time this hits the door mat, we shall once again be in that pregnant pause between the due date and the first lambs putting in an appearance. The time honoured rites of the lambing season are something that I have taken part in for more years than I care to remember. Even after 50 years of playing midwife to recalcitrant, belligerent female ovine’s however, I still look forward to the start of the lambing season as spring will soon be with us. No two seasons are ever the same and you can never say that you have seen it all before, because the old dears will always be one step ahead of you. This year however will be something of a red letter year, hopefully “Big Fred” has done his job, and I have every confidence that he has, the first pure bred Cotswold long wool (Cotswold Lion) lambs for almost 200 years will be born in Clifton! These lambs will form the basis of a new pedigree flock with the prefix Apletree. I chose this prefix as the Apletree family farmed this land in the 16th century and were Deddington Cotswold wool merchants. Despite the very cold start to the year and the need to feed oat straw when they first came in, the main ewe flock ‘mule’s’ (Swaledale X Bluefaced Leicester) seem to be in good condition, which is more than can be said for the bank balance! The shortage of hay has meant the bulk feed lorry has been arriving with alarming regularity, so we can only hope that the old Candlemas (2nd of February) rhyme will hold good; ‘if candlemas be fair and bright, winter’ll have another flight. But if Candlemas day be clouds and rain, winter is gone and will not come again’. It can only be hoped that the other well known almanac entry for the month of February (February fill dyke) will also have some credence in it, as the Clifton sea is little more than a puddle and the field drains have run dry. Perhaps old ‘El Nino’ hasn’t finished with us yet. With the lengthening days the bees are beginning to venture out. It will still be some time however, before we can put the plans for the coming season’s expansion into practice. Every thing is ready for the off. March is the ‘crunch’ month for bee keeping; feed stocks are on a knife edge with more mouths to feed as the first
C
ountryman T
he clock is ticking
and by the
of the season’s brood is being produced, a cold snap can finish them off. It is therefore time to choose the right day to take a quick look below the crown board to see what’s going on, and top up the feeders. This time I will put on my bee veil however. The last time I lifted the lids to top up the feeders, and repair some Woodpecker damage, I thought it was too cold for them to fly and went without my veil and gloves, only to receive an early and painful top up of bee venom! It seems the witch of DEFRA rides again! The new DEFRA secretary Mrs Caroline Spelman is once again the lone wolf of the EEC, howling for radical change to the present CAP regime. The Secretary of state is advocating that in the light of recent adverse weather driven price rises, all CAP farm payments should be scrapped, and the money targeted at rural development (whatever that is) and environmental benefits. This illustrates the short sightedness of the here today, gone tomorrow ethos that has pervaded the political spectrum for many years. If CAP payments were moved from Pillar1 (farm payments) to Pillar 2 (environmental payments), farm commodity values would need to rise even higher to cover the shortfall caused by the loss of farm income. Even at today’s crop values most farming enterprises would find life difficult. We are regularly told by the experts that given changing weather patterns and increasing populations we shall need to see a considerable increase in food production over the next 50 years, and our government is putting food production back up the agenda. Yet at the start of February Mrs Spelman and her cohorts at DEFRA
confused.com, issued an open letter to the farming industry of this country warning; that if its campaign for the farmed environment, was not
taken more seriously by the farming community it would consider imposing compulsory regulation, which in the end would be little more than a return to environmental set-a-side. Where does that leave we ‘dear land managers’? On the one hand we have the government professing to be pushing food production up the political agenda in the face of unrest at the increasing level of food price inflation, while on the other hand imposing any number of production reducing regulations. Perhaps misses Spelman and Paice need reminding that with the present state of agricultural technology it is only possible to grow one crop at a time on the same plot of land. To put it more simply, if the ‘dear’ land manager puts 25% of his land into environmental cropping and grows his food crops on the remaining 75% in accordance with the present regulations, he will produce less food not more. Perhaps if you apply the rules of lateral thinking there just might be some sense in all of this. Less food produced equals higher farm gate prices, higher crop values equals less need for agricultural support, less food available for the human race would lead to a reduction in the world population, which in turn would alleviate the effects of global warming. With no CAP payments there would be no claim forms to fill in and no need for the cross compliance inspector to call, thus saving a whole forest of trees and reducing the global warming effects of the gaseous emissions emitted by the inspector! So at the end of the day there might just be enough trees left for the remaining human race to climb back into! Ho hum and I haven’t even started to spend 24/7 in the lambing shed!
n
With George Fenemore
March 2011
29
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