Anton Coaker - Weekly Column

[llamedos]

So Santa has been and gone, leaving the inevitable detritus of drifts of paper and packaging, leftovers, empty bottles and a slightly increased girth, and a helpful NHS Christmas report that we’re all getting fat. Thanks for that guys. A better present –and I couldn’t have asked for better- was the kind spell of weather. It helped me maintain cerebral altitude no end. The kids helped bed up, so all I had to do over the holidays was fill feeders and carry bags of cake about the place. Well, I say that…and there was that weaned calf that was arattling, and needed a 3 days course of jabs, and the yearling with the skanky eye, who also needed a jab of long acting in his eyelid. The former, at least, was small enough that John and I were able to wrestle him in behind a gate in his group each day. Oh, and one of the South Devon cows started sulking down by the river bank out over the back. She’d started bagging up, so I deemed it prudent to fetch her in within easy reach Christmas Eve, lest something went wrong and she was beyond an easy glance. Then one machine was reluctant to fire up, so spanners were out on Christmas Day as well. But apart from that, I even got my feet up for an hour here and there.

The reactor heifers are fetched into isolated, but still here. They’re a very biddable pair of South Devon 18 month olds, reasonably well grown, each with a kind eye, and a fresh bright green reactor DNA tag in her ear. Getting to know them better in their isolation loosebox, when they should each have had a long breeding life here is less pleasant. And, to try and halt the numbers from escalating further, there’s middle aged pedigree Belted Galloway cows off to the chop shop this week. Some are in calf, but they’re well fleshed, and with over 100 head of youngsters I can’t shift, it’s a simple matter of the numbers. They’re worth more to cash, while the youngsters are still growing.

It’s not that way I want to farm, and staying on the fluffy mental cloud cushion, maintaining my elevated state of serenity, takes some doing. Nick Drake and some gurt heavy Hawaiian lad playing the ukulele are on the calming soundtrack, and I’m endeavouring to think nice thoughts. Imagine a place filled with soft cuddly rabbits and puppies, hopping amongst flowers in the golden sunshine. I’m aiming for some kind of cerebral telly tubby land.


Anyway, the calendar pages have just about run out, every days date is ticked. Perhaps a New Year will bring better luck.

I found 2016 a troubling 12 months. There were a couple of popular votes in the West showing me I’m completely out of step with popular thinking –and I use the word ‘thinking’ cautiously. Both will shape an unpredictable future. Then there’s continued evidence in the Middle East, if it were needed, that humans will sink to almost any depth in their squabble over who stands on which piece of dirt –and hasn’t that general area of dirt had some blood spilled on it over the centuries. Seemingly we’ll kill and maim any number of our fellow beings to be able to say we’re the king of a particular hill….even when everything on the hill has been reduced to a pile of blackened twisted concrete rubble. From a relatively safe distance –and some of the hatred and feuding has certainly found its way back here-, others will condemn or condone the bickering factions, whilst happily selling either, or both sides, their slings and catapults. Scarcely glimpsing the irony, when one of own front line politicians has the guts to stand up and point some of this out, he gets slammed for his lack of tact. In fact, Boris seemed to have called it exactly right for once.

And then there’s much wringing of hands because a few erstwhile popular musicians and celebrities have had their tickets punched. Apparently this is due to the ‘Curse of 2016’. It doesn’t seem to occur that after the passage of 30-40 years, with a fair bit of high jinks and ‘poor lifestyle choices’ along the way, the massed ranks of baby boomer, TV era pop/movie stars will naturally start thinning. The numbers will only go upwards now, presumably escalating until we reach the natural conclusion when the hundreds of ex-reality show stars cash their chips in. The media will be swamped then.


Anyway, I’ve had better years….but to be sure, I’ve had worse. Let’s see what a fresh calendar brings. I’m facing into the rising sun, glass still half full.

 

[llamedos]

Dung Fork ​

Trying to notice every little detail –usually while tripping over the metaphoric whale in the pool- I recently clocked the wording of an advert for a dung fork. Ostensibly being marketed at equine enthusiasts, it had to be labelled a ‘manure fork’. Presumably equines only deposit ‘manure’, rather than the less refined substances other farmyard beasts might generate. And here’s the thing that caught my eye. Apparently this trusty hand tool is ‘ideal for handling manure, and lots of other uses’.

Other uses? Really? Well, if you must then- perhaps the idea could give rise to a game well-mannered boys and girls might play to pass the time….called ‘Your top ten other uses for a dung fork’. Beyond the obvious…let’s see. You could use it to pitch small bale hay or straw onto the trailer, and hence up onto the stack, or into the loft. Of course, you’d be better using a two pronged ‘prang’ for this, rather than a four prong fork. This practise likely dates from the age old handling sheaves of cereal, and loose hay- into stooks, then onto the wain, and finally onto the rick. Then rehandling it all over again into the thresher, or the shippen. We’ve got an ancient monster sized prang head around the yard somewhere….why so big? Enlighten me someone, please. Anyway, prang culture has waned in the light of combines, ‘flat eights’ for little bales, and latterly 3-400kg big bales. No-one’s that strong!

Then you might be tidying up some hedge trimmings, and perchance heaving them on the bonfire and indeed, some oldies are still wont to call their dung fork a ‘heave-ho’. My goodness aren’t we being educational this week?

Running short of sensible uses….I suppose one could want to toast four rats at once on said bonfire – vermin kebabs- as terrier treats. Or relax by watching clumsy twits skewer their own feet –oh ho, but it has been known to happen! As it goes, I have seen a hybrid of these two, when former cowman Dave, and our pal Johan disturbed a teeming nest of rats under an old cake bin. The only weapons to hand were dungforks, and the usually placid Swede Johan clearly has an odd tail of Berserker DNA in him, once his blood is up. It was good sport for some long minutes, and little short of a blessed miracle that no-one got impaled…well, other than a lot of rodents.

