The world is changing but nobody important wants to notice

Funny how some things never change. Sixty years ago I was busy with a fork and wheelbarrow cleaning out a heifer shippon. I was no more than eight at the time. This morning, there I was, with fork and wheelbarrow, mucking out heifers again. Admittedly my younger self would have appreciated the developments in muck fork technology. The one I’m using now is lighter, with a hollow metal shaft. The barrow hasn’t changed much, but being galvanised rather than painted, it’ll doubtless last better. Some things are apparently timeless and unchanging.

Other people are also trapped in an apparently timeless world. Our ruling classes are a prime example of this. So in the Netherlands, the last government decided that 30 per cent of all cattle farms need to be closed by 2030 in order to halve nitrogen emissions as decreed by EU regulations. Government policy was that Dutch farmers will be forced to either sell their land to the state now or face expropriation later. Given that the Netherlands is apparently the second largest exporter of agricultural products in the world after the US, to cut their production is of rather drastic. Admittedly this plan is on hold because the farmers formed their own political party and this led to the collapse of the government at the elections. It’s not just the UK political class which is out of touch with the electorate.

In France, farmers are protesting at the cut in their income, and the incoming requirement to leave 4% of farmland fallow and the mandatory restoration of hedges. This comes on top of bitter arguments about irrigation projects, which have led to crashes. Apparently 58% of the water used in France goes to farming, 26% to drinkable water, 12% to cool down nuclear reactors and 4% goes to industrial uses.

These arguments parallel those in Spain, where farmers are also complaining. Apparently Spanish strawberry farmers are seeing their prices undercut by strawberries imported from Morocco. Because of the use in Morocco of water from sewage systems for irrigation, these strawberries can contain Hepatitis A. In the UK and EU we have regulations to ensure this doesn’t happen. But whilst expecting our farmers to keep up standards, governments have no problems about importing stuff cheap which does not meet those standards.

But in Spain as in France there are problems with drought and the amount of water going to agriculture. In Spain it is apparently 70%. Now it may be that there are people who think that washing the car or running a bath is more important than producing food to eat. If so, they should say so, and they can be issued with appropriate ration cards.

But perhaps somebody has noticed that the world is changing.  

Science for Sustainable Agriculture is often described as a think tank. In a recent article, in which they look at a Defra report into the new Defra designed environmental schemes, ELMS, they pointed out that

https://www.scienceforsustainableagriculture.com/mattwridley6

“For action after action, the Defra-funded report indicates that achieving environmental benefits in land managed under ELMS actions can be expected to be offset by potentially more significant disbenefits elsewhere – both in terms of environmental and food production impacts. In simple terms, it recognises that land under the ELMS will be less productive, which will require the missing food to be produced on other land, including in other countries, which could result in overall worse outcomes for the food production, climate and the environment.”

The Defra report is here.

https://randd.defra.gov.uk/ProjectDetails?ProjectId=21327

So the policy that our political elite still clings to is to reduce food production in the UK and import more from abroad. But if countries like the Netherlands, France and Spain are also moving down that road, where do we import it from. Somewhere where your produce arrives with a side order of Hepatitis A perhaps?

But the world is changing. The world that existed when I first picked up a muck fork is a very different world to the world we have now.

We have a war in Europe. Danish and Swedish ministers, among others, have said that Russia could invade a NATO country in the next three to five years. Because we are no longer in the EU we tend to miss some items of news but 20 of the 27 member states increased defence spending. Some of them by considerable amounts. Indeed NATO and a number of EU member states have suggested that the UK consider reintroducing conscription as a way to help deter aggression.

But it isn’t just Europe. The rest of the world is less stable. The shooting in Moscow seems have been organised by ISIS–K. These have been fighting against the Taliban in Afghanistan as well as elsewhere in Central Asia and Iran and are violently opposed to Shia Muslims. Russia, having joined in the Syrian civil war, having become allied to Iran, and having offered military support packages to African dictators facing Islamic or other insurgencies, has ended up very firmly on one side in the divide which splits the Islamic world. It just happens to be the side violently opposed by ISIS-K. So whilst Iranian proxies like the Houthis attempt to blockade the Red Sea, Iran and now Russia come under attack from ISIS and vaguely allied forces. But of course being hostile to Iran doesn’t mean they’re any less hostile to the West.  

So given the total mess which is world politics at the moment, is it really sensible to adopt policies which reduce our food production and increase our imports from a less stable world?

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There again, don’t confuse me with somebody who might have a clue what they’re talking about

As a reviewer commented, “Should be mandatory reading for anyone moving to the countryside for the first time. Charmingly accurate and educational. Utterly first class.”

As another said, “Yet another quiet, but highly entertaining, amble through Jim Webster’s farming life, accompanied by Sal, his collie extraordinarie.
Sheep, cattle, government eccentricities and wry observations are all included.”

It Ain’t Half Hot Mum

According to its website, “Wildlife and Countryside Link (Link) is the largest environment and wildlife coalition in England, bringing together 82 organisations to use their strong joint voice for the protection of nature.”

They provided parliament with evidence to show that the British countryside is a “racist colonial” white space.

