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26th August 2010

Laurence was asleep and I was finishing paperwork when the phones began to ring just after midnight.  Reports from the local gamekeeper that cattle were out at Raikes.

Laurence went ahead in one vehicle and I followed shortly after, collecting David en route and meeting Donald up at the farm.  The cattle had stampeded through a couple of fences flattening relatively new posts and wire; something must have really spooked them to cause this extreme reaction.  We found the cattle in four locations, some had even jumped a further fence to join the field of Galloways. 

Another two staff and a couple of gamekeepers joined us in the pouring rain as the loose cattle were herded back to the safety of their field and fences were repaired.  It’s not so easy driving new fence posts into the ground by torchlight.

Two hours later we were back home, dripping wet and more than ready to sleep.

Back to the fields five hours later to check the cattle in daylight, count them, look for any injuries and sort the last of the Friesians out from the Galloways and move that final number to their own field.

It’s been a fortnight since harvesting at Shalford and since then just 100 acres have been cut at Hammer Fields, Coast Hill and Raikes. There is just 60 acres of wheat to harvest at Paddington and 50 acres of Triticale, all of which could be done in a good dry day with no break-downs.  That will then leave 250 acres of spring rape.

 

20th August 2010

For a long time the countryside has been littered with the remains of balloons released at events, parties or balloon races, but now it’s the turn of the Chinese lantern.

Today we collected 31 lanterns which were recently seen flying from the direction of Hayley Conference Centre. 

I'm sure Dick would rather be driving a tractor instead of litter picking

Chinese lanterns are becoming a real hazard in the countryside; with a sharp increase in the number of fires in standing crops and straw bales and the unnecessary number of livestock deaths as a result of these lanterns.  There is also a risk to wild animals such as deer, pets and buildings in towns and countryside alike.

The lanterns were picked up over an expanse of land with crops and cattle and tinder dry woodland and I’ve no doubt that we'll discover more.

They landed on the dry woodland floor and were caught up in trees and amongst crops.

Apart from the major health and safety issues caused by these lanterns with their candle, bamboo and or wire; I just don’t see why it can be deemed acceptable to willingly release a large paper bag into our countryside when in a different situation the accidental dropping of a very small sweet wrapper or the like, can result in a large fine.  The world has truly gone mad!

To me, the issue is not whether the paper is bio-degradable or whether the so called eco version of the lanterns, don’t have wire. They still have splintering bamboo which can be ingested by animals and get stuck in their throat causing an agonising death.  The paper is meant to be fire retardant but some of those we collected have clearly been burnt.

It’s a mess across the fields which we will clear up time and again, but why should we have to?

Without regard for where these lanterns might fall or the dangers they may cause, people are ultimately launching hazardous balls of litter into the sky which our family and staff are having to pick up.

We happen to farm in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) but all corners of Britain have beautiful countryside which should not be littered by these ugly paper bags which blow about and get caught up in trees and crops.  Even if they do begin to make them in biodegradable material these bags will still hang around for weeks on end and ruin the stunning scenery of the great British countryside.

The National Farmers Union has been campaigning to reduce the release of Chinese lanterns since the summer of 2009 and it has lobbied the government on this issue. Last summer the NFU wrote to the RSPCA on the matter, asking it to voice concerns on Chinese lanterns and their impacts on animal welfare.

They are particularly concerned when grass is cut and ensiled for winter feed, and the wire is chopped up and subsequently contained in hay or silage. This can also be a problem in relation to the bamboo frames. Lanterns pose further welfare risks to livestock, as well as other animals, if the wire entangles itself around the animal’s foot and becomes embedded into the skin.

There’s an informative piece on the NFU website and some ideas of how we can help http://www.nfuonline.com/Our-work/Campaigns-and-Lobbying/Westminster/Join-our-lobbying-effort-on-Chinese-lanterns/

 

15th August 2010

The weather is now fit for ducks which is perfect, as we recently bought five! ; two Silver Apple-yards and three white laying ducks which are Apple-yards crosses.

