Going, going, gone...

It is a measure of how closely interwoven country folk are that a farm equipment auction can draw a huge crowd from many miles around. Retirement sales are rare and it is often everyone's last chance to say a proper goodbye before the retiring farmer pulls down his sheds and moves to sheltered accommodation within easy reach of the A30.

The retirement of a farmer always feels like the loss of a respected comrade, or a particularly well-loved shire horse. To begin with it is rare. Usually, you die on the job in some hideous accident, or you spend your twilight years interfering with how your son/nephew/grandson wants to run the farm, spending all your time letting them know how it was done in your day. I have always found it difficult to imagine that retirement existed for farmers as a group - my own grandfather was buying and selling bullocks almost to his dying day and had to a have a hip replacement at 82 years old after being trampled over by a frightened heifer. The option of a long and happy retirement is, therefore, a relatively new phenomenon in the countryside thanks to the near-doubling of land values in the past 10 years that has allowed retiring farmers the real option of the good life on a foreign beach.

Brushing sentiment aside, a farm sale can occasionally be a fantastic source of bargains if you want to mend/fix/renovate/restore your tractor/quad/water pipes/galvanised sheds, so I fired up the Isuzu, put on my best tweed and went to look for bargains in Tedburn St Mary.

The experience was both invigorating and rather surreal. Builders scavenged for cheap timber, while hobbyists paid way over the odds for knackered out old calf feeders and sheep races. The lots included some antique chamber pots (sold as a job lot, the auctioneer told us) and some fine cider jars and demi-johns, which I snapped up for £40, alongside an eclectic collection of chainsaws, tools, sinks and tractors. The detritus of an entre career on the land illustrated that it is impossible to throw anything away on a farm as it might just come in handy one day. No doubt other sales will come up and much of the same stuff will end up back on the market, which also proves the point of the Yorkshire saying: "Buy cheap, buy two..." A good friend of mine from Bradford had to explain to me that this meant that quality told in the end. I explained that a similar saying doesn't exist in German as quality is taken as a given in the Fatherland. In the end, you'll get what you pay for, but it was a nice day out, nonetheless, and the cider jars look nice on the mantelpiece.    

The long road ahead

A busy summer has left little time for blogging as us farmers gear up for winter busily gathering in the last of the hay and generally looking forward to several months of relative quiet. The natural break that nature takes between November and February is a good time to take stock of where the farm is going and what still needs to be done to get the business on its feet.

So, here is a balance sheet of what has been achieved:

1) The herd is in place and has settled in well.

Apart from an outbreak of new forest fly (a rather nasty weeping eye disease that can cause blindness if left untreated) the cows have adapted quickly to the moor-like ground that dominates around here. Luckily Aberdeen Angus are tough hill cattle and can cope easily with varying grass quality and rapid changes in temperature. They have spent most of the summer in the lower flood meadows eating wild garlic and testing the quality of the fences.

2) The books are in order.

If mostly showing red at the moment, the "Teach Yourself Book Keeping" course has paid off and I never realised the joy of a perfectly balanced account ledger. It is liberating. Try it one day.

3) There is plenty of food for the winter.

There is absolutely no danger of running out of hay this year. The grass yield was up 50 per cent on this time last year and we have more bales than we know what to do with. However, the old country saying goes "If it grows, then winter knows," in other words, a dry, cold winter more often than not follows a good growing season so you'll be glad of the surplus.  

3) Prince Charles is paying me.

Well, not directly, but through sponsored courses on "Holistic Grassland Management" at Bicton College. I am not sure whether this involves reading poetry to the pasture, but Brian's contribution is much appreciated and more than justifies the civil list and centuries of unearned privilege, in my view.  

As in any balance sheet, there are equaling negatives:

1) I need more fencing than East Germany.

Though not in bad nick, the cattle are going to test our 25 year fence posts eventually, witness the day of the rampaging bullock ("Close Encounters of the Herd Kind"). This has got to be paid for somehow and it looks like my reparation payment from Germany's taxpayers has already been spent well before Christmas.

2) The Beef price is going through the floor.

Commodities are getting cheaper and farming is not unaffected. Deadweight beef retails at 350p a kilo, down from 380p/kilo since the start of the year, not helped by the supermarkets tearing each other to pieces. This doesn't affect me directly as I have nothing yet to sell, but a glut of beef has come on the market this year and pushed prices down. On the other hand, the cost of inputs has fallen too - petrol, diesel, corn, barley are all moving downwards which means farm margins are starting to improve despite the price slump.