Another use for your fork, in extremis, is to sharply prod a bull in the stern, when it’s decided it would be a good idea to rub someone against a granite wall -that’s happened here and all. There’s the historical, where junior ‘Home Guards’ –‘Don’t tell ‘em Pike’- were given a dungfork. This could doubtless be called upon in the absence of a suitable firearm, to pierce the marauding Hun. Well, sufficiently obliging invaders anyway. And then there’s the cultural, where, upon a marriage among their ranks, youthful farmers would hold aloft a long arch of forks outside the church, for the happy couple to walk under. I’m unsure of my ground here, but I rather suspect this tradition pre-dates the official YFC movement. Again, do please correct me, those who know. One fondly hopes the forks in this instance were purchased new especially…or at the very least, scrupulously cleaned.

See, we managed a few other uses!

Now then, back to needing to market a dung fork by suggesting it has many other uses, while stepping away from the word ‘dung’. Firstly, it rather suggests whoever worded the ad mightn’t be cut out for rural life.

But it then gives rise to some deeper thoughts. There is a perception that us country folk are more acclimatised to such waste products, what with our beasts of the field depositing their fertiliser all over the place. And indeed this may be the case. But there’s an edge to it as well, suggesting an inferiority with it. Backalong I was chased off an online discussion-on leftie politics - with an inveterate townie. Knowing my background, he didn’t want me to speak because ‘manure and politics didn’t mix’. Never mind the stark prejudice his comment reveals –that simple country folk

wouldn’t understand higher matters-, there’s an urban hypocrisy there. Just because they’re removed from it all, are they ‘cleaner’ than us?

Funnily enough, the further I venture into urban environs, the grubbier it all looks, and the more I feel the need to be cleansed.

Anyway, never mind any of that. To close, you need to know about a dagger found in Tutankhamun’s tomb. As well beautifully made over 3000 years ago, recent analysis of the iron in it has identified it as having been hewn from a meteorite. It’s a knife from space, man!

 

[llamedos]

Books Beasts & Brexit Breeze ​

To better myself, I am determined to chew my way through a Solzhenitsyn book –‘Cancer Ward’- which I’ve manifestly failed to manage in several attempts over the years. This time I’m going to read the damn thing if it kills me. I’m sure it’s very revealing about the Russian State during the Stalin era, and is a high brow work of great intelligence and depth. It’s also like mentally wading through cold treacle. One of the problems I have is that I mostly do my bit of reading before I go sleepy-byes of a night time. So when the work load at the coal face is heavy, a dreary book usually has me nodding in less than a page…and boy is it dreary.​

I have promised myself something with a bit more pace as a reward if I can finish Solzhenitsyn. My beloved kindly entreated Santa to replace a few low brow classics missing from the shelf, - through that well known interweb outlet. They seemingly arrived via a South American jungle, rather than the North Pole. So Henri Charrier and Ted Simon await until we finally find out what happens to ‘Oleg’. Will he get to snog the nurse? Will he find the tedious party official nextdoor is the man who denounced him and had him exiled? I don’t know yet, but by Golly, if the drudgery of the writing reflects the dire period from which it was borne….it must’ve been grim.

OK, onwards

For something like 6 months of the year, when daylight is short, temperatures lower, and grass growth scant, my days are filled with, and dictated by, feeding cattle. In fact, the other 6 months seem largely to be dedicated to shovelling out the detritus from this foddering work, mowing the summers grass, turning it, rowing it up, and baling it…so we can start all over again, but at least there are odd breaks in the routine.

The commitment doesn’t overly bother me though. I’m very happy amongst my cattle on the whole, finding their behaviour and characters endlessly fascinating. The happy fact that when I tire of individuals, or they irk me in some way, I can eat them makes cattle so much more appealing as pets….don’t you think?

However, all is not quite as rosy as usual in the cowshed. Besides the ongoing spread of TB, which is creeping ever further through the surrounding countryside, robbing me of young heifers who should’ve had all their lives in front of them, crippling my trading options, and forcing a major upheaval in the way I farm, there’s Brexit looming over the horizon.

As you know, this will inevitably lead to a reassessment in the way farming is subsidised, and very possibly, various statutes which govern how I go about my peasant existence. While it all seems far away, and involves far greater minds than mine, I am watching a curious array of differing lobbyists wading into the fray with their demands. Voices clamour, reports are leaked –and I’ll think you’ll find few bank managers will forward a loan, or call in a debt, based on a ‘leaked’ document- worthy bodies deliver their considered views, firebrands wobble on their soap boxes, desperate to use the chance to shout ‘look at me’.

There’s people clamouring to cover the hills in trees, although you need to pay close attention to notice whether they mean naturally repopulating primal oaken forests, or regimented rows of Sitka Spruce. The former imagine stands of magnificent broadleaved behemoths, where unicorns and giant gaily coloured butterflies can frolic in the dappled sunlit glades, while the latter see tonnage yields per hectare figures flickering down their screens in green digits, al la Matrix. In reality, the dreamers would end up with decades of impenetrable thickets of rowan, blackthorn and brambles, while the number crunchers would soon have dank lightless blocks of unthinned monoculture teetering on the edge of catastrophic windthrow.

The purist farming lobby dream of being able to push for production once more, in a subsidy free world where the food production generated actual profit, and farming is unshackled from the constraints of EU red tape. While arrays of various ‘ologists’ get very excited about the prospect of saving the endangered ‘Crested Fuzz Hopper’, or whatever it might be…and that this can be achieved by ensuring that Coaker and his chums remain closely shackled.

The ranks of interested, clamouring vying voices is deafening, each determined their message is most important..

And somewhere in the middle, us peasants go about our daily tasks feeding cows and fettling muddy ewes. For while the future of upland farming might be just one leaf blowing in the Brexit breeze, it’s the mainsail of my ship, and that of a widespread interconnected working community around me.

 

[RushesToo]

@llamedos Please pass on to Anton that he is as rare and as priceless as an "inaccessible rail" both endangered by their geography, rarity and joy at their seemingly impossible continued existence [I have great hope for both]

http://datazone.birdlife.org/species/factsheet/22692556

ps Has this now permanently moved from blogs- if so I won't bother going there again.

