Farmer Patrick says – September 2024

Hello. I’m sure I say this every time I write this article, but the seasons really do seem to fly by…summer especially so. Winter drags, we all know that. It’s long, it’s wet, it’s damp, it’s miserable and it gets dark early and light late. It’s gloomy, dull and dreary, although Christmas helps to break it up mid-way. Summer, on the other hand, is full steam ahead. It follows on from the rapid growth of spring when everything comes out of dormancy and begins to flower, flourish and awake. Animals come out of hibernation, trees gain their leaves, and of course, the grass needs mowing.

On the farm so far this summer, we’ve had a flock of new laying chickens and several flocks of chicks, we’ve made hay (which I told you all about in my previous column) and even managed to get it in the barn when it was dry. We’ve baled straw, cut corn, filled the fields up with spring lambs and had our day-old turkeys in – over 20,000 of them! We’ve even found time for the odd cold refreshing beer of an evening. 

The next task for us to think about will be cutting a second crop of silage to feed our cattle through the winter. Autumn cultivation will start soon, ready for planting next year’s crops (farming is ALL about thinking ahead!). And then there’s the maize to harvest, ready to be used as winter feed. The days are long on the farm this time of year. My own day starts around 5:30am and finishes about 7pm, seven days a week. Lots of you I’m sure can associate with these hours and know what it is like! But I’m happy to say I enjoy most of what I do.

The farm shop has been equally busy, with fresh produce being picked every day for sale, keeping an ever-increasing number of customers happy with our local food. It’s always good to see people walking out with a happy face and a box full of produce from the farm, and knowing that all our hard work will now hopefully be enjoyed by them.

Looking at farming on a national scale, I find it concerning that last year we saw a 5% decline in our own production of vegetables. Before we jump to conclusions, imports only rose by 1%. This basically means there was a 4% decline in vegetable consumption. Whilst I’m sure there are many contributing factors, one cannot help but wonder about the nation’s health and also those who will have us believe we are all going vegetarian. Even more alarming is the falling of our own fruit production by more than 10%. As I mentioned previously, at the end of this year we are set to lose another large UK salad producer.

There are many driving forces behind this but, ultimately, being a business, agriculture is swayed by economics. The endless drive by those with a vested interest to plant more and more trees on prime farmland with generous subsidies and incentives – paid by central government in order that the developments may offset their carbon emissions when building new houses – seems a double irony. We lose agricultural land to housing, and then we also lose it to tree planting, to offset the impact of the housing. 

Net gain is not much in the way of food production and I may sound like I am repeating myself, but we live in a growingly uncertain world politically. And events in Ukraine and the eastern bloc, along with those in the middle east, with their possible impacts on shipping and cost of imported products, should give grave cause for concern. On a recent visit back home, one of my Ukrainian team told me how her parents, who live in the central part of a large town, only have electricity for two hours per day and have had no running water for over three months. 

Just stop and think about the impact of that. Freezers are worthless, black market products are rife. No water = no dishwasher, no bath, no shower, no sink, no taps, just a bucket of water distributed by a tanker. No power: imagine what that will be like as winter sets in. No light, no TV, no mobile phone, no laptop, no kettle, no iron, no toaster, no music, just dark, cold and miserable. We are so lucky in this country – I hope for a miracle in Ukraine. Wish them every luck.