The Anton Coaker column thread

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Rewilding

I hate to return to such a turgid business, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to talk about ‘rewilding’ again. It’s become the new talisman which everyone from Boris downwards seems to be clinging to. The basic concept is that we should all stop ‘managing’ nature as much, and allow the environment to heal itself ….and already I feel myself slipping into their limp spiel. Celebrities endorse it, the great and good use it as a smokescreen, and a huge slice of society accept it must be the way forward. Arch proponents spout about ‘rewilding’ whole areas… in the UK, this is taken to be the ‘uplands’, and the re-introduction of all kinds of species- including large predators- which obviously might impact me somewhat. Taken to its logical conclusion this would mean the end of my community’s entire culture, which- surprisingly enough- I find somewhat upsetting. Farming the local landscape is how my family has lived for many centuries –certainly since before the church started taking names. I’m related by blood to most of the other families who do so across Dartmoor and its Southern flanks.

There’s an irony that an ingrained historic culture, which has such evident roots, and whose work has is so linked to landscape, could be so easily be cast aside as worthless. If we wore bearskins and lived primitive lives far away, you can be damn sure many would-be rewilders would also be campaigning for our human rights to be left alone. I’ll wager that many of these evangelists have dropped coins in the pot for organisations fighting for cultures elsewhere, or send out ‘Survival’ Christmas cards to give a few pence to far flung ethnic groups. Whilst sitting in their concrete and steel lives, they would drive me and my sheep and collie dogs off the hills we’ve worked forever.

That’s a pretty offensive and hypocritical idea where I’m sat.

Perhaps we’d better dial it down a bit. After all, some rewilding projects are a bit fluffier. Borough councils have cottoned on that they can economise on grass cutting budgets by leaving various public spaces to turn into ‘flower meadows’. This’ll all be fine until they discover that what actually grows will be the unwanted volunteer crops of ragwort, dog muck and fast food wrappers. It makes me chuckle that the whole ‘cropped lawn’ appearance is born of the pleasant aspect of fields neatly grazed by those wicked sheep, and the counterpoint of ‘species rich hay meadows’ are an archaic part of the basics of farming cattle. The cows went out to rough pasture in the summer –either onto the hill, or perhaps out on the marsh- so neatly cropped inbye fields grew a crop of hay for their winter survival….and hence ours.

Associated with rewilding are several other talismanic buzz words… ‘tree planting’, ‘sustainability’, ‘carbon neutrality’ and ‘green economy’. Apparently, such hooey will save the world. I notice in this very paper some cookery writer blithely gabbling away about how eating meat was bad for the environment, and then gave various recipes using ingredients whose very production is famously destroying distant resources and cultures. They really seem to believe that by saying these stupid things, unicorns will frolic in the sunlit glades.

In fact, as I’d realised some time ago, what it’s really all about is salving their guilt. They –we- all want the ease and luxury that modern life brings us, and we all want more. We go on building new railways, airports and vast housing estates- with their inevitable supporting infrastructure of industrial and retail parks, factories, mines, schools, hospitals and ‘recreational spaces’. The endless demands this places on the world’s resources are obvious, and vast beyond individual conception…as was made clear when ‘Uncle Albert’ tried a 3 point turn in the Suez Canal last week. We know this, and feel bad about it. So ‘liking’ the wildlife charity’s facebook post, and clinging to the idea of ‘rewilding’ takes some of the pain away.

It was brought into magnificent focus for me last week when a local rewilding enthusiast – who has even been lucky enough to be paid to knit some yoghurt for such a plan to save the world- was publically proclaiming he was hoping to be able to take a ‘guilt free flight to somewhere sunny this year’. He really believes that he can burn some aviation fuel for his own gratification, releasing 350 million year old carbon, but it will be OK because he’s messing about with some pitiable project which has a shelf life of the blink of an eye.

They’re like teenagers at the college debating club, clenching their little fists and saying ‘right on!’ It’s pathetic.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Twins

A few months back, I decided it was time to send on one of my older cows. She wasn’t walking quite right, and her tag told me she was well into double figures, which is old enough up here. She’s a pure bred Angus, of which we only keep a handful. And true to form, she’d performed like the clappers, breeding easily and fast, and always rearing a big calf. But equally true to form, she was suddenly looking burnt out, when a South Devon would still be hale and hearty, and Galloway would hardly be hitting her stride – those hairy urchins will run into their 20’s if you let them. But then, all things tend to be relative, and I’d no complaints. Checking the calendar, I realised that she could well be some way on in calf again, which would proscribe a trip to the ‘Happy Valley Retirement Home for Retired Suckler cows’. ‘Bother’ said I. Getting the vet to rummage around next time he was here revealed that sure enough, she was too far on to make that trip. Oh well, I fetched her into a smaller group, and arranged matters that she didn’t have too hard a winter. And she was perfectly happy, albeit not the quickest to trot to the feeder each morning.
But then, in the last few weeks, I noticed she was slowing up. She was eating as normal, and her dodgy locomotion didn’t seem to be bothering her any more or less than before, but something was clearly dragging her. I’d more or less resigned myself that she’d be leaving the place on the knacker wagon before long. I wasn’t going to let her suffer, and indeed, if the weather had been foul, I likely would’ve pulled the plug there and then. It seemed a shame, as she was also beginning to ‘bag up’.
Blow me, Monday morning last week, she was the first to calve, stood over a pair of strapping twin heifers when I went out and about first thing. She loved them both, and had a big bag of milk. No wonder the old girl was making heavy weather of it, given her diet through the winter has been nought but belly-fill baled silage, and she’s had 100” of rain on her bonce in the last year. The figures are in, and by golly it was wet- a lot of the rain gauges high on the tops took 130” and more during 2020. One locally took 144”. That’s twelve feet. We’ll come back to that dreckly.
Anyway, this old Angus is as proud as punch with her 2 calves, and with a bit of tlc, looks like she might well raise them. She’s feeling a lot better for a lightening of the load. I had to milk her out – her teats are a bit big with age- so the calves weren’t afraid of taking milk from the bottle. Now, I’m giving her a few scoops of hard feed, standing over her with a stick to keep her mates from nicking this treat, while feeding the terrible twins a bottle of powdered milk to top them up – it does feel like I could use an extra pair of hands, but it’s working well and only takes a few minutes at a busy time. When the grass comes – a distant fantasy in this cold weather- I’ll find a bit of lush meadow for her to spend her last summer here.
Back to the rain. I haven’t said much about it, but we’ve had some unusual issues with 2-3 groups of livestock in the last 6-8 months. 2 groups of last year’s lambs went to pieces through the autumn, despite the rest being a good crop. A post-mortem on one revealed, amid a large array of symptoms, the likely cause…shortage of a couple of trace elements. This was a bit perplexing, as we bolus the ewes to guard against this known deficit. I note that the 2 groups concerned were the ewes that had endured the toughest conditions the previous winter…although they themselves looked fine.
Then, over Christmas, we had a little bunch of calves still born/fail to get up and go, or ‘too stupid’ to suck’. We’ve had the vet test for one or two nasties, but simple iodine deficiency looks high on the list – I’d treated the cows for that before the vet ever got here, so we couldn’t test them. Matters have improved on all counts since, but when I saw the record rainfall figures, it all made a bit more sense. Given that there was such a pronounced dry spring, the previous winter month’s figures really must have been dreadful.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Glover Report

There’s already a lot of worried foot shuffling and hand wringing regarding a potential shapeup of the country’s National Parks. See, some clever fella by the name of Julian Glover has looked into them, and found them wanting. The element within his report causing the most excitement is that, perhaps, maybe, they ought to be brought together under one National organisation, rather than run and managed at a local level, as is currently the case.
Unsurprisingly, many of the fears being voiced are that some remote unanswerable office goons would berunning the show, with scant knowledge of the Parks themselves, or any concern for the locals. This is pretty ironic for most of us who live under the current system, as it’s just about exactly what we’ve come to feel about the Park system this last decade or two. Ostensibly, the doings of each National Park –such as Dartmoor, where I make my abode- are overseen by its governing committee. This body includes various vaguely local councillors for whom we might – or might not as the case may be- vote at their respective elections. Not all of them by any means, but potentially, some of them. But regrettably, we don’t get to select which councillors are put forward…that’s done by someone far removed from my dirty finger-nailed existence. Other members of this committee are, I believe, appointed by the relevant Secretary of State. In effect, this means that large chunks of my life are governed by a body over which I have no statutory right of effective influence. I cannot vote for them myself.
Now I accept that my interests and needs, as someone living inside a National Park, have to be weighed against national interests and needs. It would be churlish to ignore this reality. We live on a grotesquely over populated little Island group, and it’s inevitable that my urban neighbours, who outnumber me so very much, have a greater voice than me.
However, giving me no voice, no chance to put my case, sounds pretty unfair to me. I can’t even use my voice in Westminster, as the parliamentary system means I don’t get to vote for a representative with my fellow Dartmoor inhabitants. Our vote is simply lost among surrounding constituencies, where we are tiny minorities. We’re Gerrymandered out of representation.
On balance, I consider my human rights to a say in how the country is run are eroded by the National Park system. My forebears, and those of many of my farming neighbours, have been shepherding stock in and around Dartmoor’s slopes for centuries, why do we have no effective vote?
As for the current system- ne’er mind Glover’s vision-? With the honourable exception of the few poor folk at the coal face, trying to smooth the choppy interface twixt heedless visitors and me-, I have no faith or confidence in the organisation. Too many of their cadre are highly educated professional desk jockeys, blow-ins who’re completely remote from the most basic understanding of the workings of our community at ground level. Their chief concern, as with office-wallahs everywhere, is to defend their desk…preferably making it bigger, and indispensable. Glover might open new opportunities for some, making even bigger centralised desks. You can be sure some are watching that space carefully. But here, precious few of them have much more than the barest local connection, and when they cash in their respective pails, they’ll no longer have any stake in the community. Several are privately outright hostile to my community…I say ‘privately’ when in fact it doesn’t take much Sherlock Holmes sleuthing to track down evidence that they would far remove us.
Any such comments generally get, in response, asmooth retort trotted out, outlining all the fabulous good works they do to help everyone enjoy what many now see as a public play park, rather than my home and workplace. Various initiatives will be referred to, illustrating how the farming community are being specially looked after….although right now, I’mstruggling to think of which of these have been of much use to me…unless I’m actually paying for them myself. The response will be filled with warm words and soothing bulldust - I could save the author’s efforts by recycling one of their previous missives- but will mysteriously skip right past the constant erosion of my rights.