We’ve allowed two broody hens to sit on eggs this summer, the first hatched out two of the four eggs she was sitting on and the second hen managed to accumulate eggs from other hens until she was sitting on sixteen! 

We moved her to her own broody house and Henny is now the proud mother of seven chicks of various colours.

I have spent a fair few hours pulling ragwort in Abinger where the spring herd of Belted Galloways have been grazing.  They’re out of grass now and will need to move soon.

Granite, the bull has been running with this herd for about eleven weeks and will move to Churchfield for some well earned R&R before moving in with the autumn herd after they have calved.  In the meantime the spring herd will be pregnancy tested and if any of the cows are not pregnant they will transfer into the autumn herd to run with Granite again.

Here I am with our bull Mochrum Granite

Nine cows were scanned earlier in the year and we had a rough idea that calving would begin in July and be complete by the end of August.  We’ve been checking the cows at least twice a day for the last three weeks and one has looked fit to burst all that time, but not one has calved.

There's a small ploughing match in one of our stubble fields today and an opportunity for some of the young farmers to have a go for the first time including our boys, so we'll see what they make of the job!

 

10th August 2010

Picture the scene: four very smart gents from SKY TV sheltering from the rain, side by side with our staff in their work gear as Laurence gave them their work for the day. 

The business team from SKY were here to discuss the economy and the Inflation Report with Laurence and Guy Gagen (also NFU), they took some footage of Laurence with the combine harvester and will use probably just a fragment of the interview as part of their business story tomorrow.

The SKY team look very at home in the country!

The true meaning of 'Suited and Booted'

It was interesting to hear about the research behind these business news items and I’m hopeful that the SKY team are able to incorporate a true reflection of modern farming, even though it will only include a tiny snapshot of what they saw and learned today from Laurence and Guy.  

I'm looking forward to viewing the results of their city and country footage in the morning; so long as there’s no political scoop that sweeps it off the newsroom floor overnight.

As I said yesterday of another TV channel,  it can be frustrating when we hear ‘news’ that sounds very far from the facts as we know them (presumably this must be similar in other walks of life), so I’m thinking maybe it’s time to have a new, more down to earth, ‘real life’  farming programme on TV?   

Many friends and even total strangers say how interested they are to read farming websites or blogs so maybe there’s mileage in a fly on the wall programme such as there are for vets?  A programme to reflect the lives of established working farmers and associated farming communities; their daily routines and real life dramas, high welfare UK food production – seeing the farmers viewpoint, the true grit required to make ends meet on some farms (maybe where there’s no alternative diversifications or the farmers are very isolated) and the reality that many farmers are in fact very attuned to World markets and commodities and are business men and women who happen to have their factory floor in the great outdoors! Oh well, it’s just an idea!

Back in the real World, it’s raining at last!  Although it's stopped the harvest, it may finally help the grass grow.

The cattle come running over parched ground as breakfast is served

The belted Galloways are great at foraging for sustenance where other breeds might have given up long ago, but in this drought we’ve had to provide them with additional grub, to ensure they remain fit and well and produce enough milk for their young.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

8th August 2010

Recycled paper waste is being spread on local fields over the next couple of days.  The company who undertake the work is licensed by the Environment Agency. 

The paper waste, once of plant origin is now rotting plant material and rotting plants give off a smell as cellulose is broken down.  Ed will disc the ground after the material has been spread so that it’s incorporated into the soil.  The paper will compost the soil and enrich it with nutrients from the paper, reducing the amount of fertilizers required and preventing the needless addition of the paper to a landfill site or incinerator.

Although there may be an unusual smell for a few days, the recycling of paper waste from mills in this way, benefits the environment and hopefully each recycling project that we undertake as individuals at home or at work, will help benefit our World. 

I have just returned from Shalford where Laurence is still harvesting spring wheat, hopefully he’ll be finished before midnight. The yield is low at Shalford due to the dry weather when the crop was first establishing itself, the straw is extremely short and some fields have quite thin coverage of wheat. The ground is sandy with large surface stones occasionally being taken up into the combine harvester causing another halt to remove the stones.

Laurence has to crawl into confined spaces and under the combine harvester on a fairly regular basis.