This begs a lot of questions. Why is the countryside a white space? Perhaps, given the rubbish wages, high levels of rural deprivation and the high cost of housing, people who aren’t on serious money don’t want to move here?
As for visiting, I suspect that for people who are financially struggling, whatever their skin colour, the sheer cost is enough to put them off. When you’re struggling to cope with the increased cost of living, something has to give.

As for farming, to be fair, I know a lot of people who weren’t born in this country who have a good work ethic. I would happily employ them but there are two problems. The first is that I don’t make enough money to take on employees, and the second is that they’re too smart to work ridiculously long hours in poor conditions for damn all reward when they can, with the same sort of commitment, actually make a decent living and build up a business in a more urban setting.

But to be honest, I have two problems with the Wildlife and Countryside Link pronouncements. The first is that we have a lot of well paid, predominantly metropolitan people who obviously haven’t a clue what life is like in the countryside. Even Suella Braverman is switched on enough to describe the wildlife groups’ claims as “naïve and based on a Beatrix Potter version of the countryside when, in fact, rural communities suffered poverty and deprivation as acute as urban areas.”

As always we have those with money pontificating about the failings of the poor. But in point of fact I once met an old chap who as a boy has seen Beatrix Potter, or Mrs Heelis as she was known, walk up from the ferry, just another farmer’s wife with a sack thrown over her shoulders to keep the rain off. She had forgotten more about rural reality than some have ever known.

Then there’s this talk about it being colonial. I looked up what the word really means (other than when it’s used as a generic insult meaning ‘a bad thing’.) Colonialism is “the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.”

Like when rich metropolitans lobby to get control over rural policy so they can go in and tell the peasantry (who are obviously too stupid to run their own lives) how things should be done.

I’m sorry that the good and doubtless adequately compensated people at Wildlife and Countryside Link feel that the indigenous population are failing to meet their high standards. Perhaps, to paraphrase the words of Bertolt Brecht

The Wildlife and Countryside Link had leaflets distributed in parliament

Stating that the rural peasantry had forfeited the confidence of the elite and could win it back only by redoubled efforts.

Would it not be easier In that case for the elite to dissolve the rural peasantry and select another?

Me? I’m so damned indigenous that it’s almost embarrassing. Apparently my family have been mixing a bit of farming and fishing along this coast since before the American colonies revolted (that we know of.) Will I have to be ethnically cleansed to put things right? Or if I just tick the ‘white, other’ box on forms, will that do?

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If it helps, she’s not got a lot of white on her

As a reviewer commented, “Jim Webster’s recollections, reflections and comments, about life as a Farmer, are always worth reading, not only for information, but also for entertainment and shrewd comments about UK government agencies (and politicians).
One of the many observations that demonstrate his wryness, is as follows:
There was a comment in the paper the other day. Here in the UK, clowns are starting to complain that politicians are being called clowns. The clowns point out that being a clown is damned hard work, demands considerable fitness, great timing and the ability to work closely with others as part of a well drilled team!”

The money available for Agricultural and Environmental schemes

In the UK both major parties have been promising that there will be more money spent on environmental regeneration. Also politicians are now starting to pay lip service to food security. Sir Kier Starmer promised that “The next Labour government will commit to this – 50% of all food purchased by the public sector will be food produced locally and sustainably.” He also said that “food security is national security”.

The problem is that now there is another call on the money. I hate to mention it, but when Russian tanks rolled into the Ukraine, the world changed. You want international agreement on climate change. Fine, what are you going to bribe Russia with to get their signature?

But let’s explore just the UK. How much money has Britain given to Ukraine?

Ahead of meeting President Zelenskyy, Rishi Sunak confirmed the UK will provide £2.5 billion in military aid to Ukraine in 2024/25, an increase of £200 million on the previous two years.

In comparison, in the years 2022 and 2023, Defra planned to spend £2.3 billion as part of our planned trajectory for the agricultural transition. This sum is supposed to increase slightly as government has committed to spend an average of £2.4 billion per year across the Parliament.

So in simple terms our aid to Ukraine is about the same as our Agricultural spending.

But we are not alone. The CAP accounts for 33.1% of the 2021 EU-27 budget (EUR 55.71 billion). Similarly EU leaders are promising Ukraine will still get its €50 billion aid package to help prop up its war-shattered economy.

So given we’re already taxed to the hilt and are hovering on the edge of recession, where is the extra money coming from for the environment?
The whole Russian invasion scenario has had a mixed impact on the environment. On the positive side of side of the balance, it has helped speed the process of weaning Europe off fossil fuels and encouraged renewables. On the negative side China and India are buying considerable quantities of crude oil at ‘fire sale’ prices from Russia to fuel their economies.

Looking at the bigger picture, if you want net zero to be achieved by 2050, how are you going to achieve it without the agreement of Russia and China, among others?

I have talked to East Europeans of my own age. They grew up under the gentle guidance of the Soviet Union. They did not get rid of the Russians once to have them back again as the Russian Federation. If Russia isn’t stopped in the Ukraine, will it have to be stopped in Poland? The Baltic States? Would an EU commission acceptable to an expanded Russian Federation be able to ban the use of fossil fuel? At what point does the West drop the war crimes charges against Putin and others with no more than a sense of quiet embarrassment?
As Radek Sikorski, Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs, said the other day, “there’s never a shortage of pocket Chamberlains willing to sacrifice someone else’s land and freedom for their own peace of mind.”