To be sure, a nationalised central Park authority might well serve me even worse. But right now, we don’t feel that we’ve got much to lose. Which is why you won’t hear many of us complaining about the Glover Report. Certainly not until we’ve seen some meat on the bones of proposals.
Right, I’ve lambing and calving to attend.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Lambing

There isn’t time for anything else than what is filling my waking hours right now…which is the safe delivery of fields full of new lambs and calves. I feeling pretty tired, as the pace has picked up, but then, I’m doing 14 hours a day and I’m beginning to feel real old. I daresay I could’ve recharged my batteries before kick-off, but that was never going to happen. In fact, on reflection, I note I haven’t had a day off since 2019 – when I sloped off to a Tyrolean mountain. That, as you’ll recall, involved shepherding yet more cows- and possibly the testing of some schnapps. I suppose I’m lucky I enjoy work generally, and what I do especially. And I constantly feel inadequate and idle if I haven’t performed herculean miracles each day. Perhaps some shrink will do a study of what goes on in balding old farmers heads.
Anyhoo…here I am, with immediate and constant demands on my time, whether I like it or no, as the moment I turn my back there’s some obstetric emergency. Failure to attend means further problems, or possibly one less lamb to wean next autumn. The cocktail of heady aromas clinging to me, along with colourful stains, are borne of various quantities of amniotic fluid, milky lamb/calf poop, blood, cow splatter, silage, iodine and sweat. As an example of this, imagine the scene. A bridlepath runs right past the field in which the main lot of South Devons are calving thick and fast. A passing pair of ramblers called over to me in the yard to say one had little toes showing at her back end, and seemed to be stuck. Stopping doing what I was doing, I walked back up the path with these kind folk, and hopped the fence to appraise the situation. Assured it was a straightforward delivery, and time baby was out, I invited the visitors in to watch – they were clearly very interested, and I’m not a monster you know. As we approached, the young cow gave a heave, and an enormous head and shoulders slipped into the daylight. Easy peasy I thought. I’ll just give him a tug and get him out and breathing. Oh yes! It’s as simple as that……sometimes. In fact, the cow jumped up, allowing the calf to slip round a few degrees as she lurched up, meaning his hips wouldn’t progress through the available space – think a square peg in a square hole, but rotated a few degrees one way or the other. Happily, the cow is a very amenable soul, and allowed me to tug on calfies legs for all I was worth. But to no avail…he was now hanging half out, wedged tight by his own weight. I knew exactly what needed doing… he required rotating back those few degrees. And yup, the only way to achieve this here and now was for me to grab hold of his chest bodily, and heave with might and main. It surely looked as undignified as could be, but took only seconds, at which point he flumped out onto the dusty deck, hitting the floor with an almighty dollop. We’ve had a lot of big strapping calves – who’re mostly arriving on their own – indeed, this was the most I’ve had to intervene to date.
I scooped the gloop out of his mouth, as he started taking gurgling great gasps of breath. The cow spun to start licking her precious new arrival, and happy all was well, I escorted my admiring audience back to the path, covered from shoulder to waist in gloop. They were very happy to have watched the miracle of life, and I diplomatically omitted mention that, very likely, had we not approached, the cow mightn’t have jumped up at the wrong moment, baby would never have slipped round, and she would’ve been licking a new calf all on her own by the time I next got back to her group. Maybe. Of course, I’m grateful for such news, as I’m well aware what happens to a cow and calf which gets stuck for any length of time at such a moment unattended…..and that ain’t pretty.
I did tell you about the twins on the doddery old Angus cow backalong. They’re now growing apace. I take mum half a bucket of hard feed each day, a bottle of powdered milk to top up Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, and a stick to keep off the ravening youngstock in the field who’d steal the cake. This means that while one twin is feeding, the other is either gnawing on my knuckles trying to get to the bottle, or biffing me somewhere a fella doesn’t want biffing. They’re very sweet, but…….

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Crypto Currency and Deliveroo

In case you were sitting comfortably, here’s a couple of little glimpses into the insanity that modern society generates to confuse and confound. One snippet I lately happened upon – and I haven’t checked the veracity of the story, so indulge me. There is a recent business phenomenon in which companies will deliver other firms fastfood to folk who’re too idle too prepare their own food, or to even bother walking out the door to fetch it. Apparently the likes of ‘Deliveroo’ and ‘Uber Eats’ provide this facility, although I’ve never availed myself of their services as I rather suspect they wouldn’t like the look of my postcode. Anyhoo, I read they now have a combined UK turnover greater than the country’s agricultural sector. I’m not sure what this says of us, but it says it pretty loudly. I have to assume that the logical progression is that eventually, for an extra fee, the underpaid yoof making the delivery will come right in the door and set your food on your lap, so you don’t have to raise yourself from the couch.

Elsewhere, some people are greatly enamoured of something called ‘Bitcoin’. This is a pretend currency- a ‘cryptocurrency’ -, which exists only in computerland. You can’t hold it in your hand, or spend it at the pub, and critically, no government regulates it or protects investors in it. There is nothing – but nothing- that stops it from evaporating overnight. Nonetheless, I’m given to understand that a lot of people have been buying it – again, I speak from position of almost complete ignorance…the idea strikes me as absurd. But ‘investors’ include an alleged purchase of 1.5 billion dollars’ worth by the ever tedious Elon Musk. He would really like you to be able to pay your next Tesla car with it, although the banks who control actual currency are revealingly saying ‘don’t be silly children’.

Bitcoins ‘value’ has been rising to stratospheric levels against real currencies of late- not least because of Musk’s endorsement – indeed, the only thing you can do with it is to gamble on its relative value by buying or selling it. The rather prevalent cynic in me- oh! you’d noticed- immediately wants to know where the money, the actual dollars, are heading. ‘Follow the money’ is the classic rule of investigation. Well, here’s where it gets even fuzzier for me. Apart from what is already in ‘circulation’ being bought and sold, to obtain more apparently you merely have to ‘mine’ it, using some computer widgets. There is a finite supply, which is ever dwindling. The widgets which collectively mine it are becoming ever more powerful as the unit value increases, to the extent that they now consume more power than Argentina, and almost as much as Norway. As I understand it, if they were a country, they would rank about 30th in global power consumption, consuming almost half a percent of the worlds power supply. Those trading in it fuel this moronic absurdity, and Bitcoin is only one of very many..

The only saving grace I can see is that when their bubble bursts, not only will it leave egg on some gullible faces, but the computer widgets mining it will instantly be turned off again. But meantime, dwindling natural resources continue to be extracted from beneath the surface of our poor benighted planet to fuel this nonsense.

It does make me think about the nature of what ‘currency’ really is.

Starting from small transportable materials, of little worth in themselves, our artificial construct called ‘money’ evolved essentially as a system of valuing differing commodities. A pretty coloured bead or seashell, some shiny metal or satisfactorily crystallised rock could be used to represent all manner of useful things. Obviously, food is the first thing you have to value, as long as you’ve air in your lungs and aren’t freezing- notably woollen cloth has been a historic currency. And it’s easier to carry a few discs of silver or gold in your pouch than all of the cows you might own. The metal might be shiny itself, but it’s what it represents that then counted.

From that simple premise, we moved onto the dubious written promise of gold – or indeed, of a pound of silver. This changed the game, as the system relied on a wider societal stability. And from there, we invented non-existent notional money and the banking system, and all the malarkey that arises once no-one actually possesses the shiny discs of gold at all.

