1/10/08
Careful cajoling by so many e-friends has coaxed me back into writing this blog again. The rigours of a difficult harvest and the loss of a telephone line for nearly four months have had me reliant on my mobile telephone rather than the internet. Horrendous ‘piles’ of unread emails made the eventual task of logging on quite a major task; but now I am back.
Autumn cultivations are in full swing, about a month later than normal.
Nothing has been easy this wet summer, but the harvest is now all in the barn and next year’s oilseed rape has been sown into a reasonable seed bed. Killing the hordes of voracious slugs, who prospered so well in the wet conditions under the previous crop, is now a major task if the vulnerable rape seedlings are to flourish.
Youthful volunteer wheat seedlings have been dealt with by an application, pre-sowing, of glyphosate, but the thistles could be a problem later on in the year. Our agronomist, Andrew, will be kept busy advising us on the timely and economic control of pests and diseases this cropping year. Unfortunately, the urbanised and vote hungry politicians in Brussels seem intent on ‘tying his hands’ with their proposed reduction in chemicals which he can advise us to use.
Farmers, at least the vast majority of them, are not intent on polluting our environment and the Voluntary Initiative scheme has been very successful in demonstrating that most chemicals are applied to the nation’s crops in a very responsible manner.
Other sources of pollutants are, at last, being questioned in newspapers and journals. Rivers have been shown to contain drugs, hormones and chemicals in very high concentrations that could only have originated from domestic homes. Yet the focus still seems to be on the ‘killing fields’ taunts thrown at us by some extreme members of the, so called, organic movement. Our population has never been larger, and people have never lived longer in the UK’s history, so the food that we produce cannot be too unhealthy.
Urgent, (well only two and a half years later), building repairs have been completed on the farmhouse; it looks wonderful even though I do miss the hole in my ceiling. Regular readers will be aware of my battles with the Insurance company; these are yet to reach a satisfactory conclusion, but I could not stand the mess any longer and have spent much of my savings on getting the work completed.
Loyalty seemed, at first, to count for very little in the eyes and hearts of distant Insurance Company accountants, but persistence seems to have encouraged them to re-open the case with the appointment of a new firm of loss adjusters. Our hope is that they will re-assess the original inaccurate estimates for the repairs and take the actual costs into consideration.
Very similar intransigence has engaged me with a problem at school. Even I must be careful in not ranting on too much in this blog at present, as the situation is far from being resolved. A government trial of an American ‘well-being’ scheme at our school concerned me in the way that data was being collected and used. Nobody locally seem to be inclined to listen to my worries so they are now being considered by other regulatory agencies. Don Quixote tilted at his windmills and I, a sad old part-time teacher, am left with the modern educational establishment. Still, it keeps the brain and heart ticking.
Updates will become available as soon as I get any concrete findings, but until them I will have to leave you a little ill-informed.
People have been so supportive over this strange summer that I have to revise my opinions about our urban population. Perhaps farmers have stopped whinging a little now that we have had real problems to tackle and the people who I have talked to have responded with genuine concern. Our harvest has seemed to have been adopted as other peoples harvest as they watched the daily soap opera struggle of our attempt to ‘get it in’.
Resolved to keep this blog updated, I will leave this entry. Thank you to all of those people who emailed such warm messages of concern. Perhaps my ranting can repay your kindness just a little.
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