Farm Diary - September 30 2009

We harvested all the maize last week, with two contractors running to Crouchlands from different directions. This was chaotic to say the least with two very large machines on the clamp, under pressure as trailers lined up to tip.

I think there were around sixteen trailers bringing it in, with our big trailer joining in to speed things up. A huge crop in every field, the crop yielding 30 per cent more than last year (a poor year for us), and we failed to get it all in despite building the biggest clamp of maize silage ever seen at the farm. The last block of land was clamped in the field, as another 1000 tonnes was just too much!

Sheeting up took hours, especially due to the wind picking up the minute the first sheet was unrolled. Why does this always happen? Flat calm until a plastic sheet appears on the scene, and then, suddenly, a huge sail pulls men across the clamp like flies.

Everything was covered with the 'cling-film', then several layers of plastic, with heavy sheets to hold it all down, sealing the clamp. That's it for this year, and we will have a huge carryover to see us through any difficult years in the future. Costly, but highly necessary, as running out of silage is very expensive indeed.

As scientists find water on the moon, and discover that man could outrun the dinosaur 'T.Rex', Hilary Benn comes up with a 'soil strategy'! The plan is to encourage farmers not to plough the land, using techniques known as 'minimal cultivation' or 'min-till', which involves machinery working on the surface, incorporating stubble (from the previous crop) with the top-soil, which provides a fine seed-bed.

More chemicals are needed to control weeds, as they are not inverted beneath a layer of soil (as they would be by the plough), and again Defra want farmers to employ GPS systems known to us as 'precision farming', which allow chemical fertilizer, and sprays to be continually adjusted according to land and crop needs.

All this is good stuff, although farmers have been pioneering and developing these systems for the last 20 years. The Soil Association is up in arms, wanting more farmers to revert to organic methods of crop rotation and ploughing; all very well until price and availability of food and land area are mentioned!

Hilary Benn wants food production to double in the next 20-30 years, and this will only happen with technology and science, but he wants the soil to remain relatively undisturbed, in order not to release carbon into the atmosphere (you just knew climate change was coming didn't you?).

Our soils in the UK contain 10 billion tonnes of carbon, the second biggest carbon store (the oceans contain the most), the equivalent of 57 times the nation's annual greenhouse gas emissions, and ploughing the land inevitably releases some of that carbon. We grow a lot of maize (already mentioned), and we grow it with farmyard manure, lots of it.

In order to incorporate all this manure we need to plough the land, but of course we need little if any chemical fertilizer to grow the crop, striking a balance between the need to plough (releasing some carbon) and purchasing tonnes of chemical fertilizer, which of course also has a sizeable carbon footprint. As usual, there is a balance to be struck.

I called in at the Petworth and District Ploughing Match last Saturday, to watch the modern and vintage machinery competing according to class, to see who could pull the best furrow. It was a lovely morning, and the setting at Stag Park, was majestic, as tractors gently pulled their ploughs up and down, turning the rich soil over, and leaving it in arrow straight furrows.

Strangely enough, the release of carbon did not occur to me as vintage tractors and caterpillars pulled trailing ploughs from the 1940s and 50s. I thought of the progress that agriculture has made in the last 60 years since the '1947 Agricultural Act', where government encouraged all farmers to feed the nation.

We forget sometimes how much progress has been made, choosing to dwell on the problems which inevitably follow, rather than looking at the complete picture in order to decide on balance, whether progress is being made or not.

As Dairy farming and livestock farming diminishes in this country as a result of low prices and the unwillingness of young people (quite rightly) to live the lives of their parents without proper reward, we are at a turning point in agricultural history. Government have realized this, and food production and food security is now very much on the agenda, but after many years of Defra being positively anti-farming, and Hilary Benn following a long list of Ministers who seemed to care very little about agriculture and farming, it will not be easy to reverse the damage done.

This is the time of Harvest Festivals and Political Party Conferences, and I will be listening for a single mention of agriculture and farming amongst the hours of political rhetoric and promises. We have a crisis in dairy farming stretching across the whole of Europe, and for once others are hit harder than ourselves.

Milk strikes and protests are taking place right across Europe, with the media lapping up the bad news without engaging (as usual) in the potential solutions. There is a battle of ideas taking place in the EU dairy sector, and it is crucial that it is resolved.

Many farmers and farmer organizations want to return to market management, with quota cuts and quota compensation, attempting to protect all farmers from what they see as the dangers of the market, with taxpayer's money.

Those of us on the other side recognize that 80% of all farmers in milk production when milk quotas were introduced (in 1983/84) have left the industry (so much for protection), and that the answer is to rid ourselves of quotas, and tackle the supply chain. It is powerful retailers that are bleeding the industry dry, and some control must be exercised to curb their worst excesses.