 

[B&B Pig Man]

Secretary of State in charge of DEFRA, Andrea Leadsom, proudly reassured delegates in her keynote speech at the recent ‘Oxford Farming Conference’ that she thinks farming has ‘been around as long as mankind’, and it ‘has been at the centre of human achievement’. Do you think she wrote the speech? She sure as hell read it out. Should someone bring her up to speed with both history, and then the facts of farming’s place in human achievement?

Just in case no-one has, perhaps I could help.

In fact Mrs Leadsom, humanity rubbed along without ‘farming’ for….well, let’s throw some darts in the board here. I understand that modern human beings have been around for approximately 70-100,000 years –and we’ll disregard the religious nutjobs, and top officials in Trumps Whitehouse here, who’d rather believe we were plonked here 6000 years ago by a benevolent beardie in the sky- and that farming as we recognise it is traceable to the Middle East about 12-15,000 years ago. So for the large majority of human existence, there was no farming.

And that in turn illuminates the stupidity of that other premise. We got along for tens of thousands of years without farming, living more or less as ‘hunter gatherers’. And hence were reliant on variables far beyond our control. Unless you can show me cultures*which evolved major civilisations without the security of knowing where tomorrows meal is coming from, I think we can safely say that farming isn’t just ‘at the centre of human achievement’. It is the simple absolute bedrock of human civilisation. Without a dependable long term supply of provender, it’s very difficult to find time to invent all of those little luxuries in a society…organised religion, standing armies, reading and writing….and that ultimate sign of civilisation…Government, and Ministers of State. History shows that the moment we started farming, it all starts to accelerate.

*I’m very happy to discuss exceptions to the above…indeed, I readily concede that several coastal hunter gatherer communities managed to develop fairly complex societies where the living was good. The Haida and Tlingit peoples et al of the American North West Pacific coast come to mind. Being able to feast on the abundant wild seafood and salmon through most of the year, they were well fed enough to develop quite staggering arts and crafts. Admittedly, it also gave them opportunity to develop a complex mobile warring culture, bashing heads in up and down the coast, enslaving their captives en masse, but hey! You can’t have everything. And they were an exception.

Then there are the anomalies in the rise of farming itself. Why did several cultures around the world seem to simultaneously domesticate local plants and animals without the benefit of the internet? If the peopling of the Americas happened before the domestication of wheat in the Tigris and Euphrates- which seems to be the case by several thousand years- who told the new Americans to try their hand at raising maize and spuds? Ditto domesticating Llamas and Guinea pigs, which weren’t rounded up and tamed until about 5000 years ago, 10,000 years after the natives arrived. And before you cry that someone must’ve visited from somewhere else with the suggestion….wouldn’t they have mentioned the new-fangled roundy things to make the barrow go a bit easier?

Meanwhile, how could the Australian Aboriginals spend 50-60,000 years ‘Down under’ without tripping over any of these advances? Or how a semi-domesticated dog- the Dingo- then seems to have arrived from China 40,000 years later out of the blue? And we’ve hardly got to the more recent extraordinary Polynesian expansion, taking various crop plants, chickens, pigs and eating dogs out into the Pacific from Asia, starting about 3000BC. Rather perplexingly, by the time we caught up with them – it took us several more centuries to master navigating tricks these pesky savages managed when we were still walking everywhere-, some already grew South American sweet potato plants. This latter is especially perplexing, as it suggests rather more travel and exchange than we’d like to credit ‘primitive’ cultures with. It’s not specifically relevant, but I note we tend to forget, a generation later, Thor Heyerdahl’s voyage in Kon Tiki, which revealed most of what we think we know is probably tosh anyway.

It’s a fascinating subject to a peasant like me. But, given her daft statements, apparently rather less interesting to Mrs Leadsom.

I know she’s only in this gig after missing the top post, but at best her gaff reveals an unsettling disconnect. At worst, even after a reasonable time to shoulder the brief, is there an inability to grasp the fundamentals of how civilisation arose? It was by farming, Andrea, farming. Without farming, there is effectively no civilisation.


Curiously, I’ve never been invited to the Oxford Farming Conference.

 

[RushesToo]

How dare a peasant farmer be so knowledgeable, Leadsom will have Anton locked up with revolutionary knowledge such as this. Lovely article again. Thank you Anton.

 

[llamedos]

I’m not sure I can recall exactly where, but I did see a piece in the news last week mentioning 3-4 eminent Westcountry based weather scientists. I won’t try and get their technical area of study right, because I get muddled between that word and fireballs falling from the sky, which in turn reminds me that I can never remember what to call the bloke who scans the night skies looking for such fireballs, without in turn muddling him with the daft bird who reckons if you were born in the tail end of such and such a month, you’ll have lots of luck in love and few money worries. Anyway- I seem to have got side-tracked already, sorry- these fellas –and lasses- have got together with a load of other boffins, and warned the our Prime Minister that new President of the United States is a denialist twerp when it comes to climate change, and needs a good talking to. OK, so they used more grown up words, but that’s the long and short of it.

As you probably heard during Dons campaign, he’s of the opinion that the whole thing was dreamed up by the Chinese, to hamper American industry. And one of the first things he had done on taking office was to have removed from the White House website any mention of climate change. The boffins have also pointed out, quite reasonably- that he’s surrounding himself with appointees* who have a vested interest in the oil and coal industries. It’s hard to see how they’re going to talk him round to honestly looking at the numbers. Perhaps the Chinese also invented global temperature figures which reveals 2016 was the hottest year on record, or that global sea temperatures are currently as high as they thousands of years ago, when there was an awful lot less ice locked up at the poles.

*Some of Dons appointments make me wonder if he’s selling posts to the highest bidder.

To be frank, I think we’re all going to be banging our head against a brick wall with El Trumpo. A man less given to reason, or disinclined to empathy, it’s hard to imagine. The whole business of throwing his rattle out of the pram after media suggestions that less people attended his inauguration than that of Barak Obamas, says a lot about him. He’s already established an animosity toward the media, and can hardly expect generous treatment, but I’d have thought to accuse them all of lying about this is an act of political folly. It can only bite ever harder.

