C
ountryman S
o here we go again. After
some weeks
of feverish activity, everything is ready for the start of the harvest. The green goddess has had her annual make over and is now awaiting her final wash and brush up. This will not be carried out however, until the day before she ventures out down the farm road to the first field of oil seed rape. The grain stores have also been cleaned and given a new coat of paint. After many years of service the grain loading equipment was beginning to show its age. This has now been replaced with higher capacity equipment, which will please the transport firms as in theory we should cut the loading time in half. The downside was that the existing electrical supply could not cope. So in for a penny in for a pound, we renewed the lot! I just hope that I put the right wires in the right holes, because if not we could be in for a few sparks when the generator kicks in! As I write we are just a few days away
from St Swithin’s and if the 15th of July is wet we could be in for another wet harvest time. But before the combine starts to roll, the river valley hay meadows need to be cut. These meadows are part of our environmental scheme and the powers that be dictate that they can not be cut until after the 15th. The recent rain has helped to bring the grass on, but we could still be short of winter feed. It will therefore be a hay making season of two parts. After the harvest we shall start all over again and make hay of all the grass conservation strips. Although the hay will not have much feed value it will give the sheep something to pick over, as there is clover, birds foot trefoil and other legumes mixed in with the cocks foot and other coarse grasses. These grass strips have been in place for
five years and have only been topped, so a good clear mowing will do them good. Also, if we have time and the weather permits it will be a good opportunity to reseed them with wild flowers as the tall grass has tended to shade out some of the smaller slow growing species. Our higher level environment agreement has now been running for half of its 10 year period but just what will happen once the present agreement has run its course is very uncertain given all the rhetoric coming from on high. Our masters on the other side of the ditch have visions of
10 August 2011
greening up ‘pillar1’ payments (single farm payments) by adding yet more compulsive environmental regulations and inspections before being able to qualify for a reduced payment. On this side of the stream the mandarins and the witch of DEFRA are the lone wolves howling at the moon for the abolition of all farm payments using that well worn incantation so beloved by past broomstick pilots of DEFRA ‘it’s not desirable or necessary’! Not only are they looking to stop all farm payments but the simple fact is that without the farm/ environmental payments, most farming enterprises in this country would not be in a financial position to be able to take land out of production. The silver lining to all of this would be, that without the single
office, one butcher/ delicatessen, one delicatessen/tea room, one restaurant and an antique centre. the butchers shop is now a hair dressing salon, the bakers an estate agents office and one of the grocers is now a dress shop! Of the garages, one is now a housing estate, another is a dental practice and the third has become a bike shop, catering for the lycra clad weekenders and their mountain bikes! In 1974 the parish had eight farming
With George Fenemore
farm payment most of the ever increasing mountain of regulation and red tape with which we are at present hog tied would become unenforceable. Without the single farm payment many
family farms would not be viable, and the modern day trend of farms being spilt up with the house and a few acres being sold off to incoming good lifers, with the remaining land being added to the next door farm would increase. Although the additional land may improve the viability of the neighbouring farm, at the end of the day there will be less indigenous rural people living in the countryside, as the economy of scale means bigger machinery - not more employees. The writing is on the wall for most of the small village shops and post offices. This is nothing new but the situation is getting worse. When I first came to Deddington there was three grocery shops, a baker, post office/paper shop, three garages, two hardware shops and a butchers shop. Today we have one supermarket/post
enterprises, seven of which milked cows. Today there are three and no cattle which is just as well given the on going situation with bovine T.B. It is some years since I wrote about the morality of shooting thousands of cattle each year while leaving the main vector of the disease in the countryside unmolested, and kowtowing to the emotional machinations of the fluffy badger huggers. Once again the government is on the verge of announcing some form of control in the so called ‘hot spots’ and we are once again being regaled with any number of column inches from the various environmental editors of the national press. Another favourite subject of these urban ecologists is the demise of beloved bumble bees. Well perhaps the stripped villain of the dairy industry also has a paw in this as well. On a recent farm walk/nature ramble as part of the annual Deddington festival, we came across a bumble bees nest that had been dug out by a badger. Not an unusual sight in recent years. Last year I found 26 bees nests that had received the same treatment. Given the fact that the bumble bee doesn’t over winter as a colony but dies out in the late autumn having produced a number of queens that will hibernate during the winter to restart a new nest in the spring. So if each of the destroyed nests that I found last year had managed to produce five queens that survived the winter there could have been an extra 130 nests on the farm this year. Project that over a five year period and those 26 nests taken out by Mr Brock last year, had the potential of producing 81,250 nests on this farm alone! So it seems that it is not all quite as black and white as you thought after all. Ho hum, I am off haymaking even if it upsets old St Swithin.
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