As he pulls straw and grain from the combine to find the rocks, Laurence is engulfed in dust.

During a break down last week Laurence had to drive to Micheldever (2 hour round trip) to fetch a part, returned to the farm, fixed the combine and started cutting once again. But despite the draw backs Laurence says the harvest is going fairly well.  At least the dry weather has allowed the harvest to tick along, straw to be baled and brought in from the fields and so far not having to use the grain drier. However, heavy rain is forecast for Tuesday and Friday.

The plan is to finish the spring wheat at Shalford and move the combine back here at 4 o’clock one morning while the roads are quiet.  Then continue with spring wheat at Hammer Fields, Coast Hill, Crossways and Raikes and Triticale at Paddington.  If all this is completed by next weekend there will be a two week break from harvest until the spring rape is fit to cut.  During that fortnight the harvested fields will have the ground prepared in readiness for drilling the next crop as quickly as possible, because we expect it to rain long and hard once it eventually decides to return to our corner of Britain!

The price of wheat went fairly crazy last week, in part due to the reaction of the markets to the fires in Russia and the floods in Pakistan which of course will result in less wheat production World-wide.  Things have settled down a little now and the industry knows that the last harvest carried the biggest wheat stocks ever and so producers of wheat based products still have these stores to draw on. It is next year that will be of more concern due to the low yield World-wide during this harvest and by next year the stores will have been used.

It’s interesting how the facts are distorted by the time the ‘news’ is projected by the media.  A report by the BBC stated that ‘wheat amounts to half the price of a loaf of bread’ but that’s nonsense.  If a loaf of bread costs £1.20 and weighs 800g this would mean a tonne of loaves would cost £1500 (not taking account that the weight of a loaf could be in the region of 35% water!).

Fact: milling wheat today is £150/tonne which means that wheat accounts for 10% of the price of a loaf at today’s wheat prices, but normally wheat amounts to 7% of the price not 50%.  It would be good if the facts weren’t distorted for human consumption.

We can no longer source the pea and bean pellets which we’ve simply had to feed the cattle for a number of weeks, due to there being absolutely no grass anywhere on the farm.  Finally, Laurence sourced an alternative feed; a combined pellet and meal but this is a different consistency and has to be shovelled into troughs as the cattle aren’t able to pick this consistency up from the ground.  Next job: finding enough food troughs to move into the fields which didn’t previously have one.

The cattle at Abinger Manor are being moved into buildings at Raikes for their last six weeks and the cattle at Upfolds and Lemons will be moved into the fields they vacate which is an easier location for feeding.  That will keep Amanda, Sam and George more than busy for a day.

 

30th July 2010

I have just returned from Wales where the temperature was at times, ten degrees lower than here and the grass was green and lush.  In comparison our corner of England is suffering severe drought and the cattle have found very little grass for over a month.    At this time of year with most cattle out ‘on grass’ the workload should be reduced, however without any rain to encourage new growth, we are having to feed the cattle with pea and bean nuts on a daily basis.

This began with Sam bagging up 40 – 50 bags of grub by hand and distributing the food to each field; a task that took him all day every day for a fortnight with just occasional help from Christopher.  

Amanda is back off holiday and our boys are working on the farm now that they’ve broken up from school; I’m sure Sam is pleased with some extra help!

The situation has worsened and currently, one tonne of food needs to be moved to 22 locations every other day with a modified system. The back of the pick-up is filled with nuts using the tele-handler and as Amanda drives the truck into the fields, Sam and George shovel food out the back, making the job much more efficient.

Edward spent a week cleaning out the grain store at Raikes; brushing, scraping, sweeping and vacuuming the old dirt, grain and dust accumulated since the last grain was stored.  One of the others helping for a couple of days was Tom Stotesbury whose own father, Peter worked for Fred when he was a lad and who went to school with Laurence. 

It’s interesting to see how history repeats itself with generations of farmer’s sons starting to work on the farm over the summer, and sons of friends and neighbours doing the same.