Perhaps he’s ahead of the game, and knows how many people believe garbage on the social media –which would be useful if you peddle garbage I suppose. I don’t know, but I am concerned about a President so hostile to a free press. It’s a damning and dangerous path to take. For some reason, comrade Putin comes to mind. Why would that be?

Back to the scientists reported warning to PM Teresa then. It also contained something unusual for such a source, talking about population reduction as being an element to a solution.

This, in its way, is more controversial than just talking about man made climate change. To come to terms with the concept, you have first to get over the denialists, before you then get to the ‘we can all live in harmony’ nutters, who imagine all of those sprawling billions of souls being prepared to be less greedy, consume less, and generally live an altruistic lifestyle. Like Socialism, this naively ignores fundamental human nature, where we’re all hardwired to strive for the best deal as individuals. And that in turn is before we get to the religious nutters, who’re determined that we’re all god’s children…or whatever it is. And no, I’ve no idea how you counter that mind-set, save to point out that old Donald has successfully courted a lot of them to get into the Whitehouse.

I admire the scientist who has the cahoonies to stand up and say it. There are too many of us, we all want too much, and we’re evidently disinclined to see the problem and act responsibly as individuals. Which means we need to address it collectively, and try to manage society to slow the rise. There are rational steps we could take, as a species, to improve our use of the resources on spaceship Earth. But they won’t all be popular, or easy or simple.

And anyway, one of the largest countries on Earth, with unfettered internet access, and high levels of education, can then go and elect a lying bullying short tempered tycoon as Presidente.

On balance then, I deduce we’re knackered….better save your breath Professor Hall Spencer.

 

[B&B Pig Man]

So, what’s fomenting the broth this week?

The somewhat mundane doings of my farming career mostly involve getting a lot of rain blown..nay…blasted in my face. If you sup from a similar vessel, you’ll be all too familiar with the phenomena, and if not, well, trust me it’s different when you have no choice but to grit your teeth and carry on. Still, we’ve had a very easy go of it so far this winter, and as Jan Cole used to say…‘They can’t take away what you’ve already had’. The week’s trials also included having to fettle up some ewe hogs in a hurry. Their grass was mostly picked up, but they were steadily taking blocks and haylage from their feeder, so I was expecting them to rub along just fine. But they weren’t, and in fact were going back fast. The dirty behinds on several suggested internal parasite issues, although they were drenched as they were turned onto the ground. So as John drenched them again, I lashed some netting around the stack of bales in the field next door, where there’s a good bite of uneaten keep. We all know the little toe rags will try and get over/under/through it, and nibble every other bale, but they need a fresh bite. If they don’t turn around, it could be I’m frightfully trendy, and have got a wormer resistance problem. I’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. I do rotate product annually, and don’t over use it anyway, but we’ll see.

Back around the yard, we’d housed a couple of South Devon cows a fortnight ago. One was a poorer young cow, who was making heavy going of being out in the weather. With a roof over her back, she’s immediately licking herself and looking elements. The other was PDed late in the autumn, when I was casting around for volunteers to go and graze celestial pastures. She’d slipped time, and is marked down for having a suspectudder, but was showing 7 months in calf again by the time we picked her up. Bother. It was too late to send her for the chop then. Once she started to bag up she too wasbrought back and housed, in case she had calving issues- she was wintering with access to 100 acres of steep gorse and bramble rough…not an easy place to keep an eye on.Once indoors, she’d eat her fill of a morning, to spend her afternoons lying like a beached whale, moaning and grunting loudly with every exhaled breath. Several times, walking past and hearing this row, we thought she must be in labour, but nothing was happening. Finally, on a stormy wet morning, I went out to find 2 soggy new heifer calves outside the building. She’d calved twinsright next to the feeder, and in the time honoured tradition, they’d both scrawled into it, and hence out the front into the rain. This break for freedom hadn’t bothered one much. It was soon back in with mum, found a functional teat, and was latched on and sucking like a good’un. But the other was flat out cold.

Fetching it straight into the kitchen, it was plopped onto a horse rug in front of the Aga for Alison’s tender ministrations. There was a stock of colostrum frozen, so it was soon being stomach tubed. The kitchen terriers –of which there’s quite a pack just now- joined in by licking it clean, and then perching on top of it to warm it up…or possibly to show off their prize. One of the collies snuck into the kitchen, and looked very interested in the new arrival, but the terriers weren’t having any of it, and chased her off their new cushion. A few hours later, it was sat up bright eyed, and soon thereafter, trying to lurch upright, so was banished to a loosebox before it turned all the furniture over. At time of writing, it’s beginning to take milk from the bottle, and might shortlybe allowed a name.

Anyway, in between this, and a few other little tasks around the place, over my cuppa I’ve been reading about badger-proofing my farm. It’ll stop TB apparently. The buildings will need to be shut up like a prison- no calves escaping from them- and I can keep badgers out of the pasture I graze by digging great trenches along the foot of my fences, and burying special anti-badger netting in them. I know I’ve said this before, but I find this idea that my farming operations can somehow be separated from nature ludicrous. Deeply offensive in fact. My cows and sheep and I live in and amongst the wildlife everywhere around me. Pretending it can be otherwise is folly. Ignorant folly.

 

[B&B Pig Man]