I suppose made up ‘Crypto currency’ might be seen as the next step. But critically, it doesn’t rely on a stable government to back it. As such….I wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Plant Based Nonsense


Seeing as it’s been a couple of days since I last felt the need to defend livestock farming from the spurious attacks and blind assumptions of the ‘plant based’ morons…. I think we’d better have another go. It really seems to be an article of faith nowadays that giving up meat will save the planet, and saying so signals your supposed virtue. Massively distorted figures- and downright lies, are peddled to justify it, although I note the emotional difficulty of eating slaughtered animal flesh is seldom mentioned.
Let’s kick off with the actual science, and its interface with reality. An oft talked about –and distorted- figure is the ‘Greenhouse gas emissions’ of the livestock industry. The figures inevitably include cow burpy methane, and you can drill this down to one single point. Ask what methane is made of? Google will tell you ‘carbon and hydrogen’. Now ask where those wicked cows get these ingredients to make methane? They get it from grass and water. Given that grass sustainably sequesters this carbon from the atmosphere, giving off oxygen as it grows,comparing cow burps with burning fossil fuels is hugely stupid.
As for quoted percentages of greenhouse gases whichlivestock are responsible for – and by golly there’s some pretty rich numbers out there….I’m not altogether sure how you obtain definitive numbers. You see, no-one asks me, nor to the best of my knowledge, my cow raisingchums. So how would they know, beyond some wild guesses? Put simply, they lie. As it happened, just as Krishnan Guru-Muppet was waffling on Channel 4 news about it last week, idly stating the same lies as fact –my lovely little wife sensibly flipped channels before I could hear him whining on so- I’d just been fetching in somefat ewes for market. Now these ewes had been left geld –unbred and empty- all winter until a good trade had prompted me find them and cash them…and they were as fat as butter. They’d fattened on just about nothing but what unfertilised untilled grass they could find. The only carbon emitted was when I trucked them to market….and it’s a fair assumption that the ratio per calorie was rather better than your vegan avocado, almond milk, or soya delicacies. If he actually knew anything about it, Krishnan might well argue the merits of some systems, but his ignorant blanket statements were a wild misrepresentation, and downright offensive to me and mine. It hurts, to be continually falsely held up as a bad example. So how can he be allowed to be so dishonest and hurtful? It beats me.

Then there’s Guardian columnist called Gaby Hinsliff. She’s lately run an article carping on about red meat this, red meat that, and how it’s all the work of the devil. She admits to slipping more chicken into her cooking when her loved ones aren’t looking…suggesting that it must be better for the environment than red meat. Let’s look at the facts of that shall we? Now I’ve no axe to grind with chicken farmers – but what does she think chickens live on? A few insects they peck while they scratch around the farmyard? While my sheep and cows overwhelmingly live on the natural vegetation they find around them, pretty much all chicken – and pork- is primarily raised on trucked in feed. It should surely be part of the mix, utilising things like cereals that don’t make the grade, but placing it above animals that are mainly raised on pasture? That’s evident stupidity. I suppose she’s seen the shock videos, that seek out the most extreme intensive finishing systems, to re-inforce the blind prejudice… for ill-informed prejudice is what it is.
Gaby goes on to suggest a plant-based menu for heads of state at this year’s Cop26 climate crisis summit in Glasgow, to show us all the way. Yeah, right. This’ll be where global leaders, and their colossal retinue of advisors, assistants and hangers on, along with the circus of the worlds press, an army of lobbyists, camp followers, and doubtless a load of protestors, will travel –mostly by air- to Scotland, burning fossil fuels as they go, to discuss climate change… rather ignoring the choking elephant in the room. Asserting that their entire diet should also be flown in suggests a fairly high level of ignorance- or does Gaby imagine the West coast of Scotland is famed for its lentil crops?
Her article, I noted when I found it online, features a photo of a few Angus cattle picturesquely grazing a weather-beaten untiled Scottish hilltop. She thinks us peasants will need help ‘to find new uses for our land’, when what we actually need is protection from such ill-informed garbage.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Heartwood

I understand, buried somewhere in this week’s pronouncements from Westminster, is news that Lord Zac Goldsmith, who is apparently ‘Minister for Pacific and the Environment’ is going to get us to plant lots of trees. Now quite apart from the burning question of why the UK needs a ‘Minister for the Pacific’ is unclear, and whether his wealth- or chumminess with Boris and Carrie- has anything to do with the invention of such roles, I’m none too sure about these trees he’s going to plant.
Like a lot of his urban pals, Zac wants to believe that planting trees will soak up all that naughty carbon dioxide we’ve been releasing willy-nilly. And like the rest, he somehow imagines that this will make it OK to just carry on – when I see them abandon air travel, I’ll start to consider whether they have an ounce of intellectual or moral credibility. In fact, trees would be a very transitory and inadequate stopgap, for which the maths indicates we simply don’t have enough landmass anyway. If it weren’t borne of a desperate guilt salving fantasy, it would be worthy of further discussion. But seeing as it’s going to represent a gross imposition on the least damaging community, glibly enacted by some of the most polluting, I’m disinclined to view it very favourably.
Instead, I’m going to make a reading recommendation for you. If you’re interested in growing trees, and where they fit in with managing land, I’ll direct your attention an Australian book called ‘Heartwood: The art and science of growing trees for conservation and profit’, by Oz forestry academic Rowan Reid. He challenges entrenched views, and his book will change your view on growing trees, I can guarantee. Admittedly, it didn’t change my attitude much, as Rowan and I arrived at pretty similar conclusions, having travelled very different paths to get where we were going. That said, I’m continually wowed by the beauty of his book, and the wealth of eloquent wisdom it contains.
Rowan comes at the subject from a contempory Australian background, with familial ties to the European exploitation of the landscape. As he set on his own academic journey –he went on to become a Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne- he also developed an interest in the practicalities of growing trees. Putting his money where his mouth was, he bought 100 acres of Victorian farmland, which had been largely cleared of its native forest. Doing this as a young man, he was lucky – and intuitive- enough to be able to spend subsequent decades turning it into both a living example of his work, and his family home. He’s travelled both Australia and the world, looking at his subject and drawing his own conclusions. And the writing of this book is both the distillation of these experiences and thoughts, and the story of how both his understanding and his trees have grown.
Ostensibly, each chapter deals with an individual species he’s planted, with photos of how they’ve developed, but bringing into the text a huge breadth of related subjects. It’s hard to summarise the scale of Rowan’s grasp of the subject, but he weaves in the management of growing trees, a basic explanation of sawmilling and subsequent timber use, how growing trees can be integrated with conventional farming, responsible land use, the politics of trees – both native and plantation- the intergenerational aspect of growing timber as a crop. He delves deep into aspects of the realities of where trees fit in land management. The scope covered is extraordinary, and it’s all beautifully presented for the reader.
Rowan and I correspond a bit, so perhaps he’ll forgive me if I highlight one or two differences he and I would have. He grew up in, and has made a living in a country where European settlement- and exploitation of- the landscape is both comparativelyrecent, and well documented. The damage ‘we’ have done in many areas of his vast country is very evident. Further, it’s been feasible for a youngster to buy 100 acres of ground, and use it as a long term experiment. It’s an important detail, as things are inevitably rather different in densely populated Europe.
I would say I’ve probably a sharper understanding of the trading of timber – how to make money from the conversion of trees into cash-, and equally, I’m obviously more immersed in commercial livestock farming, but I still bow to Rowan’s encyclopaedic overview of his subject as a whole. His observation is acute, and explanations clear and easily absorbed.
If you’re interested in growing trees, track down a copy. It is both inspired, and inspiring, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Soya for Tyres

‘this is the revised article, differing slightly from the WMN printed version which went out with a howling uncorrected math mistake……oops. (The mistake was corrected, but that email got lost)’


I’m jolly glad I don’t have to take decisions of much more import than whether to turn the ewes out of the hay fields yet, or shall I put on full winter kit again today. Even these choices are fraught, driven by a persistently cold and late spring, which has sapped my mood and pulled gloss off the lactating cows and ewes. I see I’m forecast to enjoy daytime temperatures which will struggle to get into double figures again next week, and it’ll rain some more. I recall the Romans, arriving in Britain two thousand years ago, considered it largely uninhabitable. I get that!
Anyway, I’m spared taking decisions of great significance, unlike bumbling Boris, who is faced with a real poser now. With scientists warning him there’s a fresh covid strain seeping into wider circulation, he’s got to choose whether to continue fully freeing up lockdown measures. And seeing as re-imposing any kind of lockdown is very likely to lead to a considerable degree of resistance and disobedience, he’s pretty short of wriggle room.
You know me, I consider there’s way too many homo-sapiens currently extant, so I’m pretty relaxed about a fresh pandemic- indeed, I would welcome a mutation that really scythed through us. And when my number’s up? Well, at least I can stop work. But it’s generally not acceptable for PMs to think such things. Indeed, it sounds like Bumbler-in-chief did quietly say something indelicate on the subject a few months ago, and has been castigated for it. On the other hand, a Prime Minister upon whose watch there is widespread civil resistance to the rule of law, is soon in a world of trouble. Hmm. Tough choices.
At least he and his chums are clear on some more mundane stuff. The country doesn’t need me to carry on producing food, in the form of those nasty burping cattle, and wicked nibbling sheep. Instead, I should plant lots of trees, which will allow Boris and Carrie-Antoinette to fly over to Mustique for a few days guilt-free relaxation. The nation’s food can be bought much cheaper on the world market, from countries with rather fewer rules and regulations, and a cheaper workforce. Michael Gove says so, and he’s really clever isn’t he?
In fact, I rather suspect it won’t be OK. To entertain my little mind, I’ve been doing some more ‘fag-packet-maths’ for you. Not being a smoker, I’ve used the back of some DEFRA envelopes, of which I have a surplus.
One little snippet I found, which will help you see the scale of matters, was that for 3-4 years now, tyre giant Goodyear have been making some of its wares from soya oil, instead of petroleum based products. You see, the average car tyre takes several gallons of oil to make – some as ingredients, some as energy for the manufacturing process. And as we know, we need to stop using fossil fuels. Sadly, it’s jolly hard to subsequently recycle or recover any of this oil – it’s such a filthy business that it was shut down in India a decade ago, if that gives you an idea. So, ‘plant based’ tyres? Brilliant.
If we were all to use tyres made with soya, what would it mean? The computer tells me temperate soya production might average 2.8 tonnes of soya/hectare – obviously, I’d be using some diesel to do this, but let’s not go there. Possibly I could cut down some more tropical jungles to grow it a bit faster, but that would set fingers wagging. The oil I might extract, once I’d grown my soya- and if I were clever- is only about 15% of bean itself, or 420kgs/hectare. Oil is lighter than water, so that’s 456 litres. It’s hard to pin down figures, but if it takes something like 20 litres of oil to make a tyre, and globally we use about 1 billion tyres per year……to wean ourselves off petroleum based tyres, we’d need 20 billion litres-or 21.7 billion kgs -annually.
I knew you’d like this info, and already asking where the extra 47 million hectares of prime arable land is coming from?
It’s been occurring to me that air travel will be forced onto some plant based distillate fuel soon, which would undoubtedly be another set of maths of a similar order of magnitude.
Conventional ‘fossil’ oil is cheap - as John D. Rockefeller found, it used to obligingly gush straight out of the ground. In the 150 years since, we’ve built an entire culture based on its consumption, and we are so far from accepting that the party has to end that there’s currently no chance of making rational decisions. None whatsoever.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