Laurence began harvesting the winter rape last week but things haven’t gone smoothly, with four major break-downs already.  The combine harvester wasn’t performing well the first day and Laurence discovered that the sieves hadn’t been cleaned out properly prior to harvest and that caused a four hour stoppage. 

The following day a chain link broke less than five minutes after Laurence had got going, but it took over an hour to unblock the combine before the break was found.                     

 

The 'header' or cutter bar is removed

George, David and Laurence spend hours unblocking the combine.

 

After the broken link was found the welding kit was brought out to the field to carry out repairs with a down time of four hours. 

The other two stoppages have been due to the combine getting blocked up with rape, resulting in further arduous hours pulling the blockage free by hand.

The first caused down time of three hours, but on Thursday Laurence had what he thinks might be his longest ever ‘blockage’ of six hours; a frustrating and stressful time.

As the oil seed rape ripens the pods become very sensitive and explode when disturbed, losing the seed to the ground.  

Checking the crop is fit to cut

Once the crop is ready it must be harvested swiftly,  even if the stems are still greener than the top of the crop, but it’s this that causes many of the blockages, particularly this year as Laurence is cutting the crop low to the ground in order to make rape straw.

The 300 acres of winter rape drilled in August ’09 should yield more than the spring rape which was drilled in April and will be harvested at the end of August.  So far 150 acres of winter rape has been harvested, with a more even crop at Park Farm compared to the fields at Manor Farm.  The remaining winter rape isn’t yet fit so last night the harvest moved over to wheat. 

Gallant is a Class 1 milling wheat which is a relatively short variety, but probably shorter than it ought to be due to the lack of rain earlier in the growing season.  As the straw is very short we’ll not have the number of straw bales we need coming off the fields. The wheat is coming off at about 3.4 tonne an acre which is not too bad for the soil we have here.

As the wheat is harvested this year, the outer 6m margin will be left un-harvested to provide food for wild birds over the winter months.

5th July 2010

The dry weather is causing severe lack of grazing throughout the farm and cattle are being moved in search of anything vaguely green. The Belted Galloways, which looked so at home behind the watercress beds have moved today, along to Abinger Hall.

The oil seed rape at Wotton is ready for desiccation in the next day or so, however the fields of rape between Whitedown and Churchfield are not quite ready.

A mixed crop of peas and barley were sown at Paddington in March and these should be harvested on Friday with a forage harvester , much the same as we harvest maize for silage later in the year. Contractors will harvest the crop and then clamp it in silage pits to be used as cattle fodder during winter months; the peas provide protein and the barley providing carbohydrate.

Laurence and I managed a few hours away from the farm this morning to visit the RHS Hampton Court Flower Show.  We were involved in growing arable crops for Home Grown; a wonderful exhibit celebrating different aspects of commercial agriculture and horticulture in the UK.

I just loved the stunning array of vegetables, crops, and orchards surrounded by hedgerows and wild flowers all representing the diversity of home grown food production. With the weather set fair, I imagine Hampton Court will be swarming with people over the coming days.

 

4th July 2010

It is the end of an era at Manor Farm following the sudden death of Fred Matthews just over a week ago. 

Fred moved to Manor Farm when he was six years old in 1935, with his mother, father and brother Eddie. In 1960 Fred and Eddie’s parents retired, leaving the two young Matthews’ to run the farm.  However in 1963 Eddie died tragically in the Tilligbourne Valley leaving Fred to run the farm alone until Laurence became more involved in the 1980’s. 

This photo shows Fred with laurel Hobbs in the egg grading shed in the 1970's

Fred continued to farm until the end of the 1990’s but remained a partner in EDG Matthews and Sons until his death.

Frederick Charles Matthews 21^st September 1929 - 25^th June 2010.

 

23rd June 2010

We’ve been hosting school visits again this year; mainly over the summer term because this makes for an enjoyable learning experience rather than a rain soaked one!

This week 22 boys from Woodcote House School came along as part of their Geography curriculum. The boys have been studying farming in Ghana so their visit to Manor Farm provided significant contrasts. 

Firstly we visited the grain store and grain drier and discussed modern arable farming, then to Raikes farm to discuss beef and finally Coast Hill Farm to talk about diversification. 