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If you want to speak to the Expert

How much should we pay the peasantry?

The problem with environmental schemes is that it can often be difficult to work out whether they are worth entering. Indeed with some it will probably cost you more to take part because of the income you lose is larger than the money you’ll get back from the government.

But every so often there is a scheme which throws into high relief exactly what government feels you’re worth.

One fine example of this can be found in the new ‘Sustainable Farming Incentive’. Note that in this case ‘incentive’ may be something of a misnomer. But the example is ‘HRW1: Assess and record hedgerow condition.’

If you sign up for this, you’ll receive £3 per 100 metres for one side of an eligible hedgerow per year.

According to the scheme, the aim of this action is that you:

• understand the condition of your hedgerows

• effectively plan how they can be managed to improve their condition

To comply with the scheme you must:

• assess the condition of all the hedgerows entered into this action

• produce a written hedgerow condition assessment record for these hedgerows

It’s also important to realise when you have to do it. Again, according to the scheme, you must:

• assess the condition of the hedgerows and complete a written hedgerow condition assessment record within the first 12 months of your SFI agreement

• review the condition of the hedgerows and update the hedgerow condition assessment record in each subsequent year of your SFI agreement

Now you might ask how the farmer is to do this. After all, the farmer will be inspected. If the inspector disagrees with how things are done, money can be clawed back. In fact they may claw back a proportion of the total claim. So you could lose more than just the money you got for recording your hedgerows. This happened with cross compliance under the Basic Payment Scheme. Somebody with ten thousand acres of arable might have a handful of suckler cows for environmental grazing. If there were errors on the passports or eartags of the cattle, the penalty was not on any money paid on the cows, the penalty was deducted across the entire payment made to the farm. So in this case the penalty could be greater than the entire capital value of the suckler herd, never mind the income they generated. A lot of arable farmers dropped cattle very rapidly at one point.

All the RPA tell you in this scheme is. “It’s up to you how you complete this action, as long as you do it in a way that can reasonably be expected to achieve this action’s aim.

You can record the hedgerow condition assessment on paper or digitally.

And finally you must keep a written record of your hedgerow condition assessment. You must supply this evidence if we ask for it.”

Not a great deal of help to be honest. But the government did produce a ‘Hedgerow Survey Handbook.’  It was signed off by no lesser person than Barry Gardiner, Minister for Biodiversity, Landscape and Rural Affairs

Now whilst it goes into a lot of detail, and is intended for far more in-depth surveys than these. But I think the topic headings will give us something to go on. After all these are all things that will doubtless exercise the interest of the RPA inspector.

It asks questions like, is the hedge on a bank? Is there a fence, a ditch? What is the average herbaceous vegetation height? Are there any recently introduced, non-native species?
Then there are the dimensions. It suggests estimating an average height and width.

Now some of this could doubtless be taken from a photograph. As could the data as to whether there were any gaps greater than five meters wide. But how many photos are you going to need per 100m?

But we then have to ask, how much time farmers are expected to take on this. Now here I can provide an answer. Defra employs both Administrative Assistants/Administrative Officers (AA/AO) who work in a supporting administrative role with no line management responsibilities. They also have Executive Officers (EO) who are involved in problem solving, business planning and policymaking. They can also hold individual responsibility for pieces of work within a programme or project.

Looking at the job descriptions, the fact that farmers have management responsibilities and indeed can also hold individual responsibility, puts them at the Executive Officer end of the spectrum.

Obviously it’s difficult to turn an annual salary figure into an hourly rate, but we’re looking at from over £11 an hour for the AA/AO to over £13 an hour for the EO. Let us compromise on £12 an hour.

This means that if government is paying £3 per 100m, they expect that 100m to be recorded in no more than 15 minutes.

The other alternative is unthinkable. They cannot expect you to take more than 20 minutes per 100m. After all, what government official would expect a farmer to trudge along a hedgerow with notepad and camera, then get home and write everything up, for far less than the national minimum wage.

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Don’t confuse me with somebody who knows what they’re talking about. Listen to an expert.

As a reviewer commented, “

I love Jim’s autobiographical musings. They make me feel that I am following him and Sal, his dog and manager, around the farm as he encounters the vicissitudes of everyday life. I feel I’m wandering around after him, with his great narrative style.

This book, along with the others in this series, are an absolute treat and gives us the opportunity to explore life in someone else’s head.”

Lynx, Easystart and Methane

T Rex used to sing ‘Life’s a Gas’ and perhaps they were right. I was chatting to somebody who has been involved in agriculture (on the engineering, patching machinery up, side) pretty much all his life. He was commenting about the problems they’d had with a pickup which just didn’t seem to be getting fuel through to it. At regular intervals it would cut out, and you’d have to spray Easystart into the air intake to get it to fire up again.

Except they weren’t using Easystart, they were using Lynx spray deodorant. Apparently it works every bit as well, although the engine runs slightly faster. (One of the other deodorants he doesn’t recommend because you get more smoke) It appears that if you buy Lynx in packs it is price competitive with Easystart, but the important thing is that nobody gives you Easystart for Christmas and Birthdays.

