smaller plants hiding at ground level, when it is time to terminate the crop in time for spring sowing.

The frosty weather whilst writing this mid January is a welcome break from a very damp December and new year. There have been a handful of beautiful sunny days, and some calendar quality sunrises and sunsets. The Christmas period was a welcome break from politics of all kinds, farming, and in particular the national variety.  Unfortunately the latter has come back with a vengeance, whereas the farming bit just carries on rumbling underneath, no less important than it was before.  Issues such as continuing trade deals, lack of decision making on the future shape of agricultural and environmental policy, labour shortages, continuing deadlock over future trade relations with the EU, astronomical fertiliser prices and don’t forget the infamous Rules for water, are keeping farmers’ representatives very busy.  Unfortunately expecting progress on much of this is a bit hopeful whilst the upper echelons of government are drowning in embarrassment, and worse. These issues are directly affected by decision making at the highest levels in government, and it is immensely frustrating to see the nation constantly distracted by frivolity and scandal when there are so many important issues to discuss and decide.

Labour shortages – Home Office

Trade deals – Dept for international trade

Fertiliser/gas prices – Enterprise, Trade and Investment

Rules for Water – DEFRA via Environment agency

Lump sum retirement and New Entrants schemes – Treasury (needs new taxation rules)

The Public accounts committee has again reported that it is not convinced that Defra understands how its environmental and productivity ambitions will affect the food and farming sector over the next ten years. It was even more robust in some places – accusing Defra of ‘blind optimism’ when it comes to rolling out the new schemes. 

Our tame sheep flock have this year been treated to their own room service.  A handsome Texel ram has been shipped in to do the honours.  He arrived in the field one day at 6pm, and by 9am the following morning 5 rears had tell-tale red marks on them. 

Over the next few days all but one of the remaining 6 ewes were marked in the same way.  After the first 17 day cycle, the raddle crayon was changed for blue, none have been revisited, and the one untouched remains untouched.  Mysterious seeing as she is a young ewe, and we know she had triplets last year.  It is interesting to follow what happens when putting a raddle on the ram, we generally have not bothered for many years with the main flock, but knowing each of these ewes individually since they were hand reared means we will have an idea of which order to expect them to lamb in. 

Even more of a mystery is how Rocky the 9 year old wether, still sporting his anti magpie patch, also collected a red mark……

In the last week we have loaded out Maris Otter barley for the Warminster maltings, to be turned into high quality malt for mainly micro breweries, also onto lorries destined for the Dingemans Mout maltings in Stabroek, Belgium. We also loaded wheat for the ADM feed mill at Westbury.

This week has also seen the dreaded event of a TB test for all our cattle. This has now (since July 2021) become compulsory every 6 months in the high risk area (HRA), although if you join the CHECS (Cattle Health Certification Standards) scheme, you can improve your animal health standards to a level that will allow you to qualify for annual testing instead. The whole of England is divided into HRA, Low risk area (LRA), and Edge area. The HRA of England encompasses all of the South West counties, plus Shropshire Worcestershire and Staffordshire. CHECS enables herds at lower risk of TB in the High Risk and Edge Areas to remain on annual testing if they satisfy certain criteria, as covered by CHECS TB Herd Accreditation.

Fortunately all of our animals tested clear this time, and we now hope we can pass the requirements of the CHECS scheme to ensure we don’t have to test again until next January. Many farmers are feeling bitter after the change to 6 monthly testing in the HRA, seeing it altered shortly before the government announced the premature ending of the TB cull in all areas, most areas now have just one year to go, instead of the extended 5 year period that was intended to follow the initial 4 year intensive cull. The cull has continued to operate since the first areas were licensed in 2015, with enormous success, new TB outbreaks in cattle herds have reduced by an average of 54% across all cull areas, the science cannot be denied, and yet the prime minister personally intervened to close down the cull areas before the job has been completed. We have been offered a cattle vaccine within 5 years (again), and badger vaccination has begun in tiny areas. It is hard to take badger vaccination seriously because the trapping of badgers is extremely difficult, and requires a high proportion of the badger population to be re-vaccinated each year. The cost will be astronomical, and one has to ask if this a wise use of public money. Stopping the culls early, before we have a cattle vaccine, and attempting to control bovine TB only by vaccinating badgers will, as well as allowing TB to escalate once again, also undo the other benefits that lower badger numbers have brought, such as an improvement in hedgehog numbers and ground nesting bird hatchings, also a reduction in destruction of anthills and bumble bee nests. An unrestricted badger population will on average increase by 21% annually. Rough calculations indicate that TB breakdowns will be back to pre-cull numbers within 10 years without any badger culling or cattle vaccine, and all of the hard work of running the culls will have been wasted. It is heart breaking for cattle farmers, released from the scourge of TB which in some cases saw their farms, now open, closed for 11 years or more before the cull began, to face a possible return to that fate.

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