3) I spend most of my time wearing check shirts.

I used to do this when I was a journalist as a way of getting out of wearing suits, but nowadays it is more like a uniform or badge of office. I occasionally wear a pin stripe suit on trips to Exeter just for a change.

Overall, things aren't looking too bad as we enter the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. We just have to get over the contrived awfulness of Harvest Festival, which these days is usually a fund-raising lecture for Wateraid, and then it'll be mulled wine and scaring the spirits out of the apple orchard. 

Life lessons from a deer stalker

In some ways talking to people exclusively about one subject is a liberating experience. We have all been to parties where hipsters spout off about the latest pop-up restaurants in Dalston, or world traveller types insist on telling you at length about their encounters with pygmies (I like to think they have secretly eaten one) all of which leaves you feeling inadequate and open to drinking too much as an escape from the conversation.

The greatest difference I have found between the countryside and the city is even though the countryside contains far fewer people, your friends and acquaintances fall into strictly defined categories. There are the people you bond with over machinery, hay making, whist down the pub, or traditional country pursuits like shooting and fishing, but the essentially solitary nature of the work means there is hardly any crossover. Instead, in a city like London, where there are a thousand different professions, a common appreciation of the rituals of office life acts like a social glue that binds everyone together in shared frustration. 

By contrast I spent a happy evening chatting to Bob. Bob is a self-confessed stalker but you would only be in danger if you were a deer, a fox or rabbit. He is a crack shot, one of the best in Devon, and knows an awful lot about guns. This is what we always talk about when leaning on the fence as the sun goes down on the valley. I secretly covet his superb collection of custom-made rifles, with their Second World War-era Mauser bolt actions and Swarovski scopes.

The evening had gone just like any other. I watched in awe as Bob unleashed a fusillade of near constant shots into the vegetation targeting the critters that had been devastating my mum's peas. He never misses and we had just finished paunching the 18 rabbits he had bagged that evening when, much to my surprise, he asked me about my own relationship, and not with firearms: 

"It finished just after Christmas rather messily," I said.

 "I am sorry to hear that. I have always found women to be such strange creatures," (presumably because they aren't really into shooting deer, I thought) "They never seem happy to let you go off on your own and do things." It is always awkward when someone bears part of their soul to you over a basin full of rabbit guts, so I asked whether what sort of .22 ammunition he likes to use in order to bring us back to safer ground.

Thinking about it later, though, it seemed the most profound statement about the human condition I had heard in a long long time...

"Miss Potter, you say?" 

Close encounters of the herd kind

Some friends from the Southeast down on a visit recently asked me whether I had any regrets about dropping journalism, and a busy life in London, in exchange for chasing after cattle and mending fences in the blazing (for Devon) midday heat. As we sat under umbrellas on the front lawn drinking chilled Meantime Lager enjoying a pleasant salad Nicoise lunch the obvious answer was no. The answer to that question is still no, though we are all prone to self doubt occasionally. 

I thought of that conversation after a particularly close encounter with an angry Limousin bullock the other day. In fact four thoughts, in consecutive order, in the form of rhetorical questions flashed through my mind as I stared at a seething mountain of angry steak:

1) Was investment writing really so tedious? Yes it was. 

2) Can I sprint 400m to the nearest gate in wellies? No. 

3) Why did I choose a red T-shirt this morning? Oh dear.

4) I can't see any, so it must have been done? I hope. 

It is somewhat irrational to think of your career at moments of extreme peril, but I suppose there is never really an ideal time to question the choices you have taken in life, particularly if a mad bullock decides that going through you is the shortest route to the exit.  What had happened was that a cow belonging to my neighbour Martin had decided that my land was the equivalent of paradise and had trashed three of my fences in a quasi-jihadist frenzy in order to reach it. It chased my placid, sweet-natured Aberdeen Angus cattle around the field and smashed up all of the electric fencing. In short, it was wild, well, at the very least livid. 

I'd like to say that I wrestled it to the ground like they showed us at Bicton college. The technique is to stick your fingers in its nose in order to trigger a pacifying response, then twist it the ground. However, when the opportunity to try this out presented itself, I chickened out and legged it instead. Martin eventually came around with a team to herd it back to its doubtless worried family. 