But talking about gasses causing problems, the big issue at the moment is methane. Apparently cows are going to have a feed additive added, by law, to reduce the amount of methane they produce. Which is fine. Government can sign on the dotted line, and we know who gave the order. Then a generation or so down the road when we have another BSE or similar outbreak, we’ll know who to blame. Have they checked that this stuff they’re recommending is safe to feed a whole species over a period of years?
But even ignoring that, the world’s cattle produce 120 million metric tons per year, responsible for roughly 2% of climate change. But this has to be kept in proportion. Cows and other ruminants account for just 4 percent of all greenhouse gases produced in the United States, and beef cattle just 2 percent of direct emissions.

https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/making-cattle-more-sustainable

Natural wetlands emit approximately 30% of global methane (CH4) emissions. The water‐logged soils in wetlands are ideal for producing methane and the patterns and intensity of these emissions are likely to change as the planet warms

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5054

So in point of fact, government environmental policies which are aimed at increasing the amount of wetland are adding to global warming. So perhaps if they just left us alone to farm and stopped messing us about, we could get on with feeding them, and they could cut methane by stopping using so much fossil fuel?

It’s not as if livestock producing methane is new. It’s been calculated that the US used to have 60 million buffalo, a similar number of white tailed deer and then there were moose and a heap of other livestock. This is compared with the current total of 98.8 million beef and dairy cows, 65 million pigs, and 5 million sheep. Given that grain fed livestock essentially produce less methane than grass fed, modern livestock almost certainly produce less methane that what used to be there.

Now compared to farting livestock; farting humans, even farting vegans, are almost irrelevant. But biologically we do more than fart. Twenty percent of human produced methane emissions come from break down of our waste, flushed down the toilet and forgotten. It looks as if we’re going to have to do something to human diets as well.

But let us stop kidding ourselves. The largest component of natural gas is methane and everybody in Europe has been frantically buying every scrap of natural gas they can find the world market. The United Kingdom’s territorial methane (CH4) emissions were 57 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) in 2021.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/486621/methane-emission-uk/#:~:text=Methane%20(CH4)%20emissions

What is fascinating is that you will struggle to find a figure for UK methane, it’s always quoted as CO2 equivalent. The cynic might comment that this is because it produces a nice big frightening figure. But as Methane is said to be 25 times worse that CO2 this means that 57 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent was probably about 2.28million tonnes of methane.

With the wicked foreigners, sources are happy to quote the actual level of methane production. Hence one Russian gas pipeline leak was putting approximately 395 metric tons an hour into the atmosphere, Russia’s oil and gas industry alone puts 14.44 million metric tonnes of methane into the atmosphere. So that one industry puts six times as much methane into the atmosphere as does the entire UK. On top of this one assumes that Russian cows fart, and they too have human sewage systems.

To put things in perspective, the UK doesn’t appear in the top ten of methane emitters. The chart at the top of the page is from

https://www.iea.org/reports/global-methane-tracker-2022/overview

Interestingly, no EU member state does either.

It strikes me that worrying about farting cows is performance environmentalism. It allows people to feel that they are doing something, without the unfortunate side effect of having to change their lifestyle.

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What do I know? Speak to the expert

As a reviewer commented, “Amusing, sometimes touching and always witty. An absolute treasure of a book, guaranteed to put a smile on any readers face. Jim records country living in short ,sharp stories. Great for a ten minute read whenever convenient but one tale leads to the next and soon half an hour will pass. Top work”

Buying British Beef

Another supermarket caught up in scandal. But it says a lot for the reputation Booths has built up that everybody seems to agree they were being cheated by their suppliers. Still it might be interesting to see who else those suppliers were supplying. Now the National Food Crime Unit is investigating just how it happened that Booths were supplied with products labelled as British, when they came from South America and Europe instead.

Obviously this is a crime, but there is an interesting if slippery slope out there. So you can buy food from abroad, ‘process’ it in this country, and it is British. For BuyBritain.com the definition is “Have been significantly changed through a treatment or process within the UK” https://buybritain.com/blog/what-we-mean-by-british-made/

Then you have the Tesco fictional farms (other supermarkets doubtless have them) which appear on packaging to make the produce sound more locally sourced.
You might ask why Tesco didn’t just use real farms. But that is a path fraught with risk. After all, the real farm might show the same loyalty to the supermarket as the supermarkets show to farmers, and suddenly Little Wallop cheese is being sold by ASDA and Tesco has to frantically find a new source. Far safer to have an imaginary Little Wallop which is a brand wholly owned by Tesco.

But what also interested me is how little traction the story had in the media. The media was caught up in a feeding frenzy over Lineker. This time it wasn’t so much his obscenely high salary which was attracting attention, it was the fact that he was a cutting edge proponent of freedom of speech. I confess to being somewhat amused by the sheer number of my left wing friends who leapt to his support, so much so that I asked if they were “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes” and commented that it appears that we’re all Blairites now. I suspect it might be some time before they speak to me again.

But it does speak volumes. We had the storm over no tomatoes, but it’s blown over. Various supermarkets have announced they now have plenty, and everybody has moved on. Our dependence for our daily bread on major retailers who prioritise immediate margin over long term national interest is not regarded as an important issue. Who appears on a late night TV sports programme apparently is.

