Reasons to be cheerful

Sometimes there are a few things that come our way all at once that make us unhappy. It is useful to remember though that somewhere hopefully there will be some nuggets of something positive. As this blog ACTUALLY deals with food and farming rather than general health and wellbeing here are some agricultural reasons to be cheerful:

1. General trend for pesticide use is down

See here 

2. Farmers are using less man made fertiliser 

 See here

3. Milk prices for hard pressed dairy farmers are looking rosier

See here 

4. Over time there has been increasing amounts of land in agri-environment schemes

See here

5. Also, Higher Level Stewardship shows a positive trend

See here

6. The trend for nasty stuff going in water is down down down

See here

7. Stupid people are tipping less crap in places they shouldn't be 

See here

Enjoy your day and remember that it is often helpful to think of the good things.

Larder-da

With thanks to Guy Smith for the title of this blog post, this was pilfered from him.

Guy wrote an illuminating piece in FW last week following the new NFU campaign entitled 'Back British Farming' with the news that if all of the home produced food was consumed concurrently, we would have run out by the 14th August. As Guy noted in his piece, the national larder is bare and this is not good news.

Fast forward to a silly Bank Holiday conversation on Twitter earlier today. Bypassing the big discussion on the future of agricultural production for another day, a few of us quickly segued into a discussion on the place where we keep food at home.

Who has a larder these days? Is it a larder, or is it a pantry? Is this a north/south thing? I used to deliver milk to an old lady who had to have milk delivered every day fresh because she didn't have a fridge, she kept everything in the 'pantry.' Another old lady didn't have this, but had a stone slab in the cellar which kept everything very cold. We used to have one in our house in Leeds as well. Turns out, this is called a 'thrawl.'

Do  these even exist in modern homes? Is there some link between how we source, keep and cook food at home - that essentially we don't need to think too much about this as we used to - with what has happened to our self sufficiency? When buying food we can get just about get whatever we need whenever we need it, and over time successive governments have taken a similar approach.

Obviously, things have to change. In the meantime, here are some ridiculous pictures of pantries:

"I bake cakes and I have a dog called Hector."

"I haven't eaten anything that isn't out of a tin since 1994."

"The ladder yah, is vintage, we use it in the pantry and in the library. So versatile."

"I am nuts."

Review: 'A Greedy Man in a Hungry World' by Jay Rayner

I used to be a committed Guardian reader. My final year course tutor at agricultural college (he of bow ties, red socks and a beard like George V) informed us all that if we had any chance of getting a degree then we must must must read a good quality daily newspaper. This, he said, holding up a Guardian, is the only newspaper you need. He had a point; they do a good run in food, international development and environmental coverage. 

I read only the Guardian for ages. Then after a while I started muttering to myself while I was reading it. I started whispering obscenities under my breath at the letters page, and making derisive snorts when reading some back-slapping feature about a couple from Islington who had given up their jobs and moved to raise chickens, knit bespoke placemats and make their own yoghurt on a smallholding in Wales. 

Surprisingly, Jay Rayner, restaurant critic for the Guardian's sister-paper the Observer, is his new book 'A Greedy Man in a Hungry World' is likely to raise hairs on the very people I have just mentioned. This book; part critique of the modern food industry, part memoir, shines a light on our attitudes towards food and will probably make uncomfortable reading for some. He doesn't hold back, giving his views on supermarkets, GM, biofuels and meat eating with an insightful and engaging mix of investigative journalism, family history and his own experience as a self confessed 'greedy bastard.'

He thinks we all need to get real about food, and I agree with him. He bemoans the ridiculous polarised discussions that go on in relation to food; where 'any form of mass production or mass retailing is an evil' and that while our local farmers market and our allotments make us feel good, to produce 50% more by 2030 as the UN suggests the 'holy trinity of local, seasonal and organic just won't cut it.'

The book starts from this juncture: that the future of how we feed ourselves is not black and white, that there is a lot wrong with the food industry, but a solution based on a 'fantasy, mythologised version of agriculture' helps no one. This book sets out to provide some realism in an important discussion that is often lacking any, whatever your view of what the future holds. Or in Jay Rayner's view - he proposes a move towards a 'New Gastronomics.'

