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.