I’m getting hesitant to mention President Trump of Trumpington. Never mind it being overdone, but do you have any idea how difficult it is to write about him? Far from being a gift to a nosey parker like me, he’s a nightmare. See, I’m a weekly columnist, but I never know what he’s going to do in the next 7 hours…some days it feels like he’s making it up moment by moment. I can hardly write a sober and sensible critique* of some policy decision yesterday when he’s just as likely to announce today that he’s going to invade the moon/ban anyone left handed/annexe Canada tomorrow. His unpredictability is the only surety.
*And I realise there are some of you who maintain I can’t write a sober and sensible critique about anything, but that’s because you’re cruel, foolish and ill-informed.
I notice, amongst us bemused onlookers, there’s a general speculation about when and how it’s all going to crash and burn. No doubt an enterprising chap could run a book on what’ll happen. And I daresay the smart money would be getting very short odds on the ‘when’ rather than the ‘if’. The problem is that watching such a renegade man boorishly blundering through conventional diplomacy stops being funny when you consider the gravity of possible outcomes. At the very least, the world has become a sleazier, grubbier –in every sense- and meaner place.
In fact, matters might come to a head quicker than anyone guessed, as he discovers that the system is carefully structured to try and prevent such recklessness, or as Obama found out, overly one sided play.
Better I stick to my own doings…..I don’t suppose the fluttering of my butterfly wings will affect a hurricane thousands of miles away, Confucius.
So, the twin South Devon calves are thriving, one on Mum, and the other on the bottle. In the latter, I’ve seldom seen either such a turnaround –from being laid stone cold in the rain, to a bouncing biffing tail wagging hoodlum in just a few days- or indeed any calf take to the bottle so vigorously as quickly. She is Alison’s baby, and thriving as well as it’s possible to imagine.
Back with her Mum and sister, we’ve fetched a couple more outfits in. Both cows had slipped time, and caught the bull unexpectedly. One is a beautifully put together Dun Belt, whose belt doesn’t go all the way round. She subsequently couldn’t be given a full pedigree, but I kept her on anyway –inevitably she’s the best of her year group. But 18 months ago, she suddenly developed sun burn on the flashes of white on her sides. This photosensitivity is very likely a complex interplay of factors, including ingestion of some toxic plant. Both bracken and ragwort are implicated, and despite extensive efforts, both can and do sneak into the conserved forage. It might also be complicated by on-going fluke issues. We treat for fluke annually, which is potentially not quite enough for 100% surety. But the cost of treating everything again far outweighs the benefits, and besides, I’m reluctant to weave such a heavy protective net….ultimately they’ve still got to function out on the hill. The upshot is that we experience one or two such cases a year. They’re seldom fatal, but knock the cow concerned for six. And this poor girl was pretty rough for a week or two. Unsurprisingly, she was empty the following spring, but time off and plenty of grub has found her back on good form now, and she was found loving a new fluffy calf out on a newtake last week.
The weather was already bad, and I knew the forecast was for worse, so I nipped out that afternoon, and walked her the ½ mile back to the yard. Baby trotted along most of the way, and I only had to carry it through a muddy gateway, and then through the gate into the drift lane. The cow was very obliging, lowing gently all the while, and never showing me the least aggression.
I’d left a bit of space in one building, as a fall back for just such cases, and with the sleet driving in cold, sapping calories from every beast it strikes, I’m mighty glad I had the space. It does give rise to the whole ‘free range’ cattle debate. I know a lot of you are uncomfortable with the idea of dairy cows being housed 12 months of the year –and indeed, I don’t think much of the plan- but this tough hairy hill cow needed to be indoors in pretty short order last week, or she’d have been licking a dead calf this week.
It’s complex….perhaps we’ll talk about it another time boys and girls.

 

[B&B Pig Man]

So, should dairy cows stay indoors 12 months of the year, or should they have to have access to pasture for kinder months, frolicking amongst the daisies and buttercups as nature surely intended?
First off, we’d better make it clear that there’s no reason permanently housed cows shouldn’t be just as healthy and happy as can be. And conversely, living outside on pasture doesn’t necessarily mean a cow is going to be a shiny picture of contented well-being. Indeed, ask any of the majority of my hirsute ladies this morning, who’ve just spent last night out in the cold rain, where they’d prefer to be, and their answer would be very clear. And if you’re choking on your granola, unable to believe that I can know this, a very simple autumn experiment would be to offer them the choice. They don’t have to be milked, so you could give them access to an open shed, with a rack of fodder, a dry straw bed and fresh water, or gates left open all the way out onto their lear miles up on the ‘Forest’. And as strictly neutral as you made the experiment, my hairiest wildest Galloway cow would find her way into the building by about Christmas morning. She wouldn’t be inclined to return to the hill until the end of April. Obviously, I’m disinclined to run the trial, as they’d come and go a bit, pooping everywhere, and the place would quickly descend into chaos. Anyway, I have a sneaking suspicion that, if the trial were to run on for a few years, several cows would decide that tramping up over that hill is quite a fag, and freedom is all very well…but look girls, there’s a fresh bale of haylage in the feeder this morning. And it’s not just shelter from the rain….the shade of a roof on a sunny day would appeal to a beast which had the choice.
Right, we’ve ascertained that cows can be perfectly happy indoors. But what’s best for them? Cow health is high on the list, but there’s a pretty good correlation twixt happy cows and healthy cows. If the management is right, cow health will be right. Obviously, there’s more to manage indoors…..cows make a lot of poo for a start, and the waste needs moving – preferably to where the fodder is grown- but it isn’t rocket science. And as difficult as it might be to believe looking at me, there is some skill in grazing cows outdoors. While they cleverly eat the grass in front of them, obligingly walking forward and spreading fertiliser behind as they go, there’s a bit more to it than that. Honest. But keeping them healthy outdoors is generally a simpler business.
What’s best for us? Well there’s a thing. Young cattle, thinly depastured on sheltered grassland, can be converting natural pasture into meat year round, with the only downside being the questionable burping and farting equation. And you could well argue that wild animals would eat the grass and burp just as well as these cattle. But once you start doing any ‘farming’, which we have to if millions of people are to be fed, it gets complicated. Carting fodder into your giant hi-tech super-dairy, and carting away the copious waste, is obviously going to burn a lot of fuel. And while the science is even more disputed, I would hazard a guess that the burping and farting problem is hardly improved. Further disputes arise over the quality of the product. While grass fed beef is higher in Omega 3’s, and hence better for you –we evolved to eat it after all- but there is nothing identifiably wrong with indoor/intensively raised meat or milk. My gut feeling –ho ho- is that while cows grazing unimproved pasture will pick up a better spread of minerals and trace elements, the varied diets of both intensively housed stock, and modern human lifestyles, probably balance out the imbalance, if you see what I mean.