He makes it clear that this is a tricky thing to do, bearing in mind that most folk actually know very little about the realities of farming, retailing and the wider food industry. This is summed up in the title of the first couple of chapters - 'Supermarkets are not evil' followed by 'Supermarkets are evil.' Sounds like the beginnings of a contradictory book? Yes, in part, but Rayner admits that. We're all contradictory when it comes to our food choices. We can all plump up our chests and buy our artisan food at the farmers market, then drop into Tesco on the way home and think nothing of topping up with a few special offers. 'Supermarkets make things cheaper' says Rayner. 'They just do.'

Rayner notes that supermarkets have revolutionised the way we buy food, and there are many people of a certain age (I would count my late grandmother in this) who would most certainly not like to go back to how it used to be. Highlighting the economic reality of what supermarkets have done for food prices, he notes that that in the early post war years you had to 'work until Wednesday morning to pay for the family's weekly shop, now you'll have earned enough by some time just after noon on Monday.'

Yes, yes, yes, I can hear many farmers shouting, this is the whole bloody problem. Just look what supermarkets have done, look at their profits and look at what some of their practices have done to the farming industry. I think Jay Rayner would agree with them. But he would also provide a fairly cutting retort like he does in the book: 'This is business. This is what supermarkets do. Complaining about a supermarket chasing the cheapest price is like wandering into a brothel and complaining about all the shagging going on in there.' Ouch.

This sounds like he isn't on the side of the farmer, when he quite clearly is. He is just a realist. He covers, literally, a lot of ground in this book. At times it is contradictory, and at times it is complicated, but then so is the food industry. He summarises by noting that we need to 'embrace a new economic model around our food, one which is flexible and non-doctrinal.' For the moment he says, it does make the most sense, on balance to buy the food grown in our own country where possible. 'It's not about nationalism,' he says 'it's not about patriotism, it's about cash: buying what farmers produce helps them to invest. The more they can invest, the more sustainable a model they can reach for.' Tick!

I gave a resounding nod to Rayner's final sign off - 'It's time we had a very close look at all the assumptions we have been fed about the world of food. We need to stop reacting emotionally and start thinking realistically. We need to read the numbers, understand the maths and focus on the science. Be in no doubt: all of this is far too important for us to risk getting it wrong.' 

I devoured this book, and I suggest that you will, too. 

Shear Pleasure

Sometimes you just need some time away. I have just come back to Brussels from a week in Scotland. I spent the biggest chunk of the week shearing sheep with a good friend of mine who is a shearing contractor in Aberdeenshire.  

Shearing is a great leveller, and also binds people together. I first learnt when I was 16 after I took myself off to a course on a farm in Lancaster, and I am still friends with people from that time. I then tried and tried after that to get on to as many farms as possible. I hate driving machinery and I am also terrible at it, so my route to gain farm experience was through shearing. It worked.

You're either serious about shearing, or you leave the job to someone else. I love it. It is sweaty, hard work and most farmers are more than happy to call it a spectator sport, roll wool and make cups of tea instead. Shearing for me is a way to think about nothing in particular for a while - I am too busy concentrating on holding the sheep, making a good job and gently perspiring in the agricultural equivalent of running a marathon in a sauna. 

I was hotter than the actual sun for most of the week

I have done a fair bit of thinking since. Re-wind. I read this before I went away. I read this often. And this. I went to a meeting in Brussels on sustainable agriculture where the platform was dominated by an anti-pesticide campaigner with no room for moderate debate. I get into Twitter debates about animal welfare. I went to the Natural History Museum in London recently and saw their wildly outdated depiction of modern agriculture. Then yesterday I read this.

You know what? I don't recognise this as the farming industry I have just been practically involved in for the past week. I didn't see millionaire subsidy junkies; I saw farmers building their businesses on what of late has been little return. I didn't see huge faceless agribusiness operating; I saw family farms working hard to make sure their farm was in a better state for the future. I didn't see a barren decimated landscape; I saw rolling productive countryside and farmers bursting with pride in the sunshine. I was bursting with pride myself.

And here I am back in Brussels. I can still feel a twinge in the bottom of my back, and I know that this week away has done me some good. I am reminded why I do what I do. Next year when I go shearing, I think I'll invite George, Mark and Philip. We could get a holiday cottage together. I could take them to meet some farmers I know. I could teach them to shear sheep if they fancied it. 

Wouldn't we have a lovely time in the countryside together?  

Thoughts on the State of Nature

All over the news this morning is the 'State of Nature' report that has been developed by a coalition of 25 environment NGO's.

