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. 

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.