This illustrates a serious farming point, and a lesson well learned: don't be conditioned by the behaviour of your own animals when dealing with other people's. 

Temperament is difficult to explain, but you know it when you see it. Angus cattle have been bred specifically for easy handling as it saves time and allows the cows to be left outside more. Limousin are selected for size, and not much else, which means they have a tendency to run amok if given the chance. This obviously reflects their tempestuous Gallic heritage. It is like having a particularly moody French girlfriend, with the one positive that you have the option of barbecuing her at some point. 

Anyway, I survived long enough to write this entry, but next time I won't walk the lower ten acres without my trusty stick. 

Raw hide comes to The Valley

I have been asked why the posts dried up rather in May after a flurry of writing. The simple answer is that in farming there are times of year when there really isn't much to do. The animals are out enjoying the sunshine and eating fresh grass, most of the land clearance work has been done and hay making is still a few weeks away. In short, you tend to see more men wearing check patterned shirts in Exeter looking slightly lost in an urban environment. Rather, us country dwellers have been gearing up for the summer, with the sound of tractors being serviced, gates oiled and the often vicious annual arguments with contractors over who gets their hay cut first... 

In short, there has been a lull when I have been tending my mother's several dozen hectares of flower beds and reflecting on whether that philosophy degree was really worth it. The good news, though, is that I have finally bought my cows (!) after an enjoyable trip to Brixham to see some Aberdeen Angus cattle at Waddeton, which we can add to the growing list of places in Devon that I have never even got close to visiting. 

As you can see from the photos, they are indeed fine beasts, with impeccable pedigrees and a very quiet temperament. Aberdeen's are perfect for what I want to do at the farm. They can live out all year, thrive on a pure grass diet and the meat is second to none. The thing to look for is a straight back which indicates the potential to grow to a good size when mature. These are barely 1 year old heifers and require at least another season before they can be put the to the bull. 

The other choice would been to for a continental breed like Limousin or Charolais, which are the staple of commercial cattle operations. They are huge cows and pack a lot of lean meat, however, they are also decidedly vicious, mostly, my NFU contact tells me, because when British buyers first imported them from France in the 1950s, canny French farmers sold them their most awkward and troublesome animals and the genetics have stayed in the herd ever since. Also, I find it hard to rate the meat they produce as Charolais, for example, were bred as cart hauling animals, rather than for flavour. 

With half a dozen Aberdeens to begin with, it is hardly an episode of "Bonanza", but remember that herds can double in size every year and within five years there should be enough animals here to make it worth the effort. 

Now I just have to finish that book on tending grass-fed cattle which I have put off in favour of the latest Bernie Gunther story...

Notes on a scandal

I never thought it possible that the horizon could be filled with the fire of burning animals.

The recent death former president of the National Farmers Union (NFU) Sir Ben Gill, who died aged just 64, triggered a lot of surprisingly bitter debate about the tenure of a man who will forever associated with some of the most turbulent and difficult times in modern farming. Sir Ben can count himself almost singularly unlucky that both Mad Cow disease, which resulted in an export ban on a British beef that lasted almost 15 years, and the foot and mouth crisis both occurred on his watch. In short, he had to take some tough decisions at a time when the Labour government knew next to nothing about rural issues; in the interests of balance, the Conservatives are scarcely better as the rural wing actually represents the Barbour jacket types more than actual farmers, which is why you see a lot of UKIP posters around here. It was therefore no exaggeration to say that he became the most powerful man in Britain, after the prime minister, during the time of the foot and mouth crisis in 2001.

On the face of it, Mad Cow disease and foot and mouth (a virus which can be passed to humans) bear little in common. One is naturally occurring, usually through poor animal husbandry - in this case the under-heating of pigswill - while the other resulted from poorly treated animal-based protein being introduced back into the food chain. It was very much the result of grievous human error after some hefty lobbying by the feed industry lowered the safety standards for protein recycling in the late 1980s. What both crises illustrated, however, is that the notion of farming as a seamless industrial enterprise that could be managed in much the same way as car manufacturing turned out to be acomplete fallacy. 