Which takes us round to where it’s all going. I’d say the path is already well trod by the free range egg, and outdoor piggy wiggy enterprises, and the whole ‘organic’ thing. There’s a premium for what is perceived as better managed produce, and that is becoming apparent in the dairy industry. Who will make the rules is another matter….the organic movement have had decades of wrangling over such matters, and it’s often hard to avoid stupid woolly thinking creeping in. Look how the ‘Green’ politics movement have embraced leftie viewpoints, oft at the expense of environmental concerns.
I don’t know, but we’re standing billions thick upon the planet, and unless we’re prepared to grasp that nettle, bickering over whether cows live indoors or not is pretty facile.

 

[B&B Pig Man]

I was going to write you a piece about the internet, the social media, and the rise of fake news and Trump….but it bored me, so you could hardly be expected to read it.
Instead, let’s see what’s occurring in high flying, cutting edge agricultural modernity as practised at Chez Coaker? Well a dryish week saw us get some dung out. I’ve discovered that one of the astonishing side effects of housing all these unsold young cattle, and pumping grub through them, is that waste material comes out of the blunt end. You’d thing I’d have considered this basic premise, but I hadn’t given it much thought…oh well, think of all the grass it’ll fertilise. And while the straw stack is holding up reasonably –I will run out, but not for a month or so- and fodder is still good, the cake bins are another story, emptying every other day. I’ve never been a big feeder of hard feed – the cereal based supplement to the hay/silage-, but the simple maths is that the hairy urchins are already in the building, being bedded and tended every day. The cost of the supplement is negligible against the rest of it…so I might as well keep throwing some in front of them. In fact, I daresay some keen young buck will go further, telling me that the more I feed them the faster my money is turning over, and there’s all that interest on the cash to consider, to which I’d reply… ‘Steady Maister, I only just got the hang of putting them in a building’. And as it happens, several are still running outdoors, and mostly doing just as well.
Anyway, the cake is collected from the mill, because we can’t get HGVs over the stupid crippling narrow bridges, so I have to run out with the 7.5 tonne flatbed. For good measure, ever tightening licencing rules mean that only 2 of us can drive the truck nowadays, and it’s usually yours truly. I’m nearly wearing a groove in the road on that errand.
For added fun, when I get back to the house, I’m finding my poor beloved starting to froth at the mouth about some aspects of beaurocracy which had passed me by. Well, I say passed me by, in fact I was just keeping my head down and hoping they’d go away. But they won’t, and are coming racing over the horizon to smack me in the face. Once more, ‘holding number’ rules are changing, meaning we’re going to have to re-evaluate our entire grazing plans to fit a new system. DEFRA get very agitated that some of us don’t have 10 square fields, each of ten acres and adjoining the yard, into which we plonk 10 cattle. Curiously enough, the real world isn’t like that.
It isn’t especially unusual that I utilise hundreds of fields, spread over about 15 miles. Some are rented long term, some short term, some are owned- some by me, and some with the help of the bank. That’s before we get to the ‘common’, where I have no tenure whatsoever, and share grazing with several of my peers. Very little changes from year to year –we’ve been on some of the ‘short term’ rental ground for several decades, while elsewhere we’ve been grazing the same families of cattle on the same fields, and the same common, for well over a century.
But this ties DEFRA up in knots. They reciprocate by tying us up in knots. The instruction paperwork which arrived for the latest changes in the rules run to 18 pages, and it’s very difficult to see how our farming operation can be folded to fit its detail. And as well as our lives now rotating around 60-90 day intervals TB testing hundreds of cattle, we’re very soon going to have to start recording the individual electronic ear tag numbers of the sheep. To facilitate this nonsense Alison has just ordered something called a ‘Stick reader’, for some hundreds of pounds. I suspect it’s reasonable to wager that it will either get broken, dropped in the dip, or simply refuse to work in the rain.
To suggest that all this makes me upset would be akin to implying the Antarctic is a bit chilly. I could hardly despise worse the comfy office bound morons who devise all this garbage, foisting it on people who do honest work out in the rain. And if you dare to breath in my presence that it’ll all be better when we come out of the EU, …well you’re not only quite wrong pal –can you imagine our snivel servants giving up lots of nice rules?- and there’s a real chance that I’ll be finding another use for that ‘stick reader’.

 

[B&B Pig Man]

With an unusually serendipitous flow of events, just as I’m about to write about antibiotic use, and resistance to the wonder drugs of the last century, science is abuzz with news that a team of researchers at the College of Science at George Mason University, Virginia, have identified a number ‘antimicrobial peptides’ in Komodo dragon plasma. Some, at least, can be synthesized, and will almost certainly lead to a whole raft of antimicrobial medicines. This is news.
The team have built on similar research into Alligators, which have long been known to have some tricks up their scaly sleeves. It had long puzzled science that crocodiles and the like can survive traumatic injuries –including the loss of limbs- while living in the lukewarm bacterial soup of tropical waterways, healing their wounds to continue waiting for Mick Dundee to come down to the billabong to drink. Humans in such environs would be somewhat…er….less robust.
Some bright spark observed that Komodo dragons –the largest living actual lizard, looking like a giant monitor- are known to have saliva heaving with 50 types of deadly bacteria. This seems to be part of their hunting strategy, in that once prey is bitten, it quickly succumbs to huge bacterial infections. Yet they can bite each other without much effect…other than to annoy one another. Clearly there was something to be found, and it jolly well has.
Obviously, a small population of very rare reptiles living on a handful of obscure Indonesian Islands won’t be yielding up enough blood to cure our ills, hence the synthesizing program. Unless, that is, someone starts farming the critters….. I’ll be right on it- could be a use for Dartmoor ponies, and a handy way of tidying up come lambing time.
This brings me back to where I had originally been heading. The medical profession is in a bit of a flap about drug resistant bugs, and the pointy finger of blame dwells on the livestock industry. While this isn’t strictly fair –overuse amongst people, and the inevitable effects of bugs constantly evolving anyway are also factors- it can’t be denied that farming has been playing a part. The use of medicated feed is bound to raise the rate of microbial evolution, just so we can run intensive systems tuppence cheaper.
Perhaps we should step back and imagine a world without antibiotics. I once met an old Aussie bird, who’d been a nurse in WW11. She’d tended troops injured in the Pacific war with the Japs in the fetid tropical conditions- Papua New Guinea I think I recall. And the ‘Diggers’ brought in with open wounds were dying of raging infections in droves, until the new miracle drug arrived. Penicillin, having been discovered in the 1920’s, was only developed into a usable treatment during the war, and nowhere was its arrival more marked. The difference it made was still a marvel to this former nurse decades later.
But nature is a marvellous thing, and resistance has been growing apace ever since. Microscopic lives generational turnover is generally a bit quicker than yours or mine, so while human youths are spend years growing more dextrous thumbs with which to text potential breeding partners –and it probably isn’t a good sign for a species that the ability to wear your hat backwards might be an attractive reproductive strategy- so those pesky little bacteria swarming in the petrie dish, or under your finger nails, are ever changing. And in each generation, there’ll be a few individuals who survive the chemical onslaught of our medicines. A woman recently died of sepsis in the States, full of an infection untouched by every anti-biotic on the shelf. Options for curing human TB are getting thinner every year, and I believe there’s places in the world where you really don’t want to be coughed on by a consumptive.
So news that novel treatments are being developed is great, but let’s try and be a bit more careful with these eh?
In fact, I know it’s a forlorn cry. We’ll go on rushing about thinking we’re the most important spark of creation in the universe, both individually, and as a species. In a nutshell…everyone will still want that tablet that might clear up their snuffle before they hop on the plane for the long anticipated fortnight’s holiday in the tropics, scoffing the cheap chicken sandwich in the fast-food outlet en route.
Sadly, medical advances will mostly be paid for on those terms. Commerce is king, and in our race to the bottom, superficial desires today will overshadow real need tomorrow.
Being adaptive and innovative myself, all I really want to know is…. exactly what temperature range will Komodo dragons tolerate? And can I raise them on land crossed by a footpath?