I know the Romans talked about panem et circenses, bread and circuses, but Emperors took a personal interest in ensuring that the bread supply was guaranteed. We have a population, or at least the chattering classes of the population, who simply assume their bread will be provided and instead spend their time engrossed in the circuses.
I wonder what it will take before food moves up the agenda and becomes a matter of national importance. A 16% annual food price increase hasn’t done it. Temporary shortages haven’t done it. Will it take a reintroduction of rationing before the UK government (of any party) decides that food production in the UK is important?

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There again, what do I know. Speak to the experts.

As a reviewer commented, “Like the other two books in this series, Jim Webster gives us a perspective of farm life we may not have appreciated. Some of the facts given will come as a shock to non-farming readers, but they do need to be read. Having said that, there are plenty of humorous anecdotes to make the book an enjoyable read.”

Why do you expect to eat salad in February anyway?

There is a shortage of salad vegetables in the UK at the moment. Given it is February I suspect my Grandmother would not have been particularly surprised by this. But a modern, environmentally conscious, and wealthy population expect to get everything, all the time.

The problem is that the consumer expects it to be cheap. And this is why we have run into trouble. Before Christmas the big producers (think the Lea Valley Association which produces cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, aubergines, and lettuce in 3,450 acres of glasshouses) had discussions with the supermarkets. The discussion went something like this.

Food producer. “We need to plant now to harvest in February. If we plant now we will need to use £x (where x is a ridiculously large number) worth of gas to produce the crop. Thus the crop will cost £y.”

Supermarket. “Far too expensive, cut the price or we’ll just buy from abroad. We will pay £y-3.”

Food producer. “We lose money at that. We’ll just plant in February then and you go and buy from abroad.”

Note this discussion wasn’t just held in the UK, the Dutch growers had a similar discussion and came to a similar conclusion. Why plant food to lose money and go bust? So in northern Europe, glasshouses were not planted.

Now let us turn to Spain and Morocco. Here they do not need heated greenhouses. Indeed the out of season salad veg of the enlightened is produced in Almeria in Spain without heat. Just enough plastic greenhouses to be visible from space

Except that this winter, Spain and Morocco did need heat. They have had weeks of heavy rain and a cold spell. So their crops just haven’t grown. Isn’t nature wonderful?

So this is the world we have now. We have food inflation. In the UK we had food inflation of 16.9% in the 12 months to December 2022. Lest anybody feels that it’s something to lay at the door of Brexit, the Germans had 18.9% food inflation over the same period.

But in reality, food has been cheap for far too long. If you look at the graph below, you’ll see on other spike. That’s 2008 where we had ‘a weather event’ and there was a major shortage of grain. That’s when we had the Arab Spring because so many countries revolted at the price of bread.

And now we had another ‘weather event’. Add that to a ‘political event’ with tanks rolling into the Ukraine and the current price of food is easily explained.

So in conclusion there are a number of questions you want to ask.

Firstly are you happy for major retailers to decide UK agricultural policy. Because frankly they have far more say over what is and isn’t grown in this country that government. Government environmental schemes consist of paying relatively derisory sums which might or might not have an impact, depending on how many farmers reckon they can afford to take part in the schemes. Supermarkets effectively decide which crops we grow in this country.

Secondly are you happy with the idea that we can do away with home production and just import from abroad if it produces a better margin for retailers?

Thirdly, why do you expect to eat salad in February anyway?

 Just remember where it comes from.

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There again, what do I know? Speak to the experts.

The Dongle Saga

Rather than repeatedly explain my absence from the 21^st Century I decided it would be easier just to write one blog and point people at that.

Our broadband is less than sparkling. We have a maximum speed of 4 mbps because we are at the end of a long piece of copper. This copper is not getting any younger. For much of the last year we have been working with the BT Escalation team because they seem to be the only ones with the clout to get Openreach properly motivated.

In all candour I cannot praise the Escalation team enough, it seems that I’m now on first name terms with them, and I get an update phone call from them most weeks. Currently they have been ringing rather more often.

Now about a month ago we had issues and the Escalation team got in touch with Openreach, and to be fair to Openreach, the engineer they sent out was a good one. She was, in the nicest meaning of the term, a real terrier. She started methodically by checking the first joint, even though it was testing OK to the online tests. As she moved some of the wires the entire joint dissolved into powder and she had to cut back to bare metal and reconnect it. With this done she proceeded to check every joint, with the wind and driving rain blasting across the area. She finally reported to Openreach (who in turn reported to the BT Escalation team) that they needed to replace 450m of copper cable.)
Now this work was assessed and agreed by Openreach, but it’s not entirely in their hands as they needed to approach Cumbria Highways and get road closure notices and similar. So we heard nothing more, and honestly didn’t expect to hear much as this process can, apparently, take six weeks. And to be fair, we had broadband. Admittedly it rarely got better than 2mbps but still, it was there.

Then at about 9:45am on the 14^th December the broadband just disappeared. Our modem has shown a steady orange light ever since. Talking to neighbours since, nobody else has lost their (admittedly pathetic) broadband, just us. We got in contact with the Escalation team and they did tests and then got in touch with Openreach. ‘What was the problem, had somebody done something to a wire, perhaps with the re-cabling work starting early?’ Openreach has been strangely enigmatic. They eventually said that they had an engineer working on it, but that we wouldn’t see them because the fault wasn’t near us, the fault was nearer the exchange.