No Chance

Firstly, you have my apologies for my monster maths error last week – is my best excuse is that my calculator doesn’t have enough noughts on it, or maybe the fag packet wasn’t big enough.
Onwards then. I also alluded to the fact that air travel is almost certain to come under closer scrutiny, if humanity is ever to come to terms with carbon emissions. Perhaps we should consider that this week, as world leaders prepare to oxymoronically fly to Cornwall to discuss climate change. Admittedly, it’s something no-one wants to address because it’s more or less political suicide to tell voters you’re going to ban their cheap flit to somewhere sunny. I could soon knock you up a means of ratchetting down the mind numbing waste and pollution from air travel, since I’m not seeking election….but we’re a long way from confronting a solution. Boris and his merry chums are big on talking about reducing our collective footprint, but the policy they then come up with allows ‘the whole’ to carry on, while churning out meaningless virtue signalling gestures. It’s not just spurious air travel to address, of course. There’s still ‘single use’ plastic to deal with, and the neglect natural fibres and products– when they should be hailed above manufactured mineral and oil based stuff. There’s the whole economic ‘growth’ thing, where governments use rising consumption as an indicator of success. We ought to be asking if we should be importing goods from countries fuelled on coal at all, when it has merely exported our ‘footprint’. The list is endless, but Boris just wants to stay in power, so he waffles a bit of glib rubbish to salve the voters conscience.
Sadly, all parties are inevitably the same. I suppose there’s the Green Party, but they’ve become hijacked by- or you could say ‘lost to’- extreme left wing policy. And such politics have been tried over and over, but show that such collective altruism is simply contrary to human nature –there will always be greedy, stupid and lazy people who undermine the best of intentions. Socialism inevitably flounders every time.
Unfortunately there isn’t an effective remedy that we will consciously put in place, humans being what they are. Events will ultimately overtake us, and we’ll maybe finally act. But our reaction to a crisis is usually to take whatever steps we deem necessary – irrespective of the long term implications. I suppose it’s symptomatic of how we learned to behave and adapt when we climbed down from some African tree. The day to day comfort of our immediate tribe’s offspring is always going to be our priority, and thinking beyond that stage is not exactly our strong suit.

Anyway, I get told off for being negative, so here’s some positive steps Boris might suggest to his chums.
Being that we’ve got really good at making air travel cheap and easy, despite it being about the most polluting manner of conveying us about, perhaps we should try and curb it. To do this, aviation fuel needs to be taxed, throughout the globe, and the revenue raised put into R&D of renewable solutions. Countries that decline to adopt should be 100% commercially ostracised with immediate effect. The tax level should steadily ratchetted upwards. A renewable/recycled substitute fuel might be at a lower tariff. Something distilled from low grade vegetables/feed waste makes sense.
Further, every person should be given a non-transferable ‘air-miles quota’. Let’s say initially one regional/short haul return flight per annum, and one long haul every fifth year. And unless technology overcomes the emissions problem, that would have to be steadily tightened. Anyone flying more often should be paying a rising addition tax. One thing I wouldn’t want to restrict is young people making their ‘big overseas experience’. Learning about the wider world, travelling to strange and faraway places, and going through that rite of passage has a huge beneficial effect on young minds. But should I be allowed to simply hop on a jet to go and lie on a beach – or chase foreign cattle- for a few days? No, of course I shouldn’t….or at least not without wincing at the cost. Yes, this does tax flights beyond the reach of the poorest in society…boo hoo. There are people who’ll whine at that, but then applaud the continued perilous survival of some primitive Amazonian tribal culture….whose natives can’t ‘afford’ trousers, ne’er mind air travel.
And how far away from confronting with this are we? You should know that a forthcoming world cup football tournament is to be held in Qatar. Thousands will fly to a scorched desert climate, to watch football matches….in air-conditioned stadiums and public spaces.
Oh.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Bull woes

Like some of you, I’m mightily glad to see some warmer weather. The cool dry April had been fine by me, allowing me to get the sheep lambed without too much heartache, although the both the cold nights and lack of moisture were beginning to have an effect on progression. But as May dawned, and the rain returned, things went downhill somewhat. The temperature stayed down, and with a strong wind accompanying the constant precipitation as often as not, conditions were less than conducive for a livestock farmer in the hills. The fodder ran out by the middle of the month, by which time we would usually stop feeding anyway. But this May the stock would’ve been in trouble. As we’d pretty much scraped the floor of off-lying stacks, and were down to a handful of round bales in the main pile, I bought in one more lorry load. That soon evaporated, and the cost of more was going to be such that I might as well have sold the cows. So I spread them across as wide an area as could be, and left them too it. We went out with a few bags of sweeties occasionally, to remind them we do love them really, and those still confined made do with a mouthful of barley straw I had left about. I understand the 3 big square bales of clean straw were themselves worth more than the annual GDP of several small countries, but needs must.
The stock has somehow come through this cold and wet, albeit some have been ‘milking off their backs’, neatly conveying their body mass into offspring via theirudders. I’m hoping ‘Dr Green’ will now remedy matters. We've also got a lot of empty cows, due to a couple of bumps along life’s highway. Worst has been the Angus bull having bent his pizzle sometime last year. He was homebred, and apart from being a short legged barrel of grumpiness, he’d been a very reliable stock getter. But not this time…oh no. I think 3 out of his harem have calved to date. I got bored watching them, and turned them to moor with very few looking like they were going to bag up anytime soon.
We’ve had the most miserable run of luck with bulls of late, and although I realise you have to make your own luck in life, by golly I’d like a break now. The Belted sires have had the worst of this run, with only one out of the last five delivering as he should have. I had secured an outstanding bull off a pal, bred from a Scottish cow I’ve long admired, by the AI sire whose been the benchmark for decades – but not related to my cows. His mother stood champion Belt at the Royal Highland, although that wasn’t the reason I’d held her in high esteem…merely a judge agreeing with me. Anyhoo, that chap went lame after one season, and we could never get him sound again. The next, fetched in locally in a hurry performed faultlessly, despite –perversely- acquiring the tick borne nasty ‘redwater’ as soon as he arrived. That didn’t even dent his performance! Next up, I went North again, determined to bring home something special. Several thousand quid lighter, I returned with my choice of bull…that we lost to TB before he ever served a cow. The next, bought sight unseen off a distant pal –and yes, I had a third party check it out for me- served cows well, starting as an enthusiastic yearling. The only problem was that he couldn’t ‘stop’ them. We gave him the benefit of the doubt. After all, passing illness such as the aforementioned redwater can cook their tadpoles for a few weeks, but in 9 months of determined effort, he hadn’t stopped one cow. My best old cow, from whom I’ve kept bulls, returned every month. Eventually, she was turned in with a Riggit yearling, whostopped her within days.
So last summer, with only a homebred Belt available- who had a restricted group due very close breeding- we simply turned the rest in with the aforementioned Angus, he’d get em all in calf……
There have been other bovine issues, which I’ll share with you another day, but take it from me…I’ve had a pretty torrid time of it of late.
I’m not about to be beaten down by it all. As I say, I recognise that you have to make your own luck in life, and whinging about matters beyond your control is fruitless. I did slip off to a Belted herd dispersal last autumn, and secured the cow with the best bull calf at foot – by a country mile. Cross your fingers eh?

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

G7

So the great and the good are gathering in Cornwall to set the world to rights- that’ll be a task for em. Admittedly the G7 mightn’t be the powerhouse group they’d like you to think they are. Having ditched Russia backalong –they were made to sit on the diplomatic naughty step for be grumpy in class, or possibly for borrowing The Crimea- it’s notable that China, India and South Korea are also absent. This kinda leaves a hole, but never mind. All the friendly and familiar countries are coming.