 

[B&B Pig Man]

In the course of my varied activities –hobbies we’ll call them, rather than suggest I have any kind of profession- I often come across the handwork of men in ages past. And I do try to appreciate it where I find it, however varied and slight the signs might seem.
It might be a well put together piece of dry stone wall, reflecting an era when wire fences weren’t an option, tantalised stakes didn’t exist –I fear we might have regressed there somewhat- and farming outputs supported the employment of serious labour. There are one or two examples locally which are sublime pieces of work, still upright and sheep proof after many decades- centuries in some cases. Where they don’t suffer storm water erosion around their feet, they’ll last indefinitely. I try to emulate the skill and dedication, but it’s largely a forlorn hope nowadays.
In the mill, when we’re cutting a batch of oak logs which show carful skilled management over 80-90 years, we can sometimes track the hand of foresters long underground. We were able to reference compartment records of such a load backalong. It had been started off in a larch nurse crop, which had pushed it skywards. Then, when the larch was removed in the war, the oak started to really put girth on with the annual rings revealing a jump in growth. What knots there were, were suppressed and minor. It was a joy to cut, and a privilege to see the results of such forethought.
In fact, the chair on which I sit at the kitchen table to eat my porridge –and you can sit in it if you’re ready to pay the rent- has a ‘seat’ made of a single board of elm. If you look carefully, you can see a knot therein, which was quite clearly trimmed something like 70 years before the tree was harvested. Given the chair is likely over a century old itself, that forester was assiduously tending his young trees in the early/mid 1800’s.
Admittedly its nearby mate, a rocker we commissioned for my beloved Alison to nurse the bairns in- which must be 20 years old seeing as Agnes is now in her 2nd year at Uni- and has a seat made of a startlingly pretty piece of oak burr. This was the result of random wild growth on a river bank in no-man’s land locally, which kind of deflates my spiel a bit.
Never mind. Back on track then. I like tools and machinery made well, from good materials. Right from the quality of iron in an old hook I use on weeds about the place, right up to complex gear built to the very highest standard. I’m known to be stopped in my stride when I come across something really special. The lifeboat pulled up on its trolley in Cornish harbour had me agape backalong. It was clearly put together in such a way that nothing, but nothing, on it will fail. Although I know nothing of the sea, I recognise and salute the mind-set of its design and construction.
I suppose I like to see a well thought out and executed social concept, such as the NHS…which makes it all the more poignant to see it being chipped away at. Or the traditional apprentice system, still in use in some Continental countries, which is such a sound way to bring on young craftsmen….why doesn’t every culture adopt it?
I very much enjoy meshing with a well-crafted spot of the written word from ages past, be it a snippet of rhyming nonsense, or a weighty great tome. Poems from Banjo Paterson come to mind, able, in a few humorous lines to perfectly convey the reader to a dusty dry place in an era long past, showing human values are pretty much universal.
Less esoteric then…..I also appreciate the depth of careful selection in some breeds of livestock. Where daft show fashions and hobbyists haven’t ruined them, some hill sheep breeds reveal a purity of function hard to credit….and it was done with centuries of careful ‘dog and stick’ work. We’re currently tending a newly calved
South Devon in a loosebox, who might have a bit of a long face and lugubrious look about her, but my goodness she’s a pleasant character. As old fashioned as she looks against modern standards, you could work with a herd of her kind and be deeply contented. And since I’ve several of her sisters, and know well the back breeding, I’m quite sure it’s not coincidence…it’s decades of care.
And so, what will we leave for posterity? As one of my correspondents observes, mostly our distant successors will mostly recall us for a thin geological layer of polluted ‘dumpite’.
Hmm.