You can read all about the report here, and I think there is a launch event with David Attenborough today. Take a read of the full report here. It talks about two-thirds of species being in decline. I need to read the report in full (it is pretty lengthy) and my initial thought process is from the headlines in the press. 

 

The Today programme has led with the report this morning, and it was noted that 'the culprits are the usual subjects - intensification of agriculture and urban sprawl. Business as usual is not acceptable.'

I think it is pretty obvious that business as usual is not acceptable, but I am not sure that 'the usual culprits' in the form of the intensification of farming tells the whole story. It looks to me like farming has been doing anything but intensifying in the past few years.

It seems to me that there has been a huge amount of work done by farmers who have realised that business as usual (and by this we presume the report means very intensive agriculture with negative environmental impacts) is not the way to operate.

I thought I would take a look at few graphs dotted around because it is easier for me to see things in a picture.

 

This is what fertiliser use looks like at the moment:

This is from here - take a look

This is what water quality in rivers looks like:


You can see this here on page 22 

This is how much we spend on biodiversity (which has dropped recently, presumably with government cutbacks):



Take a look at this here on page 42

This is what the Farmland Bird Index looks like - used as a wider barometer of the health of the countryside:



You can see this here as well, on page 61

On these figures farmland birds continue to decline, but at a much lower rate than over the past 40 years. Yes, there is much work to do. I hope however that the report takes account of all of the work that farmers are doing highlighted in the graphs above, and the record numbers of those in agri-enviornment schemes. It will be interesting to see what the effect of the crazy weather we have had of late has on the environment in the future as well. There is much to discuss.

 

Perhaps the most interesting underlying graph in all of this is the one related to how much the UK spends on biodiversity. We are in the final stages of CAP reform, and it is clear that the relationship between pillar 1 payments direct to farmers and pillar 2 payments for rural development and the environment will be even sharper in focus very shortly. The 'State of Nature' report is a line in the sand in this debate, hence the attention it has received so far.

 

It's all about peace you know

Today I have spoken to a farmer who I used to do a lot of work with in the UK. He is German and has lived most of his adult life farming in the north of England.

 

We were catching up after a while without speaking to each other. He is always good value, talks and swears a tremendous amount and has an infectious personality.

 

He was asking how I was getting on in Brussels and was very interested to talk about the UK and EU question that is exercising a lot of minds.

 

Here is what he said:

 

"I meet up with my family who now live all over Europe every two years. There are 150 of us because I have 8 brothers and 5 sisters and we hire a conference centre so we can all see each other. Between us we speak 10 different languages as a mother tongue.

 

"I don't think some people understand these things. There is no one alive that can remember when England has been occupied. When you have some jumped up horrible people telling you what you should do and where you should go you remember these things. When I was at school in 1955 there were 40 children in the class and exactly half of the class, 20 children, didn't have a father. They were either dead or still in prison camps.

 

"So when I hear all of this EU discussion going on I can hardly understand it. Wars are now impossible in Europe and that is why we have the EU. I wish people would think about this."

 

I thought this was a powerful thing to say.  

Review: ‘I Bought a Mountain’ by Thomas Firbank

If I was a lecturer at an agricultural college, this book would be top of the reading list. I’d tell the students that there was no need to lug the Agricultural Notebook in, that John Nix can stay at home this week and please don’t bring anything to write with. Just read this, I’d say: Thomas Firbank’s ‘I Bought a Mountain.’

Rewind first. My uncle was a shepherd on a hill farm. By virtue of some fall out I’m unclear on coupled with a character who was happier with a dog and stick than with family, I didn’t meet my uncle until my mother’s 40th birthday party when I was 10. He invited me to go to the farm where he worked. I remember the fire and the branding iron to stamp the horn of the sheep. I remember the smell, the smell that gets on your chest. He must have seen my face.

‘It gets yer! It’s n’wonder these farriers can drink.’

I remember gathering sheep with him and Michael Harness. He cast out one way, a dot in the distance, and we the other way to meet back on the old A640 road connecting Yorkshire and Lancashire. The snow started falling, the sheep licked the salt from the road, the cars blared their horns. We bunkered down for a bit of dinner under a small bridge. 

‘Here lad, sup this. Bloody cars blaring. These sheep were here ‘afore them.’ 

Fast forward. I deliver milk before school with another farmer, and I learn to shear with him as well, and then on one day the uncle gives me a chance in shearing some of their sheep. Then I go to agricultural college, and at the end of my first year on a lovely June evening I get a call from home. He has died. He collapsed in the big shed at the farm and Michael found him.