And when they’re here, one of the highest items on the agenda is, as ever, climate change. Since they’re all flying over- with huge entourages and armies of hangers on, and their chief-est concern will be their own country’s economic growth, it is reasonable to question their veracity. But hey ho. I’m sure it’ll be a nice trip out for them.

I’m underwhelmed myself, verging on being vexed about their choice of kipping arrangements. See, my lovely little wifelet and I like to stay at the Tregenna Castle – not a real castle- ourselves when we’re down West. I try to treat her in a manner that she deserves just occasionally, trying to make good the enormous drop in standards she’s accepted by erroneously getting involved with yours truly. And we very much enjoy the faded and slightly careworn building, magnificently perched atop St Ives - although I daresay there’s been a lick of paint applied lately, and I expect some of the endearingly creaky plumbing has been superannuated. We like the stroll down to town, through the sub-tropical dampy bit of fern lined gully, being able to meander about the harbour. We rootle in the little art gallery shops, and chat with the interesting mad avant garde types that rub shoulders with the few remaining natives. A turn along the beach is often in order, and possibly a visit to the Tate to enjoy the mind warping architecture of the building, and chortle at the silly pretentions of some of the art therein- I accept that I might not have quite read the brochure right. Then, the steep climb back up to Tregenna justifies the enormous blow-out supper.

But best of all, I take a perverse pleasure in arriving at this grand hotel in a lorry, and parking it rather annoyingly in front of the tennis court –it might be to Alison’s abiding embarrassment, but there’s not much point in motoring all that way and not fitting in some sawmill delivery.

But I can’t see that happening again any time soon…the prices will have probably shot up, our favourite room will have some new title – the ‘Presidential Suite’ perhaps- as the old place gives itself airs and graces after this weeks visitors…and I bet there’s some enormous limo parked in ‘my spot’.

Elsewhere, I hear some students at some posh university have voted to remove a painting of the Queen from their common room, due to her symbolising connections with a colonial past…yeah, right on comrades. And there’s further talk of hanging a big notice on any statue of Sir Francis Drake, pointing out that he lived in a time when slavery was a normal part of commerce.

I’m sorry for idiots who carp on about such things. It won’t make the world a better place…very possibly the opposite, fostering grievances- imaginary or otherwise- of people who are long dead. Understand this…whatever the vicar might say, until proven otherwise, when you’re dead, you’re dead. All of your cares have finished. Berating Drake for any connection to slavery is meaningless. You might as well blame him for anything else that was commonplace at the time, but that we now find un-acceptable.

Perhaps, and here’s a thought, it would be more appropriate to recall his maritime achievements. Remember, quite apart from repelling a foreign invasion, and, er, borrowing a breathtaking volume of gold from some chaps who’d lately stolen it themselves, he was one of the first sailors to circumnavigate the worlds oceans….and that certainly was not commonplace. Presumably the aforementioned Tate building should also have big labels attached, decrying its connection to long ago Caribbean plantations.

As for publicly dissing Her Majesty……..I’d look at the leaps forward the UK has taken – in values held by the very same whiners complaining- under her tenure. I’m fairly neutral in this matter, but it would be unreasonable to ignore Her Majesty’s cumulative, consistent grace and moral leadership. It’s hard to see how she could have acquitted herself any better. Taking cheap shots is puerile…immature.

It’s certainly wrong to ignore the past, or to pretend things didn’t happen. But looking for things to be offended by is pointless. Move on.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Neospora

I did mention, t’other day, that I’ve had some other cattle woes, and it’s time to say more. While doing a bit of blood testing on some heifers bound for another herd, we picked up a case of Neospora.
This is a reproductive ailment, which is passed from mother to daughter, or caught from canine faeces after a dog or a fox has eaten some infected afterbirth. It causes infected cows to miscarry a high percentage of calves, and remains with them for life. They might slip one or two calves, and then go on breeding normally. Others, from experience, simply stop breeding. Bulls can carry it, but can’t pass it on.
In short, it’s something you don’t want in your cattle, so we quickly rolled out the blood testing across the farm.
And sure enough, we’ve got an infection rate somewhere about 15%, and the only realistic recourse is to cull them out. The infected cows include one or two very precious animals, which is pretty hard to discover. But then, the rising rate of empty cows is a phenomenon we can’t carry –they have to go. Coupled to the bull woes I recently experienced, I’ve a lot of cows doing very little for me.
Neospora was only identified a few decades ago, although it appears to be spreading much faster of late. The reasons for this are diverse, although feeder wagons – where the cattle fodder is churned up to then be doled out along the feed barrier- means any infected material that is present is passed right along the line. Many of us are quick to blame the public walking dogs, leaving their little messages for our beasts to encounter. But in reality, it more often the resident foxes carrying Neospora. After all, not many urban dogs come into contact with placenta from infected cows, whereas an outdoor calving herd of cows is a smorgasbord for the wildlife.
Some herds are being found with much higher rates of infection, including a pal who runs a small herd of pedigree cows on a very low intensity system- but whose cattle shockingly tested 80-90% positive. That was a devastating blow, and indeed, it was to that herd I was sending my heifers when we started the blood tests, as recipients for some embryos being taken from their best show animals. Perversely, you can take embryos from infected cows without transmitting Neospora – which is at least some comfort for our friend.
The first symptoms we started noticing were a run of 5-6 weedy non-viable calves last Christmas. The odd empty cow hadn’t raised much suspicion, as cattle living on wild hill ground can’t be expected to perform as well as those living in easier climes, and when the cows on the common only come in to see the bull for 5-6 weeks in the summer, it’s unrealistic to expect 100% in the best of years. By the time you’ve also had an injured or infertile bull…..well, you get the picture. However, these feeble calves were a giveaway that something was up. The initial vet investigation failed to pick up the problem, to the practice’s subsequent embarrassment. I’d immediately got some iodine in the cows, thinking that might be our issue, which meant we then couldn’t test for its absence.
I consider myself lucky to have then identified the problem soon after, quite by chance. Armed with the results, we’ve realised that one of our best homebred pedigree cows must’ve been infected for years. She was one of the more productive beasts on the farm, and I would never have guessed. She’s got numerous descendants in the herd, all infected, and I’ve had to make some difficult phone calls to where some others have been sold. On the upside, this indicates that it hasn’t spread explosively through the herd, and is rather creeping outwards. A careful blood testing regime should clear it up pretty quickly. While the logistical costs of this are significant, the tests themselves aren’t dear – certainly when compared to carrying infertile cows. However the test isn’t 100% accurate, and already we can see some suspect ‘false negatives’, so we’re not out of the woods yet.
I’ve informed all of my immediate cattle keeping neighbours as a matter of probity,and hope that by openly talking about it here, any of my colleagues with suspicions would consult their vets about the potential problem. There’s no benefit in pointing fingers, as who knows where an infected fox might travel.
I’m hoping to get on top of it pretty quickly, and by testing subsequent breeding heifers – and backtracking from any positives found- we can keep a lid on it. It currently isn’t a ‘notifiable’ disease, although I’m wondering if it should be.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Peat & Carbon

The ‘carbon offsetting/carbon neutral’ nonsense carries on full bore, seemingly with everyone patting each other on the back and telling themselves they must be right. There’s this desperate belief that we can put a stop to climate change by tinkering around the edges, pretending that our feeble efforts might make us ‘carbon neutral’…..but carrying on much as ever. And while I absolutely accept that it’s political suicide to speak the truth, I also strongly object to the facile pretence currently offering some kind of conscience salving cushion.
One of the big wheezes- and very relevant to yours truly- is the infatuation with peat bogs. Now the tops of Dartmoor are covered in peat, although to listen to the ‘true believers’, you’d think the whole lot was either currently on fire, or slumping down to the sea en masse. A very earnest group are fixated on peat as being the saviour of humanity, to the point that they’ll ignore the obvious, with their fingers in their ears saying ‘La la la’. I won’t bore you with the detail – although the public money being thrown at the project begs some very serious questions- instead, I’ll give you a little soupcon to illuminate just how fixated they’ve become, and the level of their self-delusion.
To help ‘restore’ some bogs to their satisfaction, so they can claim they’re mitigating climate change, the group have more than once flown materials into the heart of the moors using helicopters. Helicopters! One operation involved flying several tonnes of granite miles onto the top of Dartmoor- which, as you’d noticed, is already made of the stuff. If you don’t understand the monstrous absurdity of this, not to mention the shocking hypocrisy, you aren’t thinking it through. I warned the group very clearly, but it doesn’t matter what I’ve ever said to them– they know best, and I’m an ill-educated peasant who wouldn’t understand.
Well, my understanding is that helicopters burn fuel. A lot of it- indeed, they are one of the most fuel intensive ways of moving such heavy materials about. Notably, quarries seldom use helicopters to move stonecommercially. The hydro-carbon fuel burnt had previously lain safely underground for 350 million years, hurting no-one. Now it’s forming atmospheric CO2 instead. There’s no way you can dress it up….it’s folly of an Olympiad calibre.
I suppose, if you want to talk about carbon release from peat loss, it might be better to look to the Cambridgeshire fens, where pumps run constantly to drain what then becomes prime arable land. The surface level of the peat in some places has dropped tens of feet over recent centuries. Or you might look at commercial peat extraction, both in the UK and elsewhere. Near Annan, the A75 passes what can only fairly be described as an open cast peat mine. In Ireland, it is part of the National identity, and I’m not sure how you’d convince them to stop cutting and burning peat.
It’s of note that the UKs peat is only a few thousand years old. Geologically, it’s transitory…gone in the blink of a landscape’s eye. It’s extremely unlikely to survive global climate changes already upon us.
Further, I’m not at all sure the numbers stand analysis. My infamous fag packet maths suggests that, should the entire store of Dartmoor’s peat somehow go up in smokein one go, it would add a tiny % to one single years’ worth of UK CO2 emissions. It would barely register. So faffing about burning more fuel to tinker with it, and pretend that this in some way counters what’s being released elsewhere is absurd. It’s a feeble misdirection, assisted by dreamers clutching at their ‘natural solutions’ mantra.
For my part, I’ve to choose whether to take evolving post-Brexit agri-subsidies, designed to reward and encourage such dishonesty. This is a moral dilemma for me. The juxtaposition, seen from up here, is abhorrent. I occasionally venture out from my moorland home, andfind whole landscapes changed, excavated with gurtswing shovels- which manifestly don’t run on fairy dust and unicorn farts- to build flimsy houses and tacky retail parks.
With a beautiful irony, while visiting an old pal –Dudley Luxton- lately, for to purchase a fresh Angus bull, he pointed me across the way, where yet another housing estate was being built. The site, undoubtedly with full planning permission, is on deep peat which is being dugup. I don’t know what else I can say of the wholesale pretence and hypocrisy, except that the Emperors new suit doesn’t look very substantive to me.
Oh, and someone tell Dudley, yon bull has gone straight to work…he- at least- seems to have the right idea.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Career Opportunities


