Mouth of the Wash

NeoNics

2013-05-05T07:23:13Z

Well. Neonictinoids have been banned in the EU for 2 years then

I am not saying that it was my blog post that prompted this action. I'll leave that for other people to say.

What is very interesting is that the the bee fraternity are not convinced that the ban is the right thing to do. The migration of farmers from neonics to products with older chemistry (which may be equally, or more, harmful) is a serious concern.

This shows how complex the situation is. There are too many opinions mixed in with the facts

We really need someone to say

"Look, if you aren't a scientist then shut up for a minute while we sort this out"

I still think that I am right to stop using neonics on my farm. If I was an oil seed rape grower, I would probably carry on using them until the ban at the end of the year.

Poetry AND Motion

2013-04-25T05:46:59Z

My head's down, I'm doing our annual stock taking valuation today.

Last night I did a little interview for the next FW magazine about my own start in farming. I think that the FW thought it might appease the young farmers of today.

Actually I reckon it might make it worse. Particularly when I reveal that I am actually the Earl of Lincolnshire and inherited 200 000 acres of the best silt land in the country. With such a huge silver spoon in my mouth probably it is little wonder I am so unsympathetic.

They will feel hugely vindicated when they see that I have managed to lose most of it and have been reduced to growing a few flowers on less than 400 acres.

Anyway. We've heard plenty about young people now. If you want something to read something sensible, check out Owd Fred's blog here. We haven't heard from him for a while but there's a new poem today. I love the gradual revelations about his life, I keep meaning to buy his book.

Taking Stock

2013-04-23T20:46:59Z

Yesterday we started planting the final field of potatoes. Then we were offered an opportunity to rent two more fields so it looks as though the tractors will still be rolling until Saturday. Elsewhere we are harvesting daffodils and tulips in decent volumes.

It is a really busy time of year for us. With the late Spring, I have decided to ignore all distractions until after all of the crops are planted. This could take another week. At some point I have a heap of office tasks to squeeze in (including our annual stock taking valuation). I wouldn't complain if we had a wet day so that I could catch up.

I am putting a few pictures on Twitter as I go along but you will have to wait a while for a more comprehensive picture of what I'm up to.

Autotrac Has A Lot To Answer For

2013-04-14T14:58:44Z

I have been planting potatoes today. The joy of working on a Sunday is that I get fewer telephone calls. You can tell when I am in a tractor with time on my hands because I spend too much time on Twitter.

Today, as the ripples of my spat with the farming youth were dying down, I managed to reignite a battle with one of them to pass the afternoon.

I have made it into a Storify for you here. I think it is worth a look. The final tweet cracked me up.

Planting Potatoes

2013-04-11T05:14:14Z

Potato planting is underway on our farm. The soil conditions are suprisingly good (but the temperature is still undesirably low). We are still harvesting daffodils so we are spread thinly.

Young and Wild

2013-04-07T06:34:51Z

You might remember that my columm about new entrants in last week's FW magazine enlivened Twitter for a moment or two. That wasn't the end of it. Apparently the FW has been deluged by letters as well. There are rumours in media circles of a four page letters section next week.

Amazing. Having looked at the literacy standards on Twitter, I had no idea that people under the age of 25 could still write letters. I hope that Tim and Rachel can translate the txt spk for a farming audience. LOL, tongue-sticking-out-winking-smiley.

I am unrepentent about the furore. I'm certainly not going to start back-tracking all of a sudden, *prepare yourself for the shrill sound of a reversing beeper any time soon*; I stand by my remarks that most young people have an enlarged sense of entitlement and that agricultural colleges are not fully preparing young people for the challenge of breaking into the industry.

I do wonder, however, *beep, beep, beep* if I need to qualify my remarks. If only to save all of those dis-spirited youngsters whom, as a result of reading my bitter remarks, have given up all hope of a farming career and have sent their CVs to McDonalds.

The point of writing an opinion column is to say something interesting, provocative and, ideally, a little bit divisive. To do this you sometimes have to channel the baddie in an amateur dramatic pantomime production. When you write about a single (and slowly-evolving) subject like agriculture, it isn't easy to avoid writing cliches, platitudes and the bleedin' obvious and sometimes you have to push the boundaries. Chips taste better with salt and vinegar on them. Or a bit of chilli. Think of this as a Column Jalfrezi.

