The View from the Hill

It was almost like we’ve had a famous Impressionist painter out on the farm, Jayne caught this fabulous early morning sky a few weeks ago, and then amongst myriad other northern lights photos, daughter in Devon nabbed the next one. 

Hard to believe when you still haven’t witnessed it yourself, and not for want of trying.  Since the event I have heard that such pictures are seriously enhanced by a phone camera, and there was I using the good old fashioned naked eye technique, and vainly expecting a smorgasbord of colour.

Here is an AI modified version of Jayne’s photo, uploaded to a random website that claims to reproduce a photo in the style of Claude Monet.  Judge for yourself, personally I prefer the original.

After an eye watering 208mm of rain in September, (the average is 76mm) and 150mm in October (average 120mm) so far (it’s the 21^st as I write), everything is utterly soaked.  We have had so few dry days recently that autumn sowing progress has been very limited. Doug has managed to sow the winter barley on 3 separate days, only to have it pour down again very shortly after.  No hope of rolling, and thank goodness we decided not to apply any pre-emergence weedkillers this year, as they can be washed into the rooting zone of the seeds by heavy rain, and risk crop damage.  Some farmers who are not afraid of sowing earlier may be feeling pleased they got a shift on, there was a week-long window of opportunity at the beginning of the month.  Here lie pros and cons; in our own case, we try to hold back when the weather is mild like it is at the moment, aphids carrying the barley yellow dwarf virus will still be flying and spreading it, whereas we prefer to collect the £45 per hectare bribe SFI payment, not to use insecticides, and so have to take steps like sowing later when the weather is cooler (and wetter 😩).  The Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) for 2024 now offers payments for 102 different options including the no-insecticide option.

For anyone unfamiliar with this, and curious to know what public money for public goods looks like, simply search for SFI 24 options, and head for gov.uk – expanded offer for 2024, then look for Annexe B, the full list of options. Or click here, warning: it’s quite dry……..

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sustainable-farming-incentive-scheme-expanded-offer-for-2024/sfi-scheme-information-expanded-offer-for-2024

Invitations to apply for these options were announced in July and thousands of farmers made applications, however only hundreds have been offered agreements to date, due to manual checking while (we are told) the system beds down.  Defra had made huge steps forward with SFI 23, many offers were made, accepted and put into action very efficiently, as was one of our own, it pays us to undertake a number of environmental actions, including the growing of cover crops, growing companion crops (such as in our bicrops of wheat with beans) and not using insecticides. 

The political reality of all this is particularly vivid right now as we await the outcome of the new government’s first budget.  How much will DEFRA’s budget be cut?  Will farming continue to be funded as it was in the days of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy?  In those days the area based payments were regarded simply as a subsidy to enable farmers to produce food at below the true cost of production.  Now, under the post Brexit arrangements created by the last UK government, we are a long way into the new era of public money for public goods, although delivery has been painfully slow.  The old payments system (BPS) , based on area farmed, is now at half the value it used to be, and will be down to zero by 2027, whereas the new systems have been running behind at approximately £100 million per year for the last 3 years. This is money that used to flow into agriculture and all its associated industries, and the huge worry is that the new government will remove this from the ag budget because it wasn’t spent.  This would be a huge betrayal of the industry, and was entirely because of DEFRA’s inability to get the new system fully up and running. 

If the government wants to secure the nation’s home grown food supply, and to ensure that all the environmentally beneficial actions happen that SFI includes, then it will have to give clear and positive signals to farmers in order to hold their confidence, which is on a knife edge.  Most environmental actions require land that would otherwise be used to produce food, to be taken out of production.  This can only happen if the rewards are sufficient, and the recipients believe that the system isn’t going to lurch from one extreme to the other with every change of government.  Cycles are very long in farming, and long term planning is rare enough too many areas of life these days.

Just in case anyone suspects weasel words from Defra in the future, if things go badly, here is a Weasel.  I spotted him darting along the wall of the old grainstore a few weeks ago, too slow to get the phone out for a full frontal picture, this is the best I could do.  He was carrying a dead mouse, I must admit I was not aware that I had such a useful ally so close at hand in my battle to control mice around the grainstores.  The little fellow, not much bigger than 2 mice sown together, dropped the mouse and popped into a gap in the tinwork as you can see.  I watched him for a while, but then had to get on with the job in hand.  The next time I looked, he had gone, and so had the mouse.