Anyway on Thursday 15^th, when it looked like it could be a while before Openreach achieved anything (or even told us what was happening) the Escalation Team suggested a dongle. Now BT partner with EE, and normally they’d just post out an EE pay as you go dongle. But there is no EE signal. But in the last year or so O2 have got an improved signal here from a mast barely half a mile away. So the Escalation team said that they’d pay the first £30 of an O2 dongle and take things from there.

Armed with a notional £30 I wandered into the O2 shop in town. Now my phone, O2, pay as you go, had refused to connect earlier that day but I had managed to connect later. So I asked the chap at O2 whether there were any problems. There had been no notifiable outages so with a significant glance at my phone he suggested that it might be showing its age. Not an unreasonable suggestion to be honest.

So we discussed dongles and he called up our postcode on the screen and said, “Now I know why your phone was having problems.”
The mast half a mile from us had failed totally on the morning of the 15^th and there was no hope of 4G signal for us from O2. We could still get enough signal to talk on the phone using the attenuated signal from more distant masts, but he frankly refused to sell us a dongle on the not unreasonable grounds that it wouldn’t work. Not only that but there was no date for an engineer being assigned to the mast and in the week before Christmas, he didn’t think it was going to happen.

I confess that I have been impressed with the honesty and realism of both BT Escalation team and O2 employees at this point.

Anyway the week went by. Because Openreach weren’t saying that the problem was one they would have to fix by installing 450m of new copper, there was an understandable reluctance to set up new systems that might not be in place when the old system suddenly snapped back into place and started working.
But still the Escalation team was getting nothing meaningful from Openreach. They were picking up hints from engineers reports that were copied to them, but these reports are by nature detailed. They’ll say we went to point x (which was a weblink the Escalation team didn’t have authority to open) and did this and this and it doesn’t appear to have worked.)

The Escalation team tried a new tack. ‘Why were they putting in copper? If you’re going to this sort of length why not just put in fibre? After all the cost of the copper you weren’t using would more than cover the cost of the fibre? Indeed I even pointed out that I had a friend who was interesting to doing a short documentary on the process of them laying copper. After all, nobody does that anymore and it was possibly the last chance to capture it for posterity. Alas all questions about putting in fibre have been met with silence from the Openreach end.

The Escalation team were getting imaginative, they pointed out that we are an elderly couple, running a broadband critical business. Given we had no broadband, no mobile connectivity, and the postal service was on strike, if our telephone wire went down as well, we would be reduced to using smoke signals or frantically training carrier pigeons.

This too met with a lofty silence.
Finally Christmas was bearing down on us. The Escalation team came to the conclusion that Openreach was not going to achieve anything before Christmas (even if they wanted to, could Cumbria Highways have the staff about to do the road closure orders before the holidays?) so they searched through other possibilities. Openreach finally said they couldn’t install an emergency wire. Then one of the Escalation team discovered that Vodafone seemed to have good coverage in our area. On Wednesday 21^st December I walked into the Vodafone shop. All four staff were busy, but the store manager was obvious able to leave the two customers he was dealing with to ask me what I wanted. I explained. I told him the full story, including in it O2 and everything. He said he was delighted to help.

They had a pay as you go 90 day dongle. It was £50 but came with 12 gig.

Alas they didn’t have any in stock. He knew this because I was the second person who wanted one today.

Also, Argos who also carry them, didn’t have any in stock either, because he’d already asked for the previous potential customer.

But he could get one delivered by courier, next day, for under £7.

Except that even if I thought this was a wonderful deal and wanted it, he couldn’t take my order because their systems were down (which was why he could leave a customer to speak to me).

Had I considered that somebody, somewhere, really didn’t want me to have broadband?

Anyway I got the shop phone number. Next morning I talked to the Escalation team who checked with a supervisor and they said they would cover the £57.

So I phoned the shop to check their systems were back on line, went into the shop and ordered one. Now given that we are now 23^rd December, there are postal strikes, courier firms are rushed off their feet and there is only so much people can do, I wasn’t entirely sanguine that I was going to see the dongle before Christmas.

Yet this morning I got a text from the courier company saying the dongle is on its way? Who knows what excitement this afternoon will bring?

————————————————————————————

Well the excitement continued. A package arrived, I opened it and learned I had to assemble the beast. Remember I have never, in my life, put a sim card into anything, but I sort of worked it out. Plugged the beast into the computer and nothing happened.

So I read the instructions again and found the on switch. So some blue lights came on but still nothing happened.

So I phoned our Vodafone shop, and they gave me the number of tech support. It took ten minutes (literally, I timed it) to find the numbers etc that tech support needed to deal with me. After all I didn’t have the phone number of my dongle (and don’t have a Vodafone number).
But anyway, with the sound of the muezzin reciting the call to prayer across the road from the call centre in Egypt, a very well-spoken young woman (she speaks better English than I do) worked out that whilst there was money on my sim card, nobody had turned it to data.
So now we have broadband, after a fashion.