And that’s it then. You can’t learn anything from someone who isn’t around any more. And all you ever wanted was to know him. To understand him and be friends with him perhaps, to be part of it. But you never were. The only thing that’s there now is a crook he gave you behind the door, and a tightening of the chest sometimes when you think back. That is all that can be said for that.

Back to the book. I’d tell the students to come prepared to drink tea and talk all about how wonderful the book is, how even almost 75 years after it was first published there is something very relevant in here for anyone who cares to get into it. “The man who can strike a mean is the man who makes a dull success of what he undertakes,’ says Firbank “yet the ordinary people who move with the ungoverned swings of the pendulum live foolishly and fully. My pendulum was at the extremity of its arc when I came to Dyffryn.” 

You may manage to buy a copy here 

He had worked in Canada in the ‘30’s and heard about a hill farm for sale near Snowdon. He starts his story with the purchase - “I first saw Dyffryn in a November gale. As I rounded a spur of a hill to turn into the long valley the full power of the storm caught the car. The rain was being driven horizontally, and struck on the windscreen. It poured in torrents over the bonnet, but left me dry. I liked that weather.” Firbank, with no farming experience at all, buys “a sheep farm of 2400 acres, lying in a long rectangle with its upper boundary some 3300 feet up and its lower boundary the flooding river parallel with the road. A good house, 2 cottages, plenty of farm buildings and the price was £5000.”

The book takes you through the farming year, and if it was just that would probably only be of interest to hardened agriculturalists. It is much more than that, because Firbank is so honest and writes with such passion that you are likely to get through a big chunk of it in one sitting. He learns after some time that he must just work very hard, but that everyone will help him if only he asks them. “As the excitements of the life flooded my consciousness, so that I worked and worried and ask questions from daybreak till dark, the hillmen, my neighbours, sensed at once the change of heart and admitted me more and more to their circle.”  

I like the book because the focus is on shepherding through the year - and if you consider hill farming, there isn’t a tremendous amount that has changed in practice. On lambing time he notes that “we have been privileged, for the gods have performed before us the great play of life. We feel we have assisted at a miracle. And, of course, we have.” You hear further about shearing, preparing for the annual sale and buying rams from Firbank who seems in control of the operation, but with some sense of philosophical detachment from the process at the same time. That is probably why the book works so well. 

My copy has been around a while

I could go on and on about this book. For me reading it again recently, I am surprised by the parallels between farming then and farming today. One chapter talks about the big snow of 1937, where they dug sheep out of snow drifts and pulled their last one out on day 21. “The more we mortals build,” says Firbank, “the more there is for the fates to destroy.” Looking at the year that hill farms have had this year, I think the experience that Firbank had at Dyffryn all those years ago would resonate with many sheep farmers today.

A lovely thread throughout the book which almost underpins it, is the relationship that Firbank has with his wife Esme who joins him at Dyffryn a short time after the purchase. “The gods thought fit for me to meet Esme” he says. “In early spring when the grass was a-rustle with growth, and the trees gave budding promise, and the birds and the beasts preened and stretched in the luxury of the sun, Esme came back with me to Dyffryn.” Esme is the driving force behind a lot of ideas, and it is clear that there is no way that Firbank could have done it without her. The story of Esme is probably another book in itself, and if you read this you will see from a quick internet search that the story of ‘I Bought a Mountain’ most certainly didn’t stop with the publication of the book. I will leave that chapter for you to discover yourself.

The debates we are having in agriculture now, especially in relation to hill farming, could be pulled directly from this book. The weather I have already covered, but Firbank plays with diversifying his income with varying degrees of success through pigs, poultry and a cafe for tourists. He  sets up a hydro-electric system to power the farm (renewable energy to cut costs? Interesting!) talks about the need to produce more food from the hills (this sounds familiar) to invest in agriculture as the basis for economic growth in the rest of the country (I have heard this before somewhere) and of the need for more people to work in agriculture and that the future is bright (hang on, what year are we in?). 

Whilst we must remember this was written at the beginning of the war and at a bleak time in the country, Firbank finishes by noting that “men are loath just now to return to the land. The life is hard, the wage small, and the instinct of husbandry is dead in them. But man was born of husbandry, and he may again turn to his only sure help, the soil. He will readjust his values, and may taste in the end the ultimate joy of tending Nature in her labour.”  

Everything changes, yet everything stays the same.