farming knowledge gone.

som farmer

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
somerset
I was listening to R4 farming this morning. We are all obsolete. It is now "regenerative farming". Some scientist has discovered that muck actually helps the soil. Wow!
l prefer to call it sensible farming, we broadly align with regen principles, and to be perfectly honest, what we have done, has maintained production, and saved us money.
The principles are quite simple, maintain ground cover, as long as possible, non inversion tillage, selecting the 'right' plants, to suit your soils, and rotational grazing, with cattle staying on 1 plot, for the shortest time possible, - you can see the daily grass growth, by doing that, and easily up your stocking rates. Shite is good, we all know that, it was just easier to use bagged fert, NVZ rules, enlightened us, on that.
There are no rules, no restrictions on fert, or sprays, just pointers to improving your soils, which lead to less use of those chemical fixes. Arable, either needs shite, or stock, and rotation, which most of us know, even if we refuse to say it.
Nothing complicated there, is there ? Livestock, if you can get 1 extra yr, out of a ley, without loss of production, alone, is a big saving, with no/little extra cost.
Its seen as the way forward, by those who set policies, so, no doubt, it will become more main stream, and encouraged, so early attempts, can be easily applied, by any farmer, before rules are dictated to us, you might be pleasantly surprised.
 

Pilatus

Member
Location
cotswolds
Calving cows and lambing ewes doesn’t go out of date.
I think it is important to have new thinking coming in to agriculture as per any other industry/ profession.
BUT I think it is the skills that are only learnt from being handled down ,that are being lost,and even then some will always be better at calving a Cow or lambing a ewe than others, and those are just two examples.
Off Topic.In my humble the mobile phone is causing people not to use their own initiative(brains) to overcome some situations, this situation certainly does encourage one to develop any skills, the hard way!!
Unless it can’t be fixed via a keyboard many are stuffed :banghead:
 

toquark

Member
I was listening to R4 farming this morning. We are all obsolete. It is now "regenerative farming". Some scientist has discovered that muck actually helps the soil. Wow!
Yes I often think this when I hear the words regenerative farming. Today’s progressives are yesterday’s dinosaurs.
 

Ashtree

Member
As above all my forbears were farmers and so am i but my kids have chosen a different path . Absolutely nothing wrong with that but just thinking how easily the farming knowledge that gets past down over the years gets lost in the space of one generation , makes you think doesn't it ?
Don’t worry. There is an app for that…
 

JockCroft

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
JanDeGrootLand
A very interesting thread.
Times change.
Reason's change.
Seasons change

Farming over the last centaury or more has grabbed innovative ideas and ran with them.
Some stayed the course, and some didn't.

The important fact is that farmers and workers developed new skills and perfected them quickly, probably more than most other industries. That same ability will redevelop skills that may be considered lost. They will probably improve ways it was done if its a practical task.

The knowledge resource's are at most peoples fingertip nowadays. The only danger I see is with science where too much miss information is published by biased, and blinkered authors, even peer reviewed, where that is usually by an equally biased and blinkered "researcher".

When it comes down to it, decisions on livestock cropping or weather, how much is our instinct, a sub-conscious knowledge gained through time and experience. Therefore the younger ones whither brought up in farming or from different backgrounds have to gain experience.

It would be a great topic to research. Where can I get a grant to research all this?
 

Sharpy

Member
Livestock Farmer
we have 1 young cow, that slipped, she is due exactly 2 years, from when she last calved, oct 27th, given 15,000 litres, still doing 21/day. Right, or wrong, to keep her ? We have cows that calve sub 300 days calving interval, right or wrong ?
Farming is a blank canvas in many ways, it seems to evolve as we go through our farming lives, its always changing, and adapting to weather, new machinery, crops and methods, there is always something 'different' to try, or work out.
We are entering into a new era of farming, with food production, competing against green moves, food production will win, climate change, is in the future, food is everyday. The green movement, hasn't considered, or couldn't care, that much of what they demand, will lead to lower production. This at a time food production is in a finely balanced supply, and threatening to slip into negative. We see that with todays record prices.
So we will have to compete against the green movement, at a time when demand is increasing for more production, topped with the political desperation, to keep a lid on food prices, rather think we need both old, and new skills, to steer a way through that muddle.
Its pretty obvious who will win, thankfully, despite many thinking they can, they really can't survive without us.
I have often thought that as the big stresses and dangers for a dairy cow are calving and drying off then something that calved once and milked for 8 years would do well.
 