I am fed up with my knee hurting – a cow kicked it in January, and it still hurts. So I thought to trouble the medical profession for the first time in a few years, and went to see a perfectly nice young doctor. After poking and prodding both knees for a while, she told me ‘pain killers and physiotherapy’…and that she would send details to my phone. So I got out my battered little non-smartphone…and for some reason she started giggling. I tried to look hurt and offended, but this caused her tolaugh all the more. It was a minute or two before she could compose herself, and even then, was clearly struggling not to erupt into giggles some more. Agreeing that tech wasn’t my strong suit, she kindly wrote instructions on a card, assuring me my leg wasn’t about to drop off. Still, it was nice to be the cause of such joy in a young lady.

Now, as we all know, in the post Brexit world, travel from Eastern Europe isn’t quite as easy for migrant fruit and veg pickers and the like. And there are some growers getting more than a bit itchy about who is going to bend their backs out in the burning sun and drenching rain, doing the work that us Brits are too idle or self-important to do. Likewise, busy building sites and haulage firms are finding a shortage of labourers and drivers.
And a big part of the problem is the UK state of mind. It was neatly highlighted in a report issued last week. The report delved into this growing shortage-in agriculture-, and suggested helpful ways to resolve it. Highestamongst solutions was promoting the career opportunities farm work gave…. ‘Come and pick daffodils in drizzley West Cornwall, and yes, you too could be the farm manager next year/month/week’ was the message. And therein lies the problem. Those doing the report think that we should encourage people to expect to be the ‘chief’, and not remain an ‘indian’. It illustrates this idea that doing menial work somehow makes you a lesser being. Less than – to idly take an obvious example- those doing clever reports on labour shortages. And I absolutely detest the concept. I recall, as a spotty yoof, being greatly impressed by one or two of my elders and betters who, despite being clearly educated, intelligent, and accomplished, showed no greater or lesser respect and courtesy to the lad sweeping the yard than the visiting bigwig. I came to regard it as a stamp of sublime graciousness…the ability to judge all men the same.
But things change, and to pick a point in time, I’d say it’s the ‘Tony Blair era’ that saw this idea that we should all have aspirations to greatness. And that anyone can expect –if they dream big enough and try their jolly hardest- to be anything they want. Everyone should go to university, and everyone should become fabulously wealthy and beautiful. Presumably, someone else is going to sweep the street and unblock the drain.
And surprise surprise, 20 years later, we seem to be a nation who can’t wipe our own metaphoric behinds. It’s always someone else’s job…because we expect to bebrain surgeons or whatever executive position you consider your degree in media studies ought to qualify you for. In fact, I know of brainy motivated youngsters head hunted straight out of good universities with grown-up difficult degrees, who are grateful to go into proper salaried jobs. This is as it should be, but the shortage of people at the other end of the scale means an HGV driver prepared to work difficult shifts, or a fella who can neatly slap bricks one on top of the other, is now earning just as much, if not more.
I love the irony of it. The false idea that no-one should have to do the smelly grimy jobs has made them higher paid than ever. Good. I should hope so too. The only problem is convincing the tens of millions of brainwashed Brits unwilling to get cold/dirty/sunburnt that it’s not demeaning.
Now I’ve run out of room to then ask how long anyone should be doing this lowly work for, which is something else that’s bugging me. There seems to be an army of public sector workers who think that 20-25 years is a lifes work, and that after that you should be able to retire on a hefty pension. This is a major problem, but we’ll have to think about it another time.
Meanwhile, I’m off out to lift heavy things, shovel smelly stuff, and wrestle some more bullocks….hopefully to avoid them kicking my other knee.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Heavy Metal Moon Rocks

There’s a couple of science-type things that’ve caught my attention this week, and are worthy of bringing to yours.

First off is the heat wave that hit Canada’s British Columbia and several Western areas last week. It barely got a mention over here- just a few column inches about another heatwave, somewhere else. It was just another sign of the climate change they keep banging on about. Perhaps it didn’t register because it happened in wealthy countries, meaning not that many people died. Several hundred souls perished, admittedly, but not many thousands as could have happened in denser populated areas, or poorer countries. It even got pushed out of the news somewhat in Canada, due to a developing scandal involving large numbers of indigenous children’s remains being detected at former residential schools.

However, you might want consider this. Vancouver and surrounding coastal districts have a famously benign climate, very similar to our own. That Pacific North-West seaboard is renowned for its mild balmy conditions- often verging on the soggy…hence its enormous Douglas Fir and Western Red Cedar timber. And suddenly, out of the blue last week, they endured a huge temperature spike, sustained over several days. In one village inland from Vancouver- Lytton- the mercury got within an ace of 50.C. The settlement subsequently burnt to the ground in one of the many wildfires that are raging yet. Elsewhere, across an area hundreds of miles in either direction, 45.C was frequently recorded. This is a jump of 5-10 degrees on previous local records. And in climatology-is that the word- such jumps are barely heard of. Or haven’t been until the last few years. To put it into context, these temperatures would match several North African and Middle East records. Egypt, to pick one, has barely recorded a higher figure…..ever.

It’s suggested that it might be due to the sporadic El Niño/ La Niña Pacific current oscillation, but the jury seems to be out on that. Especially as this isn’t the only place across the globe recording such spikes –it just happens to be one we can recognise and relate to. A heatwave of this magnitude in Europe would almost certainly cause huge numbers of fatalities, never mind damage to infrastructure and crops. For the first time, I’ve started becoming uneasy about the implications……the mass migrations that will occur should such things become the norm don’t make for a comfortable picture.

The situation in BC has eased somewhat these last few days, with ‘normal’ hot sunny weather in the mid 20’s. Whether last weeks shocking events will convince climate change denialists, or spur those of us who shrug our shoulders, saying ‘what can I do?’….I’ve no idea. Even then, those charged with ‘doing something’ about CO2 release are no-where near getting a handle on it. Worse, I’ve noticed that talking about it has now become an industry in itself. Inventing ever more creative carbon accounting scams is a growth industry. People fly around the world to talk about it. It’s like poking yourself in the eye to cure your blindness.

Hey ho.

But never mind. There’s some very thought-provoking news from the moon. More interesting, and superficially less worrying- although we’ll come back to that. Whether the initial facts, which have been knocking about the scientific community for a couple of years, have anything to do with various nations suddenly declaring a renewed interest in lunar travel…well, I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

You see, studies of the moons gravity – and don’t ask me how you make even an educated guess it such matters- have indicated a huge anomaly. It appears that right under the huge crater of the moons 1500 mile wide South Pole-Aitken basin, there is a massively heavy hunk of….well, something. So very heavy in fact, that the conclusion is that the meteorite -or whatever body caused the crater - still lies just below the surface. And it must be heavy…really properly monstrously heavy…one estimate puts it at 2.4 quadrillion US tons. Whatever it is, it’s very big indeed.

What it’s made of is obviously of considerable interest, with a fairly common and workaday mix of iron/nickel being thought most likely….maybe. Notably China's Chang'E-4 lander touched down nearby and started taking samples lately. Given their, er, ambitious territorial behaviour nearer to home, I can’t help but wonder what will happen if samples suggest something of more interest.

I don’t know much about exploiting minerals from an orbiting satellite, but should analysis suggest something rather more valuable than iron….well, I daresay someone is already doing the sums.

