BY JIM WEBSTER From talking to fellow farmers and others over the last few months, there has been ‘considerable dislocation’ in the market. The nearer you are to ‘commodity’ food production the more stable things have been. Whereas if you’ve specialised to produce for niche markets or even sell direct to the catering trade or at farmers’ markets, everything went very messy very quickly in … Continue reading Food Prices & Bumps in the Road
BY JIM WEBSTER I saw an interesting comment somewhere in the farming press. Apparently in agriculture we’re going to have to get with the programme and adopt more cutting edge technology. The ‘smart home’ is here, we’re now going to have the ‘smart farm’. Certainly moving to robot milking is now an option for dairy farmers. Economics and other factors might mean it’s not for … Continue reading Farming’s Robot Idealism
BY JIM WEBSTER Yes, Prime Minister, if you’ll just walk this way please. I’m glad to see that your advisers made sure they bought you a pair of wellingtons especially for this trip. Oh? Wellington has been airbrushed from history because of his links with Slavery? Or Ireland? Whatever, just put them on. The purpose of taking you round this comparatively ordinary dairy farm is … Continue reading Dairy Farm 2050
BY JIM WEBSTER As you can imagine, a slaughterhouse will get an awful lot of paperwork, and a lot of it has to be properly disposed of because it’s government documents. So a manager I know installed a shredding machine to dispose of it securely. Last time I talked to him he saved this paper for bedding up the pen in the lairage that they … Continue reading Farming & Politics Don’t Mix
BY JIM WEBSTER Looking round last week everybody was busy. Combining, baling and carting straw, baling and carting round bale silage, each one was working flat out. I suspect the average age of drivers was a lot lower than this week when so many of them are back to school. It’s been an interesting harvest round here. We tend to be later than further south, … Continue reading Another Cumbrian Harvest
BY JIM WEBSTER A young farmer was chatting with me the other day. An old chap had told him that when they wanted to buy a new tractor they sold three new calved dairy heifers. The young farmer wanted to know if this was true. The answer is, yes, it was true. Admittedly his informant bred damned good cows, and the rest of us might … Continue reading Livestock Farming’s Money Drain
BY JIM WEBSTER When you work your way down the list of jobs you have to do on a busy dairy farm, you’ll notice that one that somehow has to get fitted in is ‘looking dairy heifers.’ As soon as there is grass and the heifers are old enough, I always tried to get them outside onto it. I could still give them some supplementary … Continue reading Young Ladies of Uncertain Temperament
BY JIM WEBSTER Last week seventy seasonal workers out of two hundred working on a Herefordshire vegetable farm tested positive for Covid. All across social media a storm of people asked, “Why are we bringing in Romanians when there are people in this country looking for work?” The problem is that whilst people in this country may be looking for work, they don’t want that … Continue reading Farms Don’t Want UK Workers
BY JIM WEBSTER Here I’m talking not about selling farms, I’m discussing the sale that occurs on the farm when ‘everything must go.’ This is normally because the last tenant or previous owner is retiring. Traditionally round here there were three components to a sale. They’d start off with the ‘small tools’. This was the miscellaneous rubbish out of the workshop and other buildings. Old … Continue reading Farm Sales
BY JIM WEBSTER People struggle to understand why I can get so interested in grass. After all it’s green and normally wet. But really, my life has been spent creating optimum conditions for grass. That way I had about enough to feed to cattle or sheep, and somehow we made a living. In a perfect world, when making silage, you’d move the grass at exactly … Continue reading Grass & Decision Making
BY JIM WEBSTER I have been musing recently on the impact of arbitrary government diktats. Admittedly they have been part of my life as a farmer for longer than I care to remember. Agriculture has always been a field where Westminster felt it unwise to rely upon the ignorant and unlettered peasantry and preferred to organise things themselves. From a safe distance. And during office … Continue reading Here Today Gone Tomorrow
BY JIM WEBSTER Whilst people are trapped by the virus, agriculture continues to march to the beat of a different drum. Almost certainly having had the virus means that here we’re mentally in a different place to a lot of people but I went into town yesterday and had to go into one establishment to deal with a couple of issues. I’m somebody who hasn’t … Continue reading A World Apart
