- Location
- Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
It’s a funny old world isn’t it? As winter looms over the horizon, and the monsoons push autumn stock work forward, I’m actively engaged in the mechanics of turning -mostly- unfertilised ‘wild’ pastures into red meat. It involves quite a lot of ‘dog and stick’ farming, where we walk about in the rain shepherding stock in and out of the handling pens, and fettling them for various husbandry requirements. We get wet. The dogs get wet. Mud and poop splatters. Toes get stood upon, legs kicked, backs ache and fingers get squished. As the weeks go on, and the temperature drops, so too we’ll start to get cold. Cold and wet, in an inescapably physical connection with the landscape around us, doing what we do for a living. Now hold that thought for a minute.
Meanwhile, I want to carry your attention off the hills, and down into town. Here, I’m told, the TV company ‘Channel 4’ has invested a ‘seven figure sum’ in some ‘meatfree’ plantbased food processing firm…apparently because it goes along with their ethos or somesuch. Part of the deal will be ‘free advertising’, ne’er mind that the multi-million pound investment will surely colour the broadcasters viewpoint. I thought their job was to make TV shows…but it seems I don’t know anything. Elsewhere, as some rascal pointed out last week, the BBC –that bastion of fairness and unbiased opinion- has a website, where you can go and calculate how environmentally damaging eating beef is. I won’t bore you with the numbers, but it is apparently very clear that the Beeb are telling huge great lies on the website. Presumably this is because a number of personnel must, in fact, be very biased. Rather than telling you the truth, they’ve been lying wholesale to validate their own views. The errors have been pointed out, complaints made, but the website remained the same.
So, if you’ve been getting the uncomfortable impression that many in the urban media are, for whatever cock-eyed reasons- prejudiced against me and mine…there it is in black and white. I wonder what else their views corrupt.
This is of little immediate concern to me. I have animals to tend, and when I’m done of an evening, there’s a bottle of a very nice malt on the go, and a warming fire to sit beside. My kindly wife shovels plates of steaming hot food in front of us – usually featuring bits of animal we raised ourselves. These comforts ease the aches arising from my daily tasks.
But, long term, the above outside factors are of enormous concern. If they are indeed a reflection of how modern Britain is thinking…what the heck should I do? I sometimes toy with the idea of tilling the 10% or so of my land which is realistically workable, and perhaps planting the rest with dark dank Sitka spruce. It’s a business model I’m prepared to consider. Now try to imagine the scene I’ve been conjuring lately, where I might have 40 acres of spuds to lift, and similar areas of swedes and such. Or I might be trying to recover some kind of harvest of mouldy cereal crop….fit only for pretty hungry pigs.
The ongoing rainstorms –which a hill farmer facing the Western seaboard might reasonably expect- would turn my tilled fields into a brown slurry, which would now be spilling down the slopes and into the Dart at an alarming rate. Ne’er mind that I’d struggle to lift any kind of root crops, or combine any corn at all…my topsoil would soon be destroyed. After 10 years or so of such behaviour, I simply wouldn’t have much left. That is likely the reality.
Apple trees barely set fruit up here, and hazelnuts have only ripened on the few bushes in valley in the last decade or so. The nearest hedgerow wild strawberries are about 6 miles downhill. The soils natural pH is on the floor, and we wash our heads in between 8 and 10 feet of rainfall. Despite these minor ‘impediments’, we ship out about 50 tonnes of beef and sheep a year. It’s what we do……because realistically it’s what we do best. Now cast your mind back to the bruised and sodden description of how it’s achieved, and ask yourself how I feel about such thoughtless vitriol being constantly drip fed into the public arena by ignorant people who – I suppose- are a bit squeamish about eating the flesh of cuddly looking animals. Their ‘meatfree’ products leave a far uglier footprint on the landscape and wildlife, albeit out of sight in faraway lands.
Let’s be positive, and challenge them to look in their hearts and ask what they really want.
Meanwhile, I want to carry your attention off the hills, and down into town. Here, I’m told, the TV company ‘Channel 4’ has invested a ‘seven figure sum’ in some ‘meatfree’ plantbased food processing firm…apparently because it goes along with their ethos or somesuch. Part of the deal will be ‘free advertising’, ne’er mind that the multi-million pound investment will surely colour the broadcasters viewpoint. I thought their job was to make TV shows…but it seems I don’t know anything. Elsewhere, as some rascal pointed out last week, the BBC –that bastion of fairness and unbiased opinion- has a website, where you can go and calculate how environmentally damaging eating beef is. I won’t bore you with the numbers, but it is apparently very clear that the Beeb are telling huge great lies on the website. Presumably this is because a number of personnel must, in fact, be very biased. Rather than telling you the truth, they’ve been lying wholesale to validate their own views. The errors have been pointed out, complaints made, but the website remained the same.
So, if you’ve been getting the uncomfortable impression that many in the urban media are, for whatever cock-eyed reasons- prejudiced against me and mine…there it is in black and white. I wonder what else their views corrupt.
This is of little immediate concern to me. I have animals to tend, and when I’m done of an evening, there’s a bottle of a very nice malt on the go, and a warming fire to sit beside. My kindly wife shovels plates of steaming hot food in front of us – usually featuring bits of animal we raised ourselves. These comforts ease the aches arising from my daily tasks.
But, long term, the above outside factors are of enormous concern. If they are indeed a reflection of how modern Britain is thinking…what the heck should I do? I sometimes toy with the idea of tilling the 10% or so of my land which is realistically workable, and perhaps planting the rest with dark dank Sitka spruce. It’s a business model I’m prepared to consider. Now try to imagine the scene I’ve been conjuring lately, where I might have 40 acres of spuds to lift, and similar areas of swedes and such. Or I might be trying to recover some kind of harvest of mouldy cereal crop….fit only for pretty hungry pigs.
The ongoing rainstorms –which a hill farmer facing the Western seaboard might reasonably expect- would turn my tilled fields into a brown slurry, which would now be spilling down the slopes and into the Dart at an alarming rate. Ne’er mind that I’d struggle to lift any kind of root crops, or combine any corn at all…my topsoil would soon be destroyed. After 10 years or so of such behaviour, I simply wouldn’t have much left. That is likely the reality.
Apple trees barely set fruit up here, and hazelnuts have only ripened on the few bushes in valley in the last decade or so. The nearest hedgerow wild strawberries are about 6 miles downhill. The soils natural pH is on the floor, and we wash our heads in between 8 and 10 feet of rainfall. Despite these minor ‘impediments’, we ship out about 50 tonnes of beef and sheep a year. It’s what we do……because realistically it’s what we do best. Now cast your mind back to the bruised and sodden description of how it’s achieved, and ask yourself how I feel about such thoughtless vitriol being constantly drip fed into the public arena by ignorant people who – I suppose- are a bit squeamish about eating the flesh of cuddly looking animals. Their ‘meatfree’ products leave a far uglier footprint on the landscape and wildlife, albeit out of sight in faraway lands.
Let’s be positive, and challenge them to look in their hearts and ask what they really want.
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