 

[B&B Pig Man]

Before the sap rose too much, I managed to gets some trees planted this last couple of weeks, which reminded me I was going to talk some more about matters sylvan. They say ‘a man who plants trees loves others’, implying that trees take so long to grow that you’ll never see the benefit. Probing further the psyche of the farmers of my youth, mostly they regarded a man who voluntarily gave up the use of his land like that as little better than a fool. Even the roughest of scrub could be cleared, and grazed with profitable sheep. In the 80’s I saw, almost simultaneously, the end of the era of government encouraged woodland clearance, and the start of an era of subsidised ‘amenity’ woodland replanting. Ha! At the same time, you could enjoy the spectacle of a farmer being paid one year to rip out hedges and remove drystone walls, in the post war era of trying to modernise agriculture, then the following year, being paid to bank up and plant new environmentally friendly hedges, and rebuild the blessed walls. Such are the changing winds of rural life.
Meanwhile, almost completely separately, new commercial tree planting- primarily uniform monoculture conifers- was grant aided the whole while, also often encouraged with tax dodge schemes for wealthy investors. Cheap land in the hills was sought, and planted wholesale, in a controversial land use change even greater than the subsidy driven farming revolution through the post war decades. In Scotland particularly, there was a degree of conflict.
Coming right up to date, new commercial planting is at a very low level, with many new plantings being extremely dubious amenity rubbish, which the deer, then the squirrels will surely decimate. And while the 1970s-80s Sitka plantations coming to market are supporting a huge industry producing timber products the nation would otherwise be importing, absolutely justifying their inception, they are not all being replanted with another commercial crop.
I realise my take on all this is a bit hardcore, and in my defence, I’d be the first to break up single species/age structure systems- to lower the disease risk is nothing else-, and leave a bit of space for the wildlife. But I’m also a realist, and know very well that what we don’t grow, we’ll buy from someone else, likely carting it halfway round the world…and that’s a very great loss all round.
Having a foot in more camps than most people have feet –it’s quite a trick, which I manage by being very mediocre at everything- I see both ends of forestry. As a youngster, I’ve planted woodland myself, onto very middling grazing land, which I’m now watching grow into substantial trees, while building a business sawmilling local trees which some other enlightened soul nursed long ago. I’ll soon have the very particular privilege of felling timber I’ve grown, to put through my own mill. For devilment, you can be sure I’ll utilise some myself, so I can look smugly on my cleverness. We’ll gloss neatly over the cock-ups I’ve made, and the huge investment of time and cash which this hobby has swallowed…it’s the principal of the thing.
Anyhow…one of the things I do see from my unusual perspective, is that we have a cockeyed view of forestry in this country. A lot of farmers aren’t very interested and agri-colleges devote almost no time to it, ensuring the gap continues. I’m disappointed that, at the very least, the rudimentary maths aren’t explained to all farm kids going through such education. And while farm subsidies are very separate from woodland payments, they should really be the same thing. And by that, I’m meaning they could be lumped together, but only for land that is being actively, productively managed. Financially, it’s a no-brainer for the country, and the wildlife enjoy managed mixed woodlands almost as much as trash.
Then there’s practical problems in front of us. Controlling deer numbers needs further thought, and if every grey squirrel in the UK suddenly died of some illness, I would be a very happy man. Consider…I’ve had many a tall strapping 20 year old oak and chestnut youngster stripped of its bark and ruined, wasting 2 decades of my time and land. An upshot is that I hardly plant broadleaves anymore…why would I?
And then there’s the plethora of tree disease rampaging through the UK. Larch, Ash and now Sweet Chestnut are all being hit, with woodland owners forced to prematurely fell, and sometimes destroy, their crops without compensation. Just knowing what to replant is becoming an issue, and anyway, losing crops without compo is hardly encouraging owners to maintain and invest in their woodland.
I’m drawn to it, but it’s not an easy path to tread.

 

[B&B Pig Man]

Agriculture in arable areas is abuzz with the regrettable crash of a prominent grain trading firm. A number of corn farmers have been dragged into the morass, with some owed money for crops already traded, and others owed for crops somewhere still in the system…..although I suspect it won’t be much use trying to recover your particular artic load of wheat. Then there are forward contracts already extant before the appointment of administrators. If 2 parties have agreed a grain deal in advance, both gambling on the trade, who carries the can when one party goes pop in the meantime? In fact, happily, most such contracts have clauses to allow for the eventuality, but you can bet the legal vultures will be circling to pick over the bones.
It is a mess, and there are already creditors looking for £15 million. Given the company was turning over £80-90 million, and with stories that they were taking 3 months to pay, there’s almost certainly more to come out of the woodwork yet. Some wiser cookies had smelt what was in the wind, and declined to do business with the firm lately.
I’m very sorry for them as got burned. Certain farmer suppliers are believed to be owed £100,000, and they’re likely to be last in line, after the banks have grabbed anything they can.
The farming press is offering no end of helpful advice on how to close financial doors after the proverbial nag has bolted, which will be precious little salve for the poor blighters who have lost so much. The firm was owned by a parent company which is still trading….and I’d be asking some pretty spiky questions if I’d sent 1000 tonnes of corn in, and was now still owed for it.
I’m not involved in the case at all, nor do I know who was to blame for the crash, but the fallout has left me thinking about such matters. I’ve very occasionally been caught when some company goes scat, or discreet enquiries reveal an individual failing to pay a bill doesn’t have the wherewithal. I seldom gamble more than I’m prepared to lose, so I don’t lose sleep over it. And indeed, it’d be a sorry day when you couldn’t take a chance for fear of such things.
I notice that the perpetrators of such nonsense seldom learn from it. Perhaps some manage to secrete away funds to off shore accounts, and benefit from the chaos they wreak. Precious few I suspect. The majority, in my experience, simply blame anyone and everyone else, rather than their own lack of nouse, and blunder on. One clot crashed a while back owing me a bit. I was a looong way down the list, and finally got tuppence ha’penny in the pound. His principal problem is that he thinks talking the talk, and having big shiny toys makes him a clever man. This is despite clear signs that his addiction has eaten its way through substantial family assets over the years. My informants suggest he’s rolling again, back in business. I’m sorry for him; he doesn’t recognise his limits, or the damage his problem causes.
Happily, I won’t be dealing with him again. I tend to use such experiences as educational, and quietly go about my business a little wiser.
Back to larger concerns, another story in the farmy news is the ongoing steady amalgamation of slaughtering capacity in the UK butchery industry. One conglomerate is currently buying out another firm, creating ever fewer- but bigger- players. I would be concerned that the risk such monster businesses represent grows proportionately. There is a reasonable argument that they will have the power to negotiate better with supermarkets, but I don’t know that I buy that either…the supermarkets really are monsters.