Locks Park Farm

Today was the day; the hay was dry enough to bale. Brian’s little baler was playing up and would only spew out rock-hard bales weighing almost as much as me! Watching our shocked faces as we attempted to lift them, Brian joked  it was to our advantage (Oh yes?), as the cost of baling has skyrocketed he’d saved us a fortune by squeezing another third into each bale; something I’ll be paying for every time I attempt to lift a bale this winter! We were mighty glad we just had the one field. We have become soft. Back along when I had dairy cows we had to get in around 5000 -6000 small bales – that really was work!

All baled up

Olly tying down the load

First load ready to roll. We were carrying about four miles back to the farm, hence the added insurance of tying down the hay. Not that this was going anywhere it was so heavy - we worked out this little load weighed almost four tonnes!

I cut a meadow for hay on Saturday. I don’t do a lot, around 250-300 small bales for the sheep. Sheep are not keen on wrapped haylage, even if it’s dry and sweet, they will eat it if pushed though much prefer good old fashioned hay. At last, after weeks of ‘yes we can’, oh, ‘no we can’t', those fonts of all knowledge, the weather stations, predict four to five days of dryish weather (of course leaving a 10-20% error margin for rain just in case those super-advanced technical pieces of seaweed are having an off day).

Coming back from turning the hay a second time late yesterday afternoon I was confronted by two very dejected bored dogs waiting for my return in the yard. Feeling guilty I rushed them off for a quick walk. Going past the woods I notice the ground was covered with large patches of golden leaves. Funny. I thought and went for a closer look. Not leaves but carpets of chanterelles! Quickly taking off my cardi I began to pick - but there were too many. I dashed back home to get my basket and a knife. I picked and I picked.

Last night we had omelettes with chanterelles, tonight it was chanterelle risotto, tomorrow it’ll be a chanterelle strogonoff. And, to boot, I have trays of them drying out in the sun and on top of the Aga. A totally unexpected delicious bonus.

I was falling gently into a misty drifting twilight world between sleep and wakefulness. Robert was already asleep; soft, warm-slow breaths on the back of my neck. A noise startled, pulling me away from that place. I desperately wanted to resist it.
“Errh…phone” I mumbled into the pillow “phone”

“Whassat? Whaa?” slurred Robert

We’d got back late for a Thursday evening. We’d been over to see some friends after supper; it must have been around twelve by the time we got into bed.

“Phone!” I stagger unsteadily out of bed, bumping into the chest and slipping on the rug.
“Light on?” murmured Robert from the depths of the duvet “Didn’t hear. Sure?”

We once tried to have a phone in our bedroom, but because of thick cob walls and a dodgy connection that was ungetatable we gave up. Sometimes we hear the phone at night and I guess sometimes we don’t. Often it’s a misdialled number or a hoax.

I drunkenly stumbled the stairs to the study, fumbled for the light, but missed the call. It had gone onto answerphone. No message. I dialled 1471 but my brain hadn’t hooked up yet and the numbers meant nothing. Shaking my head and slapping my face to reawaken the blood supply I was about to redial when the phone went again.
“Hello?”
“Mum?”
“Oll – what’s happened?”

None of those things that are meant to happen happened. My heart didn’t stop. My stomach didn’t plummet. I didn’t feel sick. I didn’t turn to ice.
“I’ve crashed.”
“Are you okay?”

Those words - so futile – are you okay? Are you broken? Are you bleeding to death? Has your head, your body or any of your limbs been scrunched, torn, flung across the countryside? Is anyone else hurt, maimed, dead? Are you going to live? You are my child. I bleed when you do. Every one of your hurts hurts me…more. I love you.

“Are you okay?”
“I think so. Yes, I think so.”

He had also, unusually for a Thursday, been over to see some friends too. He’d decided to come home via a different route. They’ve been resurfacing all the small back roads and as he rounded a bend he hit a thick layer of new gravel and went into a skid; the wheels locked, he careered up a short elevated track to a field entrance, which flipped the car over bouncing it on a salt/gravel box, throwing it onto its roof and rolling it over again down the hill. It came to rest on the driver’s side in the middle of the road. He managed to crawl out of the passenger door.
Seeing it there, bottom side up across the road, a broken, skewed crushed metal box spewing forth glass, fuel and radiator fluid started the icy fingers of shock moving through my body. How he came out of it unscathed I don’t know. That no one else was involved – another miracle.

We managed to turn the car upright and tow it with the truck to a safe place near by. The next day in the light we would deal with it. Now back home, sweet tea and bed.

Robert and I felt peculiar yesterday – strange, disorientated and off-kilter. Olly, who I thought might be battered and bruised once the initial shock wore off was, still, miraculously, completely unscathed.

not olly’s car

I began writing this in response to comments in ‘cull or not to cull’, but decided to publish it as a post in its own right. I have researched, read about and discussed the problem of bTB at length - with vets, farmers, scientists, ecologists, conservationists, people living, but not working in the countryside and those that do, city dwellers and politicians. I could give facts, figures, excellent examples and analogies for and against both sides of the argument. Personally I am, of course, subjective…I have a herd of cattle I care about hugely and are at risk; I also have a passion for wildlife. And I have to make a living from my work.

The question of whether or not to cull badgers is a complex one. It ain’t half as easy as many people make out. Quite simply, it’s not black and white. The science is uncertain, the risks are large, and we are dealing with emotions as well as facts. If we are going to find away forward, it will depend on us being open-minded, listening to each other and respecting each others’ values. Above all, we must be prepared to move our positions, to get off our high horses, to let our eyeballs settle back into their sockets. Far too many of us are entrenched: a position, for or against, has been taken, and that’s the end of it. If we are to get on top of this disease, for the benefit of all - people, cattle and badgers - we must start to pull together, use what evidence there is, consider the practicality of the various options open to us, and reach consensus on the way forward. It won’t be perfect and certainly won’t be easy, but it’ll be the best we can do.