As well as trying to sow barley and wheat between the numerous rain events, Gary has been trying to get all our compost spread, we had 4.5 km of compost windrows around the farm waiting to be spread onto our growing cover crops.  On Friday last week (the 18^th) he would have finished, but he was prevented by a large bearing failure, on a shaft driving the feed chain in the bottom of the machine.  No chance to fix it on Friday, then more rain Friday night and Sunday, and on returning to the machine today he had a puncture in the tractor.  It was a Monday morning.

In my endless search for interesting pictures to accompany this article, I flew my drone a couple of weeks ago, hoping to obtain action footage of Gary at work, sad to report the drone developed a compass error, and with barely any warning flew off on a corkscrew path towards the Bonsley forest, and came to rest (I am supposing) high in a beech tree.  Far too high and impossible to see, perhaps until leaf drop, my pictures remain unreachable and unpublishable.

The stormy weather on Sunday resulted in a day long power cut, it turned out that a pole had snapped near to the top, and the wires were shorting against each other, hence the power had flashed on and off at least 10 times, before cutting out completely.  Teams were assembled from Poole, Christchurch and Ringwood before work could proceed, a pole lorry fortunately with 4 wheel drive arrived on site and eventually the problem was fixed.  One of the SSE team told me they have to do a 24 hour emergency standby shift every 8 days, which can be very wearing, as they always get called out.

Nerds Corner: It has taken me many years to properly appreciate the attributes of a broom.  During the course of a harvest, many acres of floor are swept, and the better the broom, the more enjoyable and satisfying the job is.  The angle of the broom head, by which I mean the angle at which the bristles meet the ground, is crucial, if you only want to sweep each part of the floor once, it will help greatly if the bristles are at right angles to the floor.  Second to this comes the angle of the handle, it has to be attached to the broom head at the right angle to allow the first requirement to be met, and it needs to be long enough to not have to bend over too much whilst sweeping.  This may all seem blindingly obvious, but it surprising how many brooms on the farm do not meet these specifications, and do a pretty rubbish job.  To the first two characteristics above I would add two more, the third would be the quality of the bristle, plastic just does not cut the mustard, they are invariably too stiff, so do not vibrate in the right way in order to keep the dust/grain/rubbish moving along in front, in general it seems that natural products like bassine are the best, they need to be stiff enough, but not too stiff, a general purpose broom will have to cope with a variety of surfaces, from lovely smooth power floated or polished concrete, to rough farmer laid concrete from the 70s, tarmac, or wooden floors, and no one wants to have to keep 3 different types of broom, so they have to be just right, as Goldilocks discovered in the house of the three bears.  The last, and potentially most irritating detail is the small matter of how the handle is fixed to the head.  Many heads are pre-drilled for the handle, which means there is a gap in the middle, which can then leave a line of material in every swoosh, who wants that?

Last summer I found the closest broom to perfection I have ever had the pleasure of working with, a 36 inch Bassine broom from the Bearing Boys in Norfolk, one of my favourite online suppliers for many items, from belts to bearings, as well as brooms.  So I bought three more this year, and love using them. They are light too, which adds even more pleasure to the job!  Bassine is a coarse leaf fibre from the palmyra palm tree that is commonly used to make brushes and brooms.

18th September was clearly the day that all the swallows in the south of England decided it was time to clear out to warmer climes. Fortuitous communications with birders in various counties confirmed the same assemblies forming in Kent, East Sussex and Dorset, all on the same day. Large numbers of the beautiful little birds had been spotted lining up on wires, and within hours, suddenly, they had all gone. If only we knew where to? Africa via Gibraltar is commonly suggested, but who really knows? How soon before we will be able to kit out a large enough number of swallows with tiny gps gear which could tell us all about their journeys, without seriously compromising their ability to cover the long distances they embark on? The sad fact is that in many countries they cross, miles of netting are strung up to catch them, hard to imagine why as there would be so little to eat on a swallow.

It’s lambing time down under, our friend Rachel’s small flock of sheep in the Gippsland region of Victoria have produced a gorgeous bunch of Harlequin mini meat sheep (HMMS) x Dorper lambs. It’s springtime there, there’s been rain, everywhere is green, and they are growing well.

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