BY JIM WEBSTER On the twelfth of February a friend of mine posted a quite spectacular photo of a fire on Dartmoor: This is an accident waiting to happen. Winter wildfires are not unusual. At the same time firefighters were tackling a fire near the Cogra Moss reservoir, in West Cumbria (hence the photo from one of our local papers.) In Scotland, the Scottish … Continue reading Winter Wildfires
BY JIM WEBSTER Are they worth it and if you’re not a farmer have you ever even heard of them? I was lucky in that when they were coming in, I was out of dairy and was buying calves and selling store cattle. So I managed without the extra expense. I did finish a handful of cattle, but I sold them direct to the consumer. … Continue reading Farm Assurance Schemes
BY JIM WEBSTER I came across this almost certainly apocryphal story. Apparently a town gets its first 5G phone mast. Almost immediately all sorts of people develop medical conditions. A protest group against the mast is formed. The local council arrange a public meeting and bring in the representatives of the company that erected the mast. In it everybody is waving their doctors notes and … Continue reading Spreading Muck
BY JIM WEBSTER I know a lot of farmers’ sons have played rugby in their time. Certainly working with livestock gives you a lot of transferable skills as well as a higher than usual pain threshold and the ability to soak up damage. But then I was shown a video of Indonesian Cow Racing which does seem to take this to a whole new level … Continue reading Bullocks and Barbadore
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 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 Yesterday started at 4am. That’s when I woke up and realised it was dark. What I didn’t realise was that it was 4am. The darkness and my inability to tell the time had the same cause. The radio alarm clock wasn’t on. So we’d had a power cut. Now that needed further exploration. Had there been a power cut, one that affected … Continue reading Where’s Our Rural Broadband?
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 It struck me that you might want to open your village hall or community centre, so I thought I’d guide you through the new rules which can be found here. First there is a series of warnings: Many community facilities are also workplaces and those responsible for the premises should therefore be aware of their responsibilities as employers. The government is clear … Continue reading Reality-Free Civil Servants
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 Because things were so wet over winter, the rain that we’ve had has just about been enough to keep us going, but I’ve noticed some of the sandy land is starting to burn off again. To be honest this is three months earlier than we could expect it. Still we’ve still time for torrential rain and flooding in July. I saw a … Continue reading The Rural Drift
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 It must be admitted that we were ready for this rain. As it was we’d neatly ricocheted from one extreme to another. This winter was ridiculously wet. We never had flooding as such up here in Cumbria, but there was standing water where the water table was now higher than ground level. So if we were ever going to get any spring … Continue reading Glorious Rain
BY JIM WEBSTER When I looked across at this view this morning whilst I was feeding heifers, it did strike me that I’ve not got a bad place to be ‘self-isolated’ in. Looking east across Morecambe Bay towards the hills of the Pennines. I really can’t grumble. Nonetheless, on one of my rare forays onto social media today, somebody had posted something along the lines … Continue reading Define Key
BY JIM WEBSTER There are no lingering doubts now. This virus has turned the world upside down. The late, great, Douglas Adams wrote, “The History of every major Galactic Civilisation tends to pass through three distinct and recognisable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterised by the question ‘How … Continue reading Self-Sufficient Kingdom
BY JIM WEBSTER One of the tales my father always told was of back when he was in his teens and farm workers would work for a ‘term’ (summer or winter) and then after the term was up, he’d either sign on again with the chap he was working for or go on to the next fair. Apparently one of the tales going round at … Continue reading Smoke in a Barrow