I didn't explain my position fully; it is impossible to give a full opinion in so few words. OK, not impossible. "I hate tomatoes." That's three words. What I mean is it's not easy to make a JUSTIFIED opinion in 600 words. You need to build sympathy for your case with talk about pips on people's chins and that horrible festival in Spain where they throw the things at one another and get skin in their hair...I've got side-tracked by the tomatoes.

Anyway. As I said in the piece, obviously we need great new entrants. We also need a few average ones to do the donkey work. I want to see both types rewarded with careers which are valued and paid fairly by society. I would prefer, very passionately in fact, that all these entrants could one day work for themselves too rather than for huge, corporate agribusinesses.

This is why, unlike most farmers, I have consistently argued for the dismantling of barriers to new entrants - the CAP, inheritance tax relief, the sale of council holdings, lifestyle farming mentalities, supermarket supplier consolidation and large scale commodity production.

I usually think like a young farmer trying to succeed in the business because that is the background that I have come from. I have had to jump over these barriers myself and it hasn't done me any harm. In the article, I tried (and clearly failed) to put my opinion in the context of my own experiences.

The secret to overcoming these hurdles is to work with the factors that you can actually influence, in the beginning this is usually your little more than your own weakneses. Your biggest assets, as a new entrant, can be nothing other than your abilities. That is usually enough. It is absurd to ask for special help until you have looked at these factors critically and objectively. This is where a lot of new entrants are failing. They are asking for opportunities without thinking what they can usefully offer. Cheap labour alone is not enough any more.

I have heard from some exceptional young farmers who are developing their strengths and playing to them. I predict that they will go on to be extremely successful regardless of their starting points. I have been especially impressed by Gareth Barlow, Matt Redman, Matt Sharp and George Brown - they are all already on the way to achieving great things without any outside help or favours.

My prediction is that most of the young farmers who have complained to me that rents are "ridiculously-priced", that "it's all right if you inherit land" and, most especially, the ones that have called me a "silver spoon boy" will unfortunately not do so well unless they change their outlook. They don't have the right mindset for success.

Overall I have been very pleased with the reaction. I wanted to write something which was challenging to young people because I would like them to prove me wrong. In the modern age it is a proud achievement to write something which is offensive to young people. I'll let you in on a secret, I did it by imagining that I was writing something to anger my 20 year old self. At that age, I was driven by petty principles, chips on my shoulder and a desire for a new Volkswagen Golf.

It is very important that young farmers expect a lot of themselves and very little of everyone else.

The argument that "we need more young farmers else people will starve" is patently nonsense. There will still be the same amount of land (or less) whether we have 1000 farmers or 1 million. What we need is not more farmers, it is better farming.

What we will need is exceptional talent, vision and hard work. I am very glad to see, from some of the reactions that I have had, that we already have this in ample supply. Along with plenty of wit, good humour and a genuine desire to do the right thing.

The next generation are sufficiently good not to need feather-bedding. Instead they need vernalisation. By contrast, crops grown with too much heat and water become lush, lanky and susceptible to problems.

Spring At Last?

2013-04-07T06:13:53Z

I think Spring may have finally arrived. I was wearing just a shirt at one point in the afternoon yesterday. It felt wonderful. After six months of trying to work while bundled up in coat, long johns, hat and gloves like Ranulph Fiennes, the lack of restriction felt as though I had been miraculously cured from an illness.

Sugar beet drilling started around here on Monday and I think that there will be many people planning to start planting potatoes tomorrow. That is our plan too. We cultivated a small area of land yesterday to test and the calibrate the machinery and, although the soil is still cold, I was susprised by how good the conditions were.

Young Farmers

2013-03-31T18:09:33Z

It's Easter Sunday.

We had a day off (although we are working the rest of the weekend, harvesting flowers and resuming field operations).

It has been great. I have got loads done, cut the lawns, taken the dog for a walk, dropped presents off with the family and Godchildren and painted the kitchen wall (where it was splashed with fat from the famous and delicious joint of belly pork that Sophie brought from her friend who starred on First Time Farmers). Tonight I'm going to finish reading my Capote book "In Cold Blood" and maybe watch a film.