My machine tells me there is 9mbps, but my lady wife’s laptop can only sometimes connect, even when she sits not to it. So it’s OK but frankly if BT could get the landline back to 4mbps, it works better for both of us, as that travels better.

So there you are, as news goes this has to fall into the ‘small earthquake somewhere remote, nobody important hurt’ category.

♥♥♥♥

Now I’m back I ought to tempt you into splurging out on a good book or two!

As a reviewer commented, “As with all of Jim Webster’s writing, I took to the main characters straight away, and enjoyed the shenanigans that follow – already reaching for the next book, and hoping more will come!”

The world changed and nobody realised.

There is a saying, ‘To deny is to confirm.’ The minute a body puts out press releases saying that it had never considered a policy change, everybody assumes that policy is about to be changed and they’re just waiting for a good day to bury bad news before they tell us.

The problem is, that thanks to the Ukrainian War, an awful lot of people are suffering. Look on the bright side, at least we’re only spending money, not blood.

From March onwards I’ve been pointing out that there is a looming risk of food shortages. Suddenly, large parts of the world we bought food from are no longer reliable, secure, and in some cases, they’re not even friendly.

 Now if I’ve spotted this, I’m sure that there are other people who have also read the writing on the wall, and I have no doubt that even in Defra, their words have been heard.
When we left the EU, this was seen as an opportunity by both government and the environmental lobby groups to move money from farm support to putting money into environmental schemes. I’ve taken part in some of the trials and frankly the only way I could take advantage of the vast majority of them was by cutting production. Which is fine if you lot out there don’t mind going hungry. So when you read the Defra blog

(Search for “Government reiterates commitment to environmental protections”)

It starts with a ‘government spokesman’ making a strong statement, “Claims we intend to go back on our commitment to the environment are simply not right.”

It then goes on to say, “We’re not scrapping the schemes. In light of the pressures farmers are facing as a result of the current global economic situation, including spikes in input costs, it’s only right that we look at how best to deliver the schemes to see where and how improvements can be made. Boosting food production and strengthening resilience and sustainability come alongside, not instead of, protecting and enhancing our natural environment, and later this year we will set out more details of plans on how we will increase food security while strengthening the resilience and role of farmers as stewards of the British countryside.”

‘To deny is to confirm.’ I cannot claim to have read everything Defra has produced on these schemes but starting by talking about boosting food production and stressing the importance of increasing food security strikes me as new.

Now the fighting is going to start. All sorts of people working for various environmental lobby groups are going to pile in on this demanding that there be no U turns in government policy. The fighting will be bitter.

The public are starting to cut back on their spending, so money paid to environmental charities (indeed all charities) is going to fall. If government puts less in as well, the money available to pay the salaries of the laptop classes involved in the environment will diminish. These people, like everybody else, have mortgages to pay.

And mortgages are another issue. The minute Putin started squeezing the gas pipelines, prices were guaranteed to go up, and equally inevitably, interest rates were going to rise. A lot of people are going to be very squeezed, very squeezed indeed, as the increase in mortgage payments makes itself felt. The problem is that whilst it’s possible for government to put some sort of cap on how much you pay for gas (which provides some protection for those urban and suburban dwellers who have access to gas but damn all for those in rural areas who don’t) capping interest rates is tricky. All that would do is see the pound spiral down so quickly we’d be looking at parity with the Turkish lira.

But it’s not just people who have been hit. A lot of companies have been borrowing money at ridiculously low rates of interest and not so much investing it as splurging it on vanity projects. Some of these projects are unravelling. Apple has apparently decided to produce six million fewer of the new iPhone14. After all, how many people actually need a new iPhone?

Other ventures have also taken a kicking. In July 2021, the share price of Beyond Meat was $150 a share. Currently it’s trading at $14.63. At the same time, during the pandemic, people in the UK increased their consumption of real meat and apparently the amount of fresh meat sold retail is 12% higher than it was three years ago. To look abroad, to quote https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/food/mcdonalds-ends-its-plant-based-test-us-now-what

“McDonald’s has ended its expanded test of its meatless McPlant burger in the U.S., the company confirmed on Thursday, without a clear indication of whether the plant-based product will make a national debut.

The company’s confirmation followed continued speculation from Wall Street analysts indicating that the product underperformed those tests. An analyst with J.P. Morgan this week said that the product was pulled in many stores and low sales were cited as the primary reason.”

The problem is we had a lot of jobs which were only viable at very low interest rates because these jobs produce no return on the money spent on wages. The money for their wages comes from those employees who do actually produce something that earns the company money. As interest rates go up, the companies are going to still need those who earn the money, but frankly, I doubt they will be able to afford to keep the others. When you were paying 2% on the company overdraught you could probably afford to take on another three diversity coordinators to pad our your HR department and give you bragging rights at the next conference you were asked to address. When you’re paying 7% not only will the company not be able to afford the HR it has, it certainly won’t be able to afford to send somebody to a conference that isn’t production related and it may not be able to afford you.

In farming we’ve become steadily more efficient, if you look at

Click to access fertiliseruse-annualreport2021-28jul22.pdf

You’ll see this graph showing fertiliser use and how it drops off.