…jellying, pickling, picking, plucking, topping, tailing, chopping, washing, packing, boiling, setting, and pouring. It’s been a processing factory in the kitchen over the last couple of days. All currants, gooseberries and a second crop of rhubarb were ready and waiting to be preserved in one form or another. As we’re hanging around for the weather to come right to take in a field of hay for the sheep’s winter feed (sheep are not fond of wrapped haylage, even if it’s sweet and dry) it seemed the ideal time to make sure the larder shelves are on their way to becoming well stocked for any eventuality.

My in-between-waiting-for-things-to-happen job has also been to finish putting up the shelving in my office, sort out the horrendous piles of ‘very important’ papers which I then have to dare myself to throw away (usually put into black plastic sacks and stored for a year ‘just to make sure it’s not needed’ before they’re burnt!).

And now I’m bushed with aching back, dirt-streaked face and hair full of cobwebs from retrieving books in waiting (office used to be Will’s room).

well, we had to sample!

I’ve had over a week to let Hilary Benn’s decision on a ‘no badger cull’ sink in. It’s coming around to my own herd’s bTB testing time again and I can feel the anxiety and worry beginning to build. This year there’s the added unknown of bluetongue vaccination and concerns that this could throw up more inconclusives or possible false positives. Oh happy times.

Maybe I’m a very simple soul or perhaps I’m missing the point altogether. But surely it’s staring us in the eyes - there is no perfect solution. There isn’t a ‘given success’ or some nice, easy erradicatrion programme. And there isn’t a course to be taken that will make everyone happy

bTB is out of control. A suitable vaccine is still years away (and only now they decide to throw extra money at it?), so forget that as an immediate solution. 28,000 cattle were killed last year, 14,000 have already been killed this year with the figure thought to rise to around 40,000 by the end of the year at an expected cost of £80 million to the taxpayer. Will the escalating killing and ever-increasing restrictions on cattle movements have an effect if it’s just one sided? Well of course it will, eventually, when all cattle have been culled. And yes, I am being facetious.

We need to do something.

‘Reducing the density of badgers over large areas (>100km2) where there are high levels of TB in cattle reduces the incidence’. ‘Removal of badgers is the best option at the moment to cut the reservoir of infection in wildlife, but vaccination will be vital in the longer term’. Sir David King’s main conclusions as reported by the Farmers Weekly.

Surely it’s high time all interested parties worked together and stopped this childish posturing? Here we are looking into the jaws of a recession, worried about food security, an energy crisis, possible wars and climate change. So, for pities sake, let’s get together; work out how we change certain farming behaviour and practises to minimise risk of bTB spread and have a sensible cull that will be effective at reducing bTB without causing nugatory destruction of badgers or unnecessary cruelty.

Whilst Robert was hobnobbing with royalty at the Royal Show last week I had one important thing I needed to do.
I wanted to lobby someone, anyone on the Natural England board of directors about the lack of Higher Level Stewardship (HLS) agreements being granted to small and medium sized farms. So bumping into a board member I’d had contact with several years ago gave me the perfect opportunity. Though no sooner had I started to speak she announced that she was not the person I should be talking to and firmly introduced me to Natural England’s chief executive, Helen Phillips.

Well, you can’t get better than that. Now it was up to me to make a strong, cogent case for fellow farmers up and down the country. As luck would have it she was having a heated discussion with the head of policies from the NFU on this very subject before my interruption. I had no idea at the time. Serendipitous.

I was blanked…. My nerves quivered. But no, I thought, this is vitally important, get a grip and get on! So I did. And she listened. And took notice. We agreed to keep in touch. Below is an excerpt of my recent correspondence to her…

From grass roots level this is how things appear. When HLS was first floated the take up was, I believe, mainly by farms that had no previous history of environmental schemes. These first payments were often substantial and included restorations of barns and the like. Then those whose Countryside Stewardship agreements were coming to an end applied, encouraged initially by your staff. You can imagine their surprise, disappointment and frustration when few were successful. It seems that only those applications with SSSIs or many habitats, footpaths, etc were successful. Hundreds of small to medium-sized farms like ours have been left in the lurch, while the large estates often owned by pension companies or similar have been granted agreements – with very large holdings it is, of course, much easier form them to accumulate the necessary points.

The impact on those many, many farms across the country which have not been successful (or indeed have been discouraged from applying), has been significant. They have adjusted their farming systems to meet the needs of their Countryside Stewardship agreements, often with much enthusiasm, only to find themselves high and dry and without a much needed source of income. Many have really delivered the wildlife and other goods that you are seeking. Some are now going into the red and having to resort to commercial farming of the land. Given the good budget settlement from Europe and the Treasury this rejection is hard to swallow. Meanwhile, the large estates and pension funds are benefiting, but will they show the commitment to the environment that us family farms will? I doubt it!

If it helps, I can explain what has happened on our farm. We had a Countryside Stewardship agreement for some 16 years, covering nearly half our land, but when we re-applied a year ago were unsuccessful because we did not score enough points. This despite much of the land being designated a County Wildlife Site, having a magnificent flower-rich meadow, supporting good numbers of dormice, barn owls, snipe, tree pipits, marsh tits, etc, and being crossed by a public footpath. What galled was the fact we were told ‘we were just not good enough’! Please come and see for yourself. I’d like to show you…

So all you farmers out there in the same situation as us – take heart if you can; speak to the various organisations concerned, keep on pushing and perhaps those elusive agreements will be forthcoming…