While I was doing all this, I have had some enormous fun winding people up on Twitter. I had specifically planned a controversial column for last week's magazine to enrage the young farming community. I reasoned that their sugar levels would be high after all the Easter eggs and that I might be able to have some sport. My plan worked!

I never get any letters as a result of my columns. I have written that the CAP should be scrapped. I've written that I like Hilary Benn and Brian May. I've argued that inheritance tax relief should be scrapped. What does a man have to go to annoy farmers? It's like trying to ignite wet towels.

Anyway. Once it got going it was great fun.

Here is the thread. It's quite funny, if I say so myself

The Pursuit of Progress

2013-03-24T11:50:44Z

"So who's this lovely old boy?" I hear you ask.

Well, I'll tell you. It's C. Northcote Parkinson, isn't it. He was an economics humourist. (If, on the other hand, your preference leans in the direction of humorous economists then I recommend the writing of JK Galbraith)

I am reading The Pursuit of Progress at the moment. It is a very witty book which he wrote in 1957. Parkinson's premise is that we continually complicate our lives in order to make ourselves look busy and important. He looks, very satirically, at how we add bureaucracy and then require more people to carry out less work.

You are presumably familiar with Parkinson's Law that "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."

This habit is prevalent in all areas of modern life but particularly in the food industry. Food is packaged and re-packaged, purchase order numbers issued, stock codes are allocated, spread sheets filled in, procedures and policy documents are created. If we believe Parkinson, this is all done in the name of ego rather than effectiveness.

Amusingly, farms have remained largely immune to the phenonmenon. It is admirable how simply and effectively most farmers juggle a multiplude of disciplines in inconsistent conditions.

Beeing Responsible

2013-03-24T10:02:02Z

I decided to avoid using neonicotinoid insecticides last year. There has been a lot of discussion about the harm that they do to honey bees.

I am not trying to be morally superior in my position; I actually resent being given this responsibility. I'm not a bee professor (in case you hadn't noticed). My view is that any chemical should be banned if it is found to have an adverse impact which is greater than its benefit. It isn't up to farmers to make those judgements.

It is up to legislators (with the help of chemical companies, NGOs, bee professors and consumers) to decide what is and isn't right; they have to live the resulting environmental consequences and food prices.

It is very interesting to se that in the US Environmental Protection Agency has just been subjected to a lawsuit claiming that it failing to do its job

I am pleased about that.

Too often farmers put themselves in the middle of awkward moral debates about chemicals and biotech. This shouldn't be our responsibility. I wish farmers could devote more thought to their own individual success and survival and could delegate more responsibility to policymakers in the certain faith that they will do the right thing by everyone.

This is why it is wrong when the media blame farmers for the way that the food system is. It is created by food policy and consumers actions, not farmers.

Farmers are just the guys in the middle. We delude ourselves about it but yields, food quality, food prices and the amount of effort and risk per calorie are almost irrelevant to farmers, our individual task is to make a profit from operating within the prevailing framework.

Chilled Out

2013-03-23T06:27:34Z

Will the Winter ever end? The farm is wetter than ever. Any hope of planting potatoes is weeks away.

We are keeping busy battling away in the daffodil fields. I have never known such a difficult season. It is a struggle to walk in some of the fields but some how we are managing to harvest suitable quality.

...Oh and the cold. It is so cruelly and unseasonably cold.

Yesterday I spent a few hours on a forklift loading lorries and the wind was so bitter that it took your breath away. To keep myself amused as I drove I was humming the tune "Summer Breeze." I was humming it VERY sarcastically

Translation

2013-03-09T11:55:34Z

Matthew Naylor http://www.naylorflowers.co.uk

Emnabkment

2013-03-09T09:34:04Z

Here's a lovely little story for you

I am very familiar with Oswald's voice. Embankment is the nearest tube to the Farmers Club and, since I am too mean to stump up for a taxi, I have heard him many times.

Hang on, you will definitely have to click on that link if you want to know what I'm on about. Don't think you can blunder on reading and work it out, you won't.