Dad died just after I left college and I often wonder how things would have panned out if he had still been here with his experience and different skills.
In her later years, ,mum would ask what I was doing and it might be any of the things we all take for granted such as cattle passports, field areas for IACS, or ordering sprays and she would say "Your father would never have been able to cope with all the things you do". This extended to fixing things, making up bitzer tractors and things like basic welding and shed building.
Dad came from the older generation where you got people to do all these things as he wouldn't have seen them as proper farming. However he had much better animal sense and people skills than I ever will and was used to dealing with employees where I will always try to do it myself. I think this is a common result of the decrease in manpower on farms, but I think that if dad had had to spend his working life as a one man band doing all the silage baling on his own and getting his hands oily every day, he would have packed it in.
Whether one way is better than the other is debateable since you end up doing what you are comfortable with, and the economics have changed so much.
 

DrWazzock

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Lincolnshire
My grandfathers were true farmers. They knew stock well. They could handle and use horses. To me that appeared to be a higher level of craftsmanship than much we have done since.They were almost truly sustainable and carbon neutral. They could make a wheel from ash wood and all that kind of thing. My father and uncle were more technically minded. But really they kind of lost the stockmanship side of things especially when the dairy farming went. To be honest they moved into machinery and engineering and weren’t particularity interested in agronomy either and for that matter neither am I. I employ a bloke to do that. Is what I do now farming? Not primarily. I’m an amateur machinery technician. A lot of arable farmers are. There isn’t really time anymore to do everything justice as a one or two man band. If I focus on agronomy, machinery maintenance slips. A funny sort of industry really but if I paid a bloke to do the machinery maintenance I’d be bust.
 
We have a charity in the barn who take in tools, usually donated when an old boy has died, and they clean/restore them, pack them up and ship them out to Africa, An awful lot of the hand tools are beautiful old things but they are given so many they end up disposing of them as no one uses these old woodworking tools any more. I have come across a few old books from the 1900-1930 era that were being thrown out with the tools and they are packed with useful hints and forgotten knowledge. I have one here called The Mechanic's Friend which has loads of in depth engineering advice, and it is even more amazing that it was aimed at teenaged boys in the 1930s.
 

Lowland1

Member
Mixed Farmer
My Dad was very old fashioned in his ways but a very good farmer who time passed by in the end however during Covid my two children spent a lot of time with him at a time in his life when he really was struggling mentally but although there were times when he was difficult to deal with such as when he'd call my son downstairs at three in the morning to help him remove pigs from the front room they both gained a lot of knowledge from him. One such piece was be very careful when combining Linseed because it is very easy to set the combine on fire when it wraps. Last year after delivering a combine to a large farm in Lincolnshire that was due to start on Linseed he told the farmer to make sure he has a water bowser in the field just in case. The farmer looked at him nonplussed no doubt wondering how a 20 year old from Kenya could know anything. That night he saw had recieved a call from a strange phone number when he called back it was the farmer thanking him for the advice as his combine had wrapped and started to smoulder luckily they had the bowser on hand.
Another piece of sound advice was about rolling wheat. We were going round and my son asked me why we didn't roll the wheat in Kenya well I said because we have no frost so we don't need to push it back down like on the fen at home. 'But Grandad said it makes it tiller more" So we started rolling and he's right it does we might be the only farm in Kenya doing it but it really works.
I don't think farming knowledge has gone it's probably just that people aren't that keen of listening to the old.
 