It is difficult to remember quite how grim agri-business was in the 1970s and 1980's. A deliberate policy of centralising animal slaughter and distribution networks meant many local slaughter houses closed.The one in our area was next to the riding school, which was a bit hairy as the horses would sometimes bolt if they got a whiff of dead meat. That too was eventually closed down which meant that animals had to be transport at least 20 miles to be killed. The upshot was that more animals were having to go longer distances, with hauliers being the only real beneficiaries; hauliers are the real aristocracy in country areas as they get paid for transporting animals no matter how bad the prices are at market. Therefore, with the stage set, the onset of foot and mouth in 2001 was far worse than any previous outbreak as animal transport played a much bigger role in spreading the disease in the initial phases.

Which brings us into whether the policy of culling 10 million otherwise healthy animals was justified. The rationale for the cull, which the NFU supported, was based on statistical research carried out by hitherto unknown academics at Imperial College called Roy Anderson and Neil Ferguson. It was controversial at the time  as neither had any real expertise in the specific field of animal disease. Private Eye published a special report in 2002 that rubbished most of the computer modelling that Imperial College used, drawing the conclusion that it was primarily used because it predicted an end to foot and mouth that coincided with the date that Tony Blair had chosen that year's delayed general election. The end result was that the cull was probably 10 times larger than should ever have been the case.

Let's not understate the damage this caused to the rural economy. There are few people in the Devon countryside that didn't know someone who was traumatised by the experience. Not only did it destroy livelihoods and end generations of farming in some areas, it also caused bitter divisions between the traditional big landed farming interests, who benefited the most from subsequent compensation payments, and the small-scale family businesses that are still apparent, and the question of whether farmers' leadership failed comprehensively is still open to debate. 

La Vita e Bella

"So, you have decided to become a peasant?" Was the first reaction of Italian cousins to news that I had decided to switch over to beef farming from journalism. I was in Italy for Easter after hitching a ride with my parents and I was trying to explain the complex rationale behind the decision, while at the same time trying to work out what 'life change' might be in Italian without referring inadvertently to some sort of painful transformative operation. 

"In England we call it becoming a gentleman farmer," I said.

"But you still have to shovel crap?," my cousin replied.

"Well, yes."

"So you are a peasant."

I gave up explaining at that point. There are few words more loaded with meaning in Italian than 'contadino' (peasant) and it tends to be used exclusively in a pejorative sense i.e. He is such a contadino, meaning uncouth, ignorant and unrefined. This is in many ways the ultimate insult to an Italian as the majority of the population are perhaps only one or two generations, at most, from the land and can't the bear the possibility of returning to their roots. In their eyes, they had the good sense to disappear years ago into the heart of urban Italy where jobs are better paid and the possibility of escaping your mother is greater. This is why Tuscany, Le Marche, Puglia and Sicily are full of the empty farm houses that British buyers love to renovate, and which are then burgled by organised Albanian gangs.  

It is understandable then why in the industrial north, where my family come from, that the notion of willingly returning to a less profitable and harder working way of life makes little sense. However, there maybe a slowly changing attitude driven by Italy's almost interminable economic crisis. To visit the country is to realise how lucky we are to have never entered the Euro. The entire place is littered with half completed building projects and unused apartments - Veneto alone is estimated to have 220,000 empty industrial and residential properties for which there are no buyers at all. The negative flip side to this is that youth unemployment is hovering at 40 per cent, while farming is starting to look attractive as a source of possible employment. Italian farms benefit from higher subsidies because of their smaller size, while at the same time growing highly commercial cash crops like soya and grapes. Also there is no currency risk as subsidies are paid in Euros. It is unsurprising, then, that young entrepreneurs have come out of university and gone back to revitalise the long abandoned family plot with agri tourism ventures or brand-new wine production facilities.

Grape growing in particular seems to have taken off to an extent that was unimaginable 20 years ago. The reason for this is that international food supply chains have grown longer and longer. Italian grape surpluses are often shipped to regions in Europe where there is a shortage and the same is true of grapes from Georgia and increasingly Armenia. The key point is that grapes are then fermented and bottled in the nominal country of origin, which is why producers can say "made in France/Germany/Italy" on their wares. However, like everything else, our food and drink is subject to the inevitable market force that home production cannot meet international demand, so must be bulked out somehow. For the most part, the system works well, until you find a horse in your lasagne. Pass the Barolo....

Asolo, also known as the jewel of Veneto, or the city of a 100 beautiful views. Hemingway got drunk here once. 

