I don’t know why, but November always seems to bring my ‘revolutionary’ urges to the fore, and this year they were stirred by an ‘invitation’ to renew my tractor insurance’ with the NFU. This is the outfit that advertises itself as a mutual insurance company and so is not run for profit. In this respect it is just like many of its members whose farms are also run on a non profit basis.
Lack of farm profit is put down to many things including the buying policies of the supermarkets and the food processors, but also includes bureaucracy’s obsession with regulating everything that moves. This particular factor has created a working environment in which time spent recording history, has become more important than time spent doing the things that make history.
So silly has much of this bureaucracy become, that I will never again believe that any politician is serious about reducing red-tape until I see them remove the necessity to give each sheep an individual number. Flock number yes! But, because Defra kills the whole flock in the event of a notifiable disease, individual numbers should be an option to the farmer. Tag numbers and electronic readers are very useful to large farmers and to specialist breeders. But why not let people have the choice? This one stupidity alone means that for many of the nation’s eighty thousand smallholders, ear tag regulations alone have put up costs per animal from 8p to about £1.24.
Arable farmers are not exempt from the bureaucratic bunglers. For example, the blanket ban on burning stubble has led to a dramatic increase in black grass amongst wheat which has meant millions more gallons of additional herbicides on the land, to say nothing of the compaction of the land due to increased tractor work.
There are winners however; in this case they are German chemical manufacturers and the Saudi diesel suppliers. As this column has said before; Fair Trade for third world farmers is alright, so long as it is matched by fair trade prices and a level playing field for British farmers.
In September we visited Cornwall and down a very narrow lane met a large silver van. We manoeuvred into a tight passing place whilst the other chap wound down his window and, in a delightful Killarney brogue proceeded to tell us all about Ed and Mike who each had dairy farms down the hill. Without a pause he then switched to the Royal Cornwall Show at which he sold farm machinery and, in the back of the van, he just happened to have a left over diesel generator and pressure washer.
I don’t know what it is about impromptu conversations with Irishmen, but I found myself joining in as though I had known Ed and Mile, and of course Patrick, for years. It was if this roadside scene was a kind of impromptu theatre in which Patrick and I were making up the script as we went along. We both knew it was theatre but only one of us was the director. I was merely the actor making up lines in response to those uttered by the director.
Just then a shiny posh car came up behind Patrick’s van and, as though someone had coughed in the audience, the spell was broken! However, residues of the spell still echoed in my brain as I heard myself saying, “Well, I must go now as we are relief-milking for Ed and Mike and they are expecting us any minute.” He grasped my hand, and off he went in search of a new actor on which to cast his directorial spell. We continued slowly down the lane and I said to Marie, “I bet a couple of chaps are down there wondering where their generator and pressure washer has gone.
I was right to doubt Patrick because on our return home, I was told by our house-sitting-relatives that during their last sit in Cheshire, there had been a spate of farm burglaries during which an Irish driver with a silver van was thought to be the culprit.
Talking of an Irish driver however reminds me of Casey who was stopped by the Garda in Limerick for speeding at 40 miles per hour,
“Forty miles!” cried Casey, ‘You’ve got to be wrong, I’ve only been on the road for five minutes.”
View from the Pew 