I suspect 2022 will see another large fall. In farming we’ve got to stay on our toes and stay efficient. We have to cherish the land we’ve got that can produce a crop. After all, would you like to try and plough this?

♥♥♥♥

There again, what do I know? Speak to the experts

Not even a dairy heifer is that daft.

But anyway, Friday was a busy day, we sorted a lot of heifers out, moved them about, and had the vet check that those who’d been running with the bull were in calf.

So far so normal.

Then next morning I went round checking and feeding them, and put one back who had decided that a fence so low obviously wasn’t meant as a barrier. Again, so far, so normal.

Then on Sunday morning I found two different groups had tested the limits of their current boundaries and found them significantly more permeable than I had previously thought. Certainly the previous occupants of the fields hadn’t seen any opportunities.

Luckily we have domesticated cattle. One lot followed me back to their mates. The other lot (fourteen little ones of whom five had escaped) watched me feed those who hadn’t got out (the feed was placed in sight of the escapees but some distance away) and once I’d left the field they all came back through the gap to join their mates at the feed.

So Sunday morning was spent fixing fences. Where the fourteen were, I went further along the hedge and looked at another spot. I weighed it up and decided that not even a dairy heifer was going to be daft enough to try that. Climbing up a sheer slippery muddy bank with a decent fence of barbed wire and sheep netting at the top.  
Well I’ve been wrong before, and will doubtless be wrong again in the future, and I was wrong this time. Seven out of fourteen obviously decided this one was a challenge and went for it. When I fed their mates, again within visibility but a little way away, the bawling of the escapees was pathetic. Apparently they could jump the fence from below but when looked at from above it was some sort of terrifying obstacle.

So I had to flatten it down for them, and when they thought my back was turned (I’d gone home for more posts and wire) they all clambered down and joined their mates eating. So when I got back to fix it in the rain, they all innocently watched me, from the correct side of the fence.

But to be fair to dairy heifers, their understanding of the world is limited, and you have to expect them to cross the boundaries of common sense. On the other hand, I came across this.

What people in the UK may not realise is that there are teams of contractors who start the American harvest in the south, almost on the Mexican border, and as the year progresses they move steadily north, combining as they go. After all, the further north, the later the harvest. They finish somewhere in Canada playing chicken with winter.

Now some of these chaps work closely with the major machinery manufacturers. After all they might have several big combines and tractors and they will change them in every three years. Not surprisingly, because their machinery works hard. They can be combining, 24 hours a day, for days on end when harvest is ready. So some of these contractors will effectively have new machinery on standing order. It’s metaphorically got their name on it even as it proceeds along the production line.

One of these chaps was approached by a representative of the company he deals with. The company wanted him to go electric.

His response was simple. “How do I charge these combines when they are many miles from an electrical mains supply, in the middle of a cornfield, in the middle of nowhere?” “How do I run them 24 hours a day for 10 or 12 days straight when the harvest is ready, and the bad weather is coming in?” “How do I get a 50,000+ lb. combine that takes up the width of an entire road back to mains electricity 20 miles away when the battery goes dead?”

Apparently the answer is ‘we’re working on it’.

I’ve worked with silage contractors in this country where we filled the big self-propelled forage harvester direct from the fuel company’s tanker. We stopped for a full five minutes to achieve this and were back to work.

But back to the machinery company. How can somebody who is supposed to be working with farmers be so ignorant?
Of course there is a fetish that all vehicles have to go electric. Note that I use the term fetish in its traditional meaning. “An inanimate object worshipped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit.”

So why ban diesel vehicles?  Well apparently, and to quote the BBC, “A number of studies have shown that diesel cars, unlike petrol cars, spew out high levels of what are known as nitrogen oxides and dioxides, together called NOx. Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) is particularly nasty – recent studies have shown it can cause or exacerbate a number of health conditions, such as inflammation of the lungs, which can trigger asthma and bronchitis, and increased risk of heart attacks and strokes.”

Indeed, “In many European cities, NO2 levels are well above European Union legal limits – twice the limit in parts of London, Paris and Munich, according to the European Environment Agency (EEA).”
I tell you want, we’ll stop using combines and tractors in parts of London, Paris, and Munich.

Why are people wanting to stop the use of diesel in combines and tractors in the countryside? I’ve seen the figures for a local town near here, and it is already well below the level we are supposed to be trying to get down to.
So I would humbly venture to suggest that, in reality, the NO2 produced by agricultural machinery in rural areas is not a problem.
Indeed, great steps had been made in producing biodiesel from agricultural crops. Farms could produce their own diesel which would contain no fossil fuel, and might in point of fact have a lower carbon footprint than the electricity they want us to change to.
Now it may not seem a big deal but in reality all you’re doing is putting food prices up in an attempt to give prosperous middle class activists the feeling that they’re achieving something.
They are, they’re increasing the pain felt by the poor. Not even a dairy heifer is that daft.

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There again, what do I know, speak to the expert!

As a reviewer commented, “A collection of anecdotes and observations about farming in England in the 21st century. Written by an actual farmer, this book is based on real experience and touches on a variety of subjects in a witty and engaging style. Cats, cattle, bureaucrats, workers, and the working dog all make an appearance, as do reminiscences about the old days and speculation on a possible future. This book is both entertaining and informative, a perfect diversion for the busy reader.”