Me? I see the two stories together as sadly symptomatic. We trash one home, and immediately start looking for another place to exploit.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Fetching Cows

Sometimes things can turn, as they say, on a sixpence. And so it was for me on Sunday. There I was, thinking another wet week would keep me in the mill, fretting that I should be cutting grass. I was idly planning to fetch the Galloways in off the common for the bull later in the week. The soggy looking mowing grass would have to wait. The sawmill has remained unrelentingly busy for months now, with a 5-6 week lead time seldom deterring enquiries, so I’ve taken every quiet livestock moment to lend a hand chewing round timber into sawn goods.

So there I was, supping my wakie-up coffee on Sunday morning, checking the forecast….and goodness me! After yet another drenching, a sustained high pressure was suddenly predicted to arrive shortly thereafter. Spluttering Columbian Red No. 4, I double checked, and yup…things were improving. And my plans needed to change on a sixpence. Thinking it through as I got out and about, I reckoned I’d better bring fetching the cows in forward to Monday, while it was still a bit dampy, and when labour is in its best supply hereabouts. I cogitated on logistics, as I trudged out over. First job is to give a handful of sweeties to the decrepit Angus rearing her twins, grazing a steep bank nearby with her lunatic little chum who I’d sworn I’d hang up at the first opportunity….just as she started to bag up to with an unplanned pregnancy. Cresting the brow, I happened to glance up the valley, and Lo! There was a large mob of the Galloways right outside the moorgate.

Just 2 days previously, I’d happened to drive round to a distant vantage point to look back across to where they should be. And indeed, there they were, settled peacefully on their lear. Perhaps they’d seen the same drenching forecast for today, and had fled back down to the moorgate. Whatever…..this was too good a chance to miss. So after my few chores around the yard, and putting in half an hour with a long handled hook, fruitlessly trying to reduce the jungle of bracken infesting the twinnies steep little field- it’s a Zen thing- I slipped up the valley with further supplies of sweeties in a bag.

Of course, by the time I got there, most of them had wandered off again, but at least the deluge hadn’t begun. So I started fetching in the 2 groups I could find. Scarcely going ¼ mile onto the hill, I’d acquired most of them in within an hour, galumphing down across the squelchy hillside as they heard me call. I got buffeted and trodden on a bit, as my hirsute bovine friends milled around me, breathing their steamy grass flavoured drool all over me. And, scoping about as I brought them in the gate, a further group were at least within sight, another ¾ of a mile further out. Chances were that they’d meander down by Monday morning, thinking they were missing out on something. I find they’re generally easily got when they’re wanting the bulls.

Under brooding skies, I returned home for my piece of toast and another cuppa, chuffed a lot of the work was done so simply. Finding the radio in the kitchen droning on about some footballists chances of bringing something or other home, and the monsoon still not begun, once I’d supped my tea I optimistically slipped a mile back up to the moorgate.

The remaining bunch of cows – 20 odd- were scattered astride the river, loafing in the heavy sticky gloom. I went up and around them, so I’d had a chance to look down on any hiding in the rushes. Dropping in amongst them, I eased the smaller group across the river, onto the bank where the going is easiest to get home. The other side is almost impossible to traverse, meaning a long diversion up and around the difficult terrain. Things were going fine, and I was in a state of sublime contentedness, working alone in an empty wild landscape with my placid hairy beasts. Well, except a 6 week old calf which determined it didn’t want to cross the river. I couldn’t set off without it, so I went back across, getting boots full of water, and tried persuading it. And matters turned yet again, as it scampered up and down the bank, changing from being ‘daft little thing’, to a ‘ xxxxxxx wretched ungrateful toerag’ in the following 20 minutes.

Eventually, mother called for it, and we sorted matters out, and all traipsed off down to the gate. Mondays work was sorting them for the bulls, the sun came out, and suddenly we’re in hay weather. Bingo.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Hay

The news is filled with tales of businesses and the public sector hamstrung by the ‘pingdemic’ of people being told they’ve had contact with a Covid case, so they’ve got to shut themselves away. And Boris thought he could glibly step sideways and avoid doing the same. What a PR cock-up…the chump. I suppose it was Sunday, and whoever does his thinking for him -now Dom has been excommunicated- might’ve been having a lie-in. Personally, I’m afraid that if the vaccine doesn’t protect you now, you’ve had your chips…Boris will have to be some kind of magician to convince most people to restrict their movements much longer. And extrapolating from the throngs of people splashing about in local beauty spots locally, I’d guess some folks reckon being pinged only affects their work movements.
Happily, this is an issue for other people, as I haven’t got a device to be pinged on. And anyway, if you imagine there’s much chance of my taking time off work this week, you can’t have looked out of the window. The moment the high pressure drifted in, we set to mowing grass. 50 acres of off-ground was knocked down first. Leaving that turned out with a trusted contractor, we started back here. And as every day’s forecast kept coming good, so I kept knocking down more. With another 50 acres+ on the ground here, I decided it might be prudent to stop cutting and get baling. Keeping it moving has been the trick- the damp ground brings it back to life below, as the top crisps.
Evenings, as the sun dips and the air cools, the fragrance of the soft green fresh hay slips downhill, engulfing the yard.
While the rubber band propelled round baler has been doing most of the work back here, leaving giant cotton reels deposited everywhere, I’ve even had the chance to pull the little old square baler out of its shed. I think it might 3 years since we had settled enough weather to make little bales – unlike big round bales you have to get them picked up the same day, or they’re taking dew from the ground overnight. I think I’m the only member of the team actually older than this little jewel of a machine. I carefully grease it, and spray everything with diesel before it goes beddie-byes, but last time I hadn’t adequately blown the chaff out of the knotters. These hideously complicated mechanisms, the adjustment of which is a dark art and not for mere mortals, had a congealed coating of diesel/dust mixture, which caused the right hand knotter to gobble up bits of cut off string which gave it tummy troubles on the test run.
And trust me, standing over such a device when the sun is blazing down on a field of hay which is ready to bale is a good place to test your mettle. Happily, I’d pulled the baler into the row an hour or two before I considered it properly ready to bale, so I had time to kick myself for not getting this chaff better cleaned, remove the detritus causing the offence, have a cuppa in the shade, and fire her up again. Of course, having the trusty rubber band baler parked up ready to save the day helps…but you can’t easily stuff big round bales in the lofts. And when I decided it was time, the blessed little baler then performed almost perfectly – breaking only one bale out of several hundred. Very sensibly, I elected to go on and bale the next field in round bales, leaving my eager assistants to pick up the idiot-blocks I’d deposited everywhere. Glancing over the wall as I baled, I sagely weighed how they were progressing with my own speed of travel. With unerring perfection, I happened to finish my afternoons baling as the last of the little bales was being thrown up onto the trailer. It’s no good getting older if you don’t get wiser I say.
In fact, I’m belittling my own task, as that second field is the steep one across the side of the hill, overhanging a favourite riverside picnic spot. I’ve only once had a bale roll away, picking up speed to jump over the fence. From there, it rocketed over the 120’ precipice to the riverbank, coming to rest in the middle of the Dart. On that occasion, happily, there was no-one in its path- because it might’ve spoiled their day. Subsequently, I’ve been very careful indeed baling this field, and travel to the ends to deposit the bales from the danger zone against solid stone walls. It’s tedious and intense work, but resulted in a further 47 round bales of delicious fodder.
Onwards, lots to do.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

German Floods

I’ve been trying to get my head round some stuff, as I was chasing rows of grass last week. Obviously, I was moved by the plight of Germans and Belgians killed or dispossessed in recent floods. It is impossible not to be. Houses were washed right away, along with roads, bridges and railway lines. This wasn’t in some developing country far away, where tin roofed shanties had grown willy-nilly along unstable hillsides in monsoon prone territory. This was long settled, rich, safe Europe, and some of the houses left half destroyed were seemingly old timber framed structures. This suggests events were unprecedented over hundreds of years.
It’s reasonable to presume the huge sudden rainfalls were a result of changes to our climate, just as scientists have been warning us for decades. Well, maybe. Because it’s also the case that some areas shown flooded were dead flat, indicating that alluvial material has flooded across them before at some point. And sporadic floods eroding away a V shaped valley can hardly be a surprise….how do you think the valleyappeared in the first place? The question is whether this is down to our actions burning fossil fuels, and it’s more or less impossible to be sure.
I’m not a denialist, as you know, but I’m reminded there are well documented natural events that occasionally cause extreme floods. Not many years ago, a lake of fresh water held behind a glacier was broached in Iceland – a place where nature often plays out its hand in ways to remind us we are but puny ants. That flood swept away everything in its path, although there wasn’t much to be swept away.
Then there are plenty of ancient references to catastrophic floods, probably caused by natural forces rather than a disappointed or petulant deity. There is very good hypothesis that 10,000 years ago the Black Sea was a fresh water lake with a surface level about 100’ lower than it currently is. This is backed up by the remains of freshwater shellfish 100’ down the slope of todays –saltwater- sea bed. As the last Ice Age waned, sea levels rose, including that of the Mediterranean until it finally breached the Bosporus Straight, causing sea water to cascade through the gap, flooding 39,000 square miles of what had been very habitable lakeside real estate. Oh, and giving rise to the enduring stories about some wise farmer having built a boat big enough to save some of his best breeding stock….although like all good stories, it’s grown somewhat in the telling.
So, the jury must remain out whether the recent floods were specifically down to us warming the climate, although it’s hard to ignore the continued co-incidences. What caught my jaded eye was elements of the response – and as I was trying to explain to a friend, I don’t wish to appear callous, for I am absolutely sympathetic toward those affected. However I couldn’t miss the irony of Angela Merkel immediate assurance that it’s all down to climate change, and we must do more to fight that. Meantime, Germans flocked to the aid of the devastated areas….with great big earth moving machinery and trucks and diggers. Big machines made of iron and steel…which wasn’t forged using the now metaphoric unicorn farts Angie has promised bridges and roads are to be rebuilt and made more flood resistant….using yet more steel, and concrete made of limestone that’s been burnt in kilns that weren’t fired with good intentions.
As I had to conclude, our solutions to the problems are exacerbating the problem. Then this week, I couldn’t help but notice world leaders –or at least their underlings- are all flying around the world trying to persuade each other to be ready to fly together again later this year, and declare that we’re going to give up burning all this fossil fuel. The irony seems to be lost on them.
Giving this thought has helped me understand why every man and his dog seems to be clutching at what are obviously pretend ‘solutions’. Going vegan ‘to save the world’, only to live on almonds grown with irreplaceable fossil water, or soya grown on what was just last week thriving tropical rainforest. Buying an electric car- still made of materials hewn from the earths guts, and plugged into the socket in the wall…which is connected to a fossil fuel burning power station. Celebrities buying up farmland to ‘rewild’ it, to make everything better…while living a shockingly wasteful personal life.
It’s all just a salve to rub in the wound in our consciences. We are the problem, How we live, allowing it to continue. Just by being.
We have to ‘grasp the nettle’, but we can’t.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