Down the deep lanes

The farming project has hit a hurdle, in this case what appears to be a global shortage of hurdles. There are apparently no metal gates with sheeting to be found anywhere in the United Kingdom for at least another three months. No one knows why, though I suspect the number of crush barriers evident at the London Marathon has a role to play.

Luckily, stoicism comes with the job and I have, in any case, rapidly adjusted to the peculiar demands of"farmer time." This is where any job carried out by a contractor, supplier, neighbour or friend takes a minimum of 6 months from the first approach and filters down as far as adding an extra hour to an agreed meeting time at the pub. Everyone understands the system as farmers are not really constrained by deadlines, as such, but rather the cycle of the seasons; if it is suddenly sunny and settled you cut the hay rather than disappear to a dinner party agreed three months in advance. On the other hand, it is never wise to lend money to people who think in terms of seasonal solstices, which also rules out Druids and warlocks of all kinds. 

The delay is frustrating enough to make me wonder whether I couldn't galvanize a load of steel myself in one of the old sheds. My neighbour tells is that all you need is an acid bath and a load of molten nickel so it can't really be that difficult. The gates are vital because cattle now need penning for regular TB testing and the only way to pursuade a 450 kg heffer to cooperate is to herd it into a crush and lock it tight with a yoke. The other method, which I had to learn at Bicton college, is to subdue a cow by sticking your fingers in its nose and locking its head back tight. In theory it won't go anywhere, and neither would you if a burly farmer stuck his fingers in your nose. Anyway, no gates means no cows for now. So I am instead going to Italy to see the family. 

I did have an interesting trip to see a cattle crush in North Devon. Unfortunately it was too small for my chosen animals, but it was a fascinating trip into James Ravilious country. North Devon is defined as North of the A30 corridor and boy doesn't it take a long time to get there. The total remoteness of the area has conspired to preserve the last of the small tenanted farms in Devon from an invasion of pony paddocks and commuters. North Devon villages are the last place to see proper tumbledown barns and acres and acres of corrugated iron roofs in their full rusting glory. It is rather like the Devon I remember from my childhood when a decent cottage in Ashton cost £10,000. Anyway, James Ravilious, son of the artist Eric Ravilious, documented the lives of North Devon folk as part of the Beaford archive. This is well worth checking out as one of the great social documentary experiments in modern Britain. Ravilious took over 60,000 photos as part of his effort to capture the landscape and nothing better defines a labour of love. 

Deutschland over all

I disappeared from the farm for a few days to visit friends in Frankfurt. I had had enough of hedge clearing and chainsawing and decided to return to the land of my fathers to swap agricultural for cultural pursuits. 

My friends have moved from London to a small village, really an outer suburb of Frankfurt, and have made quite a stir. To begin with they don't own a car, which marks them out as dangerously subversive in such a car mad culture, and secondly they dared to buy a wreck of a house and renovate it much like the British would do. Now the Germans are not afraid to proffer an opinion if they think it is in your best interest, so it was no surprise that the next door neighbour actually came out, uninvited, to tell them while they were moving in that they were making a mistake in buying the place. I can testify that the only problem with the house is that it stands next to the neighbour's ugly 1980s block of flats. 

Inevitably, it isn't long before observations about german farms start creeping in and it was interesting to note the differences in farming culture between the UK and Germany. To begin with, walking around a German village you can still detect the smell of a manure pile in even the most yummy mummy of family areas. This is the result of an accident of history which means that instead of wild and lonely Devon-style farmhouses, most German farms are located within a village limits for security and mutual defence. Unlike our culture, which has seen few real instances of burning and pillage since the civil war, or a night out in Torquay on a Saturday, German farmers have faced a succession of invasions and preying robber barons over the centuries. Sticking together made sense, even if in a modern context everyone is likely to moan about the smell of your barns. Indeed, village manure piles can be a hazard, I remember my father had to rescue "a tired and emotional" neighbour who failed to negotiate the bend leading to his house and ended up in the local farmer's muck heap. 

Inevitably, the business side is harder in Germany as farms are universally small and landownership tends to get split up by inheritance claims - in Germany you have "Erberecht" (the right to your inheritance) which often condemns farms to be endlessly subdivided amongst squabbling siblings. However, the basic smallscale of the system works to its avantage. The European subsidy system tends to reward such enterprises with higher payments, which combined with far lower costs (no need for tractors if your animals are shut in a barn all the time) means a relatively better living. To illustrate the point, while I was in Germany, the Suddeutsche Zeitung had a rather good interview with a young German dairy farmer who had just been named "Bavarian milker of the year". Bizarrely, this is based on a theory test (?) but the most interesting point in the interview was this young man could make a living out of a mere 160 dairy cows.  British farmers would look on in envy at this as 350 is now considered the minimum level of economic viability for milking herds. 