The children asked  many relevant and searching questions about labour needs, costs, outputs and farm size which made for a very interesting morning for Laurence and I as well as the children!   

Tomorrow we welcome back, Kender Primary School from Lewisham.

Three more weaners left for pastures new this morning and they had the most unique form of transport I have ever seen; an old tin bath in the back of a car!  I thought the pigs would simply scramble out of the bath and be running lose in the car before they’d completed the ten minute journey.  However with some straw in the bath the three piglets seemed quite content and settled down straight away; now I’ve seen it all!

After weaning the piglets a fortnight ago, Prudence and Phoebe were moved into their paddock which was once the farmhouse vegetable garden.  They seemed thrilled to be back in their old home and were soon trotting about.  The next morning it felt like disaster had struck; Prudence wouldn’t get up, not even for food.  Eventually we got her to move so that we might see what was wrong but she would only stand on three legs.

Things looked pretty bad, maybe ligament damage or a dislocated hip.  It seems that pigs can become lame after changing from one environment to another but it hasn’t happened to our sows before.  I was shocked the following morning to see that Phoebe was also lame but not quite as badly as Prudence at that time.

The vet tells me that sows often ride each other when they’re in season, so this may have caused them to damage a back leg in some way.  I have directions for care, but it’s really just a matter of waiting to see whether they heal.  Prudence seems to have improved slightly and is getting about now, but Phoebe has worsened.

The problems don’t end there though: we can’t keep the girls if their condition doesn’t improve.  Injured livestock are not allowed to be transported, so they can’t go to the abattoir and will have be killed and removed from the farm by a disposal firm.  In the meantime Percy remains alone which isn’t ideal.

It seems we have to prepare for the worst; that Prudence and Phoebe will be put down and I’ll need to find new gilts to accompany Percy.  Alternatively Percy could go to a new home and we could keep some of our weaners for breeding, a boar from one litter and two or three gilts from the other, but the boys are adamant that we can’t be without Percy as well as Prudence and Phoebe.  I’ve weighed up the options but there's no easy solution and so far, not one that can be agreed upon.

 

18th June 2010

At the Hampton Court Flower Show in three weeks time, the Royal Horticultural Society theme is ‘Home Grown’. 

Part of the RHS display required arable crops to be grown not too far from Hampton Court, whilst being transportable to site by lorry. 

The designer, Gillian Van Der Meer had successfully grown maize in boxes on a small scale for a previous show, but this year the plan was to grow spring wheat, oats, barley and oil seed rape on a much larger scale:  300 pallets had collars attached and were laid out in a field at Manor Farm, with good access for fertilising, irrigation and loading.   Contractors filled the pallets with soil and Gillian and our eldest son, Edward spent hours raking and sowing the seed by hand.

Wheat grown in pallets

The project has had its challenges, not least the atrocious winter; snow, frost and torrential rainfall followed by a heat-wave in May!  

Over recent weeks our agronomist, Andy Gay noticed that the crops just weren’t getting enough nutrients from the soil which didn’t appear to be the sandy loam with compost mix that had been expected.  Therefore the crops have been fed and fertilised to try to give additional nutrients and bring them more in line with the growth stage of crops directly in the ground.

Ed lifting a pallet with the tele-handler

In farming it’s difficult to predict precise dates for harvest with so much depending on weather, pests and diseases and break-downs.  So being asked to grow crops that must be ready for a particular date in July is unprecedented and has led to the whole family being involved and at least three members of staff.  Our boys were particularly useful when the irrigation hose had to be moved every four hours for weeks on end, with a watering plan on the kitchen wall and texting each other with reminders! 

Unfortunately the oil seed rape was eaten by pigeons and the pallet crop has been written off; just as we’ve lost fields of oil seed rape in the past, but in those instances we re-plant with an alternative crop and later harvest.

Loading the lorry with crops

Despite the set-backs I was relieved to see three lorry loads of pallets set off from Manor Farm yesterday for Hampton Court Palace.  Gillian now has the exciting and final challenge of bringing ‘Home Grown’ to life and we wish her well.

 

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