With the last of the ewes clipped

Something is troubling me. Given that just about anything I trade in has jumped in price, as have all kinds of inputs which involve a grubby finger nailed operative actually doing some work, how come inflation figures don’t reflect this? Several mainstream commodities have doubled in 12 months, and while I’m sure lots of things have remained flat, nevertheless… Between various supply issues and the pingdemic, a self-feeding shortage of all kinds of goods seems to have arisen. The Government are being warned by several very heavy hitting voices that there’s problems.
It’s not specifically this that’s hitched a thorn in the back of my mind. It’s the inevitable response. For years, governments have been geared to maintain insanely low interest rates- and to conjure new money out of thin air- to boost economies. An obvious outcome has been monstrous rates of borrowing, and an equal reluctance to sit on any kind of reserve. This fixation with an ever growing economy could be about to come home to roost. Because if interest rates jump to just a few percent, I’m guessing a whole generation is going to discover a world of hurt they never knew could happen. Further rises to rates seen in the past would comprehensively reshuffle the deck. It’s hard to imagine the bruising that would arise.
It doesn’t overly concern me, beyond the fact that I’m getting old and slow to react. See, I’m generally very conservative in my economic stride, saving my efforts for when I can get maximum bang for my buck. But I don’t know that I want all the fuss of such times now. Ho-hum.

And speaking of logistics and supply problems, I was idly following an online discussion on the subject the other night, where a number of Scots were bemoaning the shortage of cement. It seems there’s limited numbers of cement kilns north of the border, - where you’ll remember, limestone is heated to make cement, using prodigious amount of fossil fuels. And it quickly transpired that one key instillation has currently got all of its spare capacity being re-directed to a single construction project which needs huge volumes of concrete. And what job is allegedly causing all of this greenhouse gas release? Yup, the colossal uber green ‘Lairg 2’ windfarm project in Sutherland. Don’t shout at me…I only read em out.

Anyway, my life is generally focussed on more mundane stuff. The boy has got the last of the ewes clipped – excepting some ewe lambs, and the inevitable Scotch blackface ‘latecomers’ who’ll doubtless come traipsing out of the molinia wilderness out over the top directly. I’m now watching the weather forecast to have a go at the final stretch of the hay/silage harvest. Tallying that up it appears I’ve still got to get a mower under nearly 70 acres, so we’re not done yet.
In between showers, I’ve been hacking away at unwanted undergrowth, using media ranging from a contractor in a full-on forestry guarded tractor with heavy duty flail topper, through to a trusty long handled hook swung by yours truly. The former obviously covers masses of ground by comparison, obliterating everything in its path, and makes all the difference on one site I’m struggling to keep on top of. The latter however is a delight to use. And a peaceful hour or two of an evening using it gives solace to my battered soul. The sweat drips off my brow, and the horse flies give me no respite, but it’s a Zen thing.
The head of this hook was hand wrought of outstanding steel by some long ago craftsman. About every third year, I have to re-attach a carefully selected ash handle, of the highest grade I can muster. This makes all the difference, as the right handle will be light and flexible, and with the steel keeping its edge so well, it will deftly slice off smaller blackthorns and gorse bushes. The handles do fail occasionally of course, but I keep a secret stash of replacements ready. I’ve tried hefting an unwieldly replacement in the local farm supply shop, and there is no comparison. None. Craftsmanship like that hook is a lost art I’m afraid.
It tickles me that, despite all the livestock I keep around me, such work is a never ending chore. Without it, and the winters mechanical hedge trimming, the landscape would look very different indeed. The endless supply of urban muppets who think they know more about farming than we do scarcely grasp the realities of land management. When they bleat about ‘rewilding’ it’s clearthey have no idea of what farming actually means….and hence no understanding of how civilisation exists at all. That’s sobering.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

More Climate Stuff

You might have noticed a bit of talk in the news this week about wildfires, heatwaves and floods et al, which have caused misery untold in a wide variety of locations…and which are harbingers of the climate apocalypse coming over the horizon. It doesn’t help the hysteria that a lengthy report predicting a slowing of the Gulf Stream also surfaced – aha!- along with some worthy worldwide scientific group also releasing their 7 year warning of impending doom.
A fever pitched scurrying of worried commentators is to be seen daily, having flown to the latest disaster to report…. assuring their secret souls that them bringing you this news is more important than the little itty bit of carbon they’ve released by doing so. And I note I’m not alone in having clocked that MP Sharma fella flying all round the world, trying to wrangle climate saving plans from world leaders in the run up to the COP whatsitsname due in Glasgow in a few weeks time. There are those that have timorously suggested he might’ve done this all by ‘zoom’ or some such….but that’s not quite as exciting as the vitally important session of jet-setting junkets he’s been engaged in. It’s hardly as special if you can do it at home, in your slippers, is it?

Some have defended him, claiming his work to get everyone around the table is essential, despite it being the perfect example of how ‘We’re all doomed Capt’nMainwaring’. Each and every one of us thinks we’re too important to give up the things the ‘oil age’ has brought us. The ‘solutions’ are seldom much better than the problems, and almost always give scant mention to all the millions of tonnes of carbon being continually released in hidden ways you and I had hardly thought of.
I keep seeing adverts –now I’ve given it some thought- for Electricity vendors, who will charge you a bit more for power supplied from sustainably loved up generators, who plant some pretty flowers in front of the headquarters to show you how green they are. Regrettably, they give scant mention to the detail of how these providers actually go about their business. I understand some of my wealthier land-managing peers are running nicely subsidised things called anaerobic digesters, cooking up methane from ‘waste matter’ to burn in generators. This sounds great until you understand that many of them are actually running their giant compost bins on virgin crops, grown especially for the job. Maize silage is favourite, grown, harvested,hauled and ensiled using monstrously big farm machinery. The machines which harvest it are usually powered by 1000 horsepower engines, busily burning diesel all the while like it’s going out of…..Oh.
Out of professional interest I keep in touch with various lumberjack type communities around the world, and the preferred manner of putting out the numerous forest fires currently raging are fleets of water bombing aeroplanes. The irony certainly isn’t lost on me. Then I watched a very satisfactory movie the other night called ‘Planet of the humans’. In it, a rascally presenter went to the launch of some American electric car. With unerring stupidity, the organisers allowed him to find out that the demonstration cars were being charged from their glossy corporate buildings own power supply. ~This, in turn,was hooked up to the local power grid being supplied by an electricity company…..who generate 95% of their electricity by burning coal.
I wish I could make all this stuff up. Really I do. And I know it’s boring you.
But I can’t stand by and listen to the great and the good pretend they’re fixing the problem. They are not. Nor are those queuing up to buy farmland to plant carbon grabbing trees/rewild it, or enter it into some peatland restoration scam…..so they can polish their haloes and go right on doing what they’re doing. As long as we burn fossil fuels on an industrial scale, there is no such thing as ‘carbon neutral’. It’s simply a lie. And the best efforts of all this frantic virtue signalling and diplomatic scurrying is, I’m afraid, going to be undone again by the populist likes of the next Trumpty-Dumpty.

As something of a contrast, I’ve spent my week hunting straying cattle across empty wastes of billowing molinia moorland, and walking others along leafy cobbled ancient cart tracks in the valleys. I’ve been fetching in store lambs for sale using the hugely wasteful media of a dog and a stick. And all the while, it has never escaped my attention that everyone, including that ill-informed little twerp Dimblebey, is saying eating my lamb and beef is the big eco-sin. So you’ll forgive me if I’m inclined to think the human race deserves everything it’s going to get.