So, in conclusion, in the Fatherland small is beautiful when it comes to agriculture (agrikultur?) which doesn't apply to cars, or thankfully, beer. 

The cost of efficiency

So, I have to buy a cattle crush, which apart from the obvious pleasure of imagining who you would like to put in it, is a hefty bit of capital outlay for what will be a fairly small herd of Aberdeen Angus cattle. Luckily, my rural payment agency cheque should cover it (thank you German taxpayers) but purchasing this relatively simple device illustrates some of the difficult investment decisions farmers have to make in order to guarantee a reasonable living. 

To begin with, like everyone else, farmers are subject to the almost constant hard sell to replace, renew, rebuild and retire any old capital equipment; a new tractor every three years, lots of new fencing every 20, along with an endless variety of seed drills, slurry tankers, pressure hoses and biodigestors. The farming press draws the majority of its income from equipment manufacturers which is why some publications are nothing but wall-to-wall adverts for New Holland and Massey Ferguson. However, the real debate is whether the industry has reached a point where capital investment just isn't delivering the returns to justify the huge outlay. 

It used to be so simple. From 1945 to 2010, if you bought new equipment, dumped more artificial fertiliser on your fields and stuffed animals full of American grown soya beans your yield went up ten per cent a year, which justified the expense of a new combine harvester because the finance cost ate up only a small proportion of the increased efficiency. However, for reasons which aren't really cut and dried, around 5 years ago the efficiency increases that farming had enjoyed suddenly stopped. The rise of China as a major dairy and meat consuming nation is often cited by town-based experts as a reason for this, but here in the countryside the whispered conversation is that most of us are at the limit of what we can realistically produce without building the kind of mega dairies and beef sheds that everyone hates. The result is felt in consumers pockets as the prices for many staples has doubled in real terms in just a few years. 

Farming being the curious industry that it is, the response to the efficiency gap has been, perversely, to become deliberately less efficient. Feeding your animals by hand with a wheel barrow and a pitchfork was what my grandfather used to do, and seems both quaint and romantic, but it is also cheap compared with buying a £50,000 automatic feeder that won't deliver that extra bit of return. The imperative then becomes to preserve your margins by keeping costs as low as possible because this is inherently cheaper than chasing diminishing yields - we can also look forward to the return of hayricks and, hopefully, given the cost of hiring contractors these days, indentured serfs. 

Bizarrely this is also why it has become impossible to buy a second-hand small tractor at anything like a reasonable price; what many farmers in Devon have found is that although the new tractors have air conditioning and you can listen to Led Zepelin on an MP3 player, they are too big to handle the lanes and the steep contours of the fields. Also fixing them requires a PHD in mechanical engineering, which is why a lot of old Massey Ferguson tractors have been quietly rescued from the nettles and reconditioned at the fraction of a cost of a new model. There is one farmer in the village who's Fordson tractor is so old that it needs an emptied out shotgun cartridge banged with a hammer into a special hole in order to spark it into life. The main point is that they work and with nothing more than two sizes of spanner and a screwdriver you can maintain it yourself without too much trouble. 

In conclusion, I defer to the wisdom of my ever quotable neighbour who's views on the subject are clear cut: "Some of my gear is so old that it is starting to appreciate in value." Amen to that. 

Trusted and reliable: an old Massey Ferguson. 

 

A cross-compliance to bear

The reality that farming has becomes an industry as tightly regulated as pharmaceuticals, or arms exports, is brought home by the fact that the Government department that runs farming, DEFRA, referred to universally as "the ministry" (or more quietly as the Department for the Eradication of Farming and Rural Activity) has almost vice regal powers when it comes to the organisation of your farming business. If you take some sort of subsidy, and let's face it every farmer does, then the pay-off in return for the payment, is the requirement to follow a thicket of regulations that runs to several large file PDFs on the ministry's website. Build your muck pile slightly the wrong shape, or plough too close to a field edge and the full bureaucratic might of the State is called down upon you. 