Shutesy

Moderator
Arable Farmer
How many youngsters can drive in a straight line? It would be interesting to see the tramlines etc if we lost the use of GPS!
I'm sure most could learn it, if for instance no GPS was available worldwide for some reason. I'm 32, use GPS for nearly every task now on a tractor but grew up drilling, ploughing etc with no GPS at all and I know which method I would rather have nowadays. Many farmers still scoff at GPS steering saying driving straight is a dying art, using a GPS system to its full benefit is a new skill that has replaced it. To be drilling for example to 1 inch accuracy whether at 8am, 3pm or 11pm perfectly straight or in conditions like this;
20220622_142135.jpg

Is just not possible without the help of technology. Without the GPS yesterday in the above photo I would have had no clue where my drill mark was!
 

Derrick Hughes

Member
Location
Ceredigion
As above all my forbears were farmers and so am i but my kids have chosen a different path . Absolutely nothing wrong with that but just thinking how easily the farming knowledge that gets past down over the years gets lost in the space of one generation , makes you think doesn't it ?
Yes, for a long time ,
But
nothing lasts forever , 4 generations is nothing in time ,
 

JockCroft

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
JanDeGrootLand
My grandfathers were true farmers. They knew stock well. They could handle and use horses. To me that appeared to be a higher level of craftsmanship than much we have done since. They were almost truly sustainable and carbon neutral. They could make a wheel from ash wood and all that kind of thing. My father and uncle were more technically minded. But really they kind of lost the stockmanship side of things especially when the dairy farming went. To be honest they moved into machinery and engineering and weren’t particularity interested in agronomy either and for that matter neither am I. I employ a bloke to do that. Is what I do now farming? Not primarily. I’m an amateur machinery technician. A lot of arable farmers are. There isn’t really time anymore to do everything justice as a one or two man band. If I focus on agronomy, machinery maintenance slips. A funny sort of industry really but if I paid a bloke to do the machinery maintenance I’d be bust.
Our grandfathers and fathers started at the bottom, no matter big farm or small. While doing tedious repetitive manual jobs there would be older workers, talk would carry a great deal of knowledge as long as they listened.

When I stared an Ag course in the late 60's, my father who was 60 then followed each weeks learning. He was quite critical that on both livestock and arable, little had changed, indeed less than from when he was a teenager attending a night class run by the local Schoolmaster. That is when he passed on what he felt had been left out.

Despite much insistence on my part he and his mates never passed on the "word" (horsemans).
I was told more than once, "Let the stock talk to you". How many of us talk to our animals when walking the fields and have a sense of pride when the stand for us or approach us. Or am I just an old "daftie".

Father was quite proud of the fact that he had worked through the period from when tractors were virtual unknown to the advent of the combine. In the mid 70's we got a tractor with a fully enclosed cab and a heater, all be it a Zetor. In his words "the greatest advance for farm work in his lifetime" after electric light..

My point-- Our fathers and grandfathers had to almost continually learn new skills. So why can't the next generation.
 

neilo

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
Montgomeryshire
But maybe that question is very good, obviously its to give her a break before next calving but has the dairy industry become fixated on 365 CI probably started out to get cows to calve in spring to utilise spring grass but with lots of herds now being housed 365 in robotic milking units and very high yields is 365 CI the most profitable?
Sometimes starting out with a blank sheet of paper with no preconceived ideas is good, just asking why is good

It depends if an extended lactation can fit your system. If you calving to fit a grass growth curve and want to dry everything off at Christmas, then probably not. If you're AYR calving anyway, and the cow is the type that can hold milk up, then crack on.

I remember a heifer back home on the robots that did 9,000L in her first 305 days, then another 9,000L in her second 305 days. She did get in calf eventually though. The next lactation was also 2 years, giving 12400 in her first 305 days (I forget what she did in the second but would have held up).
In a high input AYR calving herd, was she any less profitable than one that got in calf to calve on her anniversary?
 

SFI - What % were you taking out of production?

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Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

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As reported in Independent


quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

read the TFF thread here: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/gfc-was-to-go-ahead-now-not-going-ahead.405234/
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