I hadn't noticed that Embankment had a different voice to the other stations but, now that I think about it, it REALLY did and it was warm and distinctive.

Life is very homogenised and little differences like these add some seasoning. How heartening than a large organisation is capable of showing a bit of warmth and flair.

Lunacy

2013-03-09T09:13:20Z

As a flower producer, I'm a never a lot of trouble to you in the week leading up to Mothering Sunday. This year was as challenging as ever so I have been especially quiet.

Why does the demand for flowers increase 100-fold for one week? Why can't people be nice to their Mums every day of the year instead? Do people really need telling to buy their mum a present?

C'mon consumers. Spread the peak around a bit. We have been working some crazy hours. On Wednesday we didn't finish packing flowers until 3.30am.

Sophie, one of my housemates, works in the M&S flower supply chain. She has been working a 12 hour night shift checking the quality of M&S bouquets.

For these reasons, we have all gone a bit mental. Sophie arrives home as Matt and I are about to leave, she'll have a lasagne while we have our breakfast. In this strange, exhausted, pre-dawn period the breakfast conversations are even more surreal than usual.

"Do you think that you could farm on the moon?" said Sophie a couple of mornings ago.

"Probably not" I replied "but I could moon on the farm." (I was VERY pleased with myself about the speed of my response. VERY PLEASED INDEED).

Anyway. I didn't buy my Mum flowers for Mothering Sunday. She helps herself to flowers from the waste bin in the packhouse. I bought my Mum a petrol-engined leaf blower and some gel-filled kneeling pads that she coverted after she saw an electrician wearing them.

I wonder if the petrol-engined leaf blowing industry and gel-filled kneeling pad manufacturers have the same Mothering Sunday peak that we do.

Spring Hopes Eternal

2013-03-02T06:17:57Z

Finally it feels as though Winter is coming to an end. Spring hasn't properly arrived yet but you can hear her tyres crunching on the gravel as she approaches.

We have plenty of jobs to do in the fields but I have been delaying tractor operations longer than some of our neighbours. I am probably wrong in my judgement, every farmer in the UK is behind with their field cultivations and we will all be very busy when the conditions are dry.

My feeling is that we can do a lot of harm by taking tractors into the field before the conditions are dry enough and that we have to be patient - you can burn a lot of diesel and horsepower convincing yourself otherwise but weather is the best cultivation tool that we have.

We failed to Winter plough two of our fields because of wet conditions (one after a potato crop and the other after brussel sprouts). There is no chance of any more frost mould and there is a greater fear that we will create a solid plough pan underneath and that that they will dry like rock on top if we plough them now. We have reasoned that it makes more sense to cultivate them to introduce some air and then subsoil and plough them just before we need them to preserve moisture that way.

I suspect that, however long we wait, there will be wet patches in may fields that will still be wet in two months time. There are some nasty suprises in store, no doubt. It will be the first year for decades that farmers will need to take a tow chain with them when they go sugar beet drilling.

In many ways we have been lucky on our farm. All of our potato fields were ploughed in reasonable conditions and none of the flower crops have had any major patches of water in them. This is almost a miracle because, with perennial crops, the impact of crop losses is huge.

We are just tentatively starting our Spring work. We have just started applying fertiliser in preparation for our Spring crops. We start by band applying Nitrogen on top of the daffodil ridges (we never apply Nitrogen in the seedbed in the Autumn to avoid leaching). We are now putting the Potash on the potato fields, this is the only fertilser that we still broadcast at 24 metres. It doesn't move about in the soil and our indices are high 3s and 4s so we are only applying it to be polite. We like to get started in Februarey (ideally on a frost) to get the job out the way and, since we use Muriate of Potash, to stop the chlorine scorching the roots.

You can see from the time of the entry that I am moving back into farmer mode, I am waking up with jobs that I am looking forward to at last. Winter 2012 on our farm has been the longest, most frustrating and least productive of my farming career - I have hated it. I cannot overstate how depressed I have been by the relentless rain and lack of sunshine in the last 12 months.

My dog is equally thrilled that the tractor operations have started again and that, hopefully, we are getting back to a tolerable normality.