It is the nature of bureaucracies that they only really punish the essentially law abiding, but getting to the point where officialdom is content to leave you alone requires levels of effort and concentration that can be distracting. For example, learning the precise way the government wants you to cut a hedge can seem like a waste of effort when your slurry tanker has sprung a leak. The answer is to go and listen to management consultants explain to bemused farmers what exactly is expected of them.

So it was with the heaviest of hearts that I had to go to a so-called "cross-compliance" presentation in Ogwell (another place in Devon that I had never heard of). I put on my best tweeds, fired up the Isuzu and prepared myself mentally to be bored rigid for three hours, with the only comfort being that Defra had thoughtfully organised the conference in the local pub. 

In the event, it was more interesting than I had expected. I turned up late trailing papers and cradling a glass of freshly bought cider only to realise that A) I was radically over-dressed in pristine check shirt, newsboy flat cap and Barbour shooting waistcoat to be anything other than a former townie B) I was the only one visibly drinking. The old Devonian in front of me turned around, looked me up and down and said: "s'pose takes all sorts" with a practiced air of resignation. 

The major issue in farming is how farmers can be weaned off the European subsidies that many have come to regard as their natural right. The next big reorganisation is in the offing, hence the frenetic round of meetings. The problem is soon that as you subsidise anything the distortions in the market start to creep in. 

For example, subsidy used to be paid per head of cattle to the point where carcasses were being held in cold storage for up to five years because of massive over-production; milk lakes and butter mountains were all a side-effect of the CAP system in the '80s and '90s. The system has since been reformed to emphasise land stewardship, but the side-effect has been that it is now more profitable to build luxury ponds for newts and five star flower accommodation for butterflies than actually do any farming. The resulting falls in headdage of sheep and cattle has contributed to the near doubling of meat prices in the past five years, which is why a lot of restaurants now serve Bavette, or flank of beef, as it is a cheap enough to preserve their margins but has the approximate taste of a prime cut. 

Anyway, the conclusion of three hours of talking was that we are all going to lose up to 11 per cent of our EU grants by 2015. This caused surprisingly little reaction from the audience, which I quizzed my next door farmer neighbour about - he had also come to the conference. He said "You have to remember that farmers are fundamentally positive people." I laughed so hard that people in the front rows turned around. "What about that farmer from Trusham who is so negative that people will only socialise with him over silent games of whist?." 

"There are always exceptions," came the reply. 

Back to Devon

The suspicion that colour supplements in Sunday newspapers sell an unrealistic and idealised version of country life lurks behind any decision to leave London and settle back in the provinces. Not only are you leaving an absurdly wealthy city state that offers a plethora of cultural and employment opportunities, but the fear is that once made, it is a choice that will inevitably lead to regret.

In blogging my experiences of giving up a career in journalism and taking up farming during possibly the financially least stable periods in the modern history of agriculture, I hope this will be inspirational to some people, or a salutary warning on the folly of trying to find that greener patch of grass. Either way, I hope to prove that a satisfactory life outside of a major conurbation is possible and available to people who aren't already wealthy liberals. 

Devon is a huge and diverse county, but for point of reference, the action takes place in the Haldon range of hills just outside Exeter. The contrast is huge, the very inaccessibility of the steep sided valleys that dominate the approaches to the Teign valley makes development almost impossible on a large scale and has helped to preserve some of the area's natural charm. But, while outwardly little has changed since the Norman invasion, there is a sub-strata of subtle shifts in lifestyle and population that is mirrored in the wider countryside.

To begin with, it is interesting that farming survives in the valley with a surprising resilience that can only be described as astounding Partly it is because the land has little alternative use. It can't be flattened, building new infrastructure is a nightmare and Devonians are a fairly cussed group of rugged individuals anyway. It has always been the case around here that small family farms averaging around 100 acres of land have barely been able to support their occupants. Hill farming in whatever context has always been tough, which is why everyone has a supplementary skill. 

There aren't many small-scale farmers that don't hire out their skills as contractors or builders to the highest bidder and, having had to do this for generations, in a way strengthens the sentimental (with the emphasis on mental) bond to the land. It is true that grazing horses are an increasing feature of the landscape, with pony paddocks and their odd, intrusive fencing marching across the landscape like an invading army, but the essential spirit of small-scale farming seems to permeate the valleys in a way that is strangely comforting.