Lambing has its usual challenges

SWINGING IN THE WIND

We had a near miss recently with a steel framed barn on the home farm. It had been used predominately as winter housing for young cattle until the last animals left in early Spring 2020, when it was cleaned out and left empty. We have always cleared the stock yards in early spring, as soon as the weather allows, with surrounds scraped clean, being very conscious of what dung and urine can do to metal.

The building has been unused since, although looked at regularly. We had some quite hard frosts after the new year and in mid-February I walked around and was horrifi ed to see the bases of all the stanchions along the open side almost ‘swinging in the wind’, while under each was a small pile of rust dust which, I surmised, had been ‘brought off ’ by those freezing conditions. The barn was only 28 years old and had shown no sign of such advanced trouble, although like most steel bases of cattle sheds they were showing rust.

Over the years I have seen similar damage on older barns and replaced a few with new feet, but to see the whole lot in this state was a real concern. So what to do? – apart from praying the north wind doesn’t blow and bring the whole thing down. On second thoughts, it might fl atten a troublesome phone mast!

I called a neighbour who has spent many years working with metal, and then called my regular farm fi tter/repair man Nick, and we talked through the options, Then, with a decision made, Nick set to, cutting and welding in some substantial steel supports. It was a delicate job but was completed and the barn is still standing. It is just so lucky the weather conditions had removed the rust and exposed the extent of the problem. Anyone with similar cattle and steel barns, I suggest you check them for similar erosion. Of course, you probably do.

It seems, fi nally, many in the farming fraternity are ‘digging their toes in’ over the ever-expanding burden of our farm assurance, inspection and levy schemes. Schemes which many have long seen as very poor value for anyone’s money; except perhaps those employed by them.

To my mind, while there may have been a case for some of them, their size and costs have multiplied beyond all justifi cation and, in so doing, they have become a parasitic liability on most practical agricultural businesses. Once they may have been useful tools for ‘cracking the whip’ in the industry. Now they are simply yet another tax.

Whatever, they are generally more of a drag than an aid. Box ticking run wild. Many questions on the inspectors’ clipboards appear simply to be put

NICK ADAMES

Former dairy farmer

there to justify employing yet more offi ce staff to think new questions up. I am not singling anyone out in particular in case there are yet more sensitive ‘feelings’ I might upset.

The only such scheme we have ever really been involved with was related to the dairy herd. Initially routine dairy inspections helped teach many of the new inspectors about real dairy farming, rather than helping improve dairy farms. Doubtless they may have initially tidied up a few of the very small herds still around in the latter years of the old century, but in the past 50 years bigger herds have been driven by the simple need to survive the changing times and unrealistic milk prices, so through necessity farmers have needed to run ‘tight ships’, and be animal friendly.

But I recall many of the questions on the inspector’s clipboard would better have suited primary school children. I particularly recall a regional female dairy inspector, Tammy something... in the latter days of the Milk Marketing Board, back around the seventies/eighties, who came in on her annual visit and invariably found fault with almost everything, on whichever farm she appeared.

Finally one day we asked her to leave our dairy and reported this to her offi ce. Thereafter she never visited us again, apparently a little chastened… If it had happened today she would most likely have brought a sexual discrimination charge.

I also remember, some years ago, being visited by a fellow from the local council who seemed concerned about inspecting our cattle fences. Not for the cattle, but for the public. They were, as in the photo, post and barbed wire, or a strand of electrifi ed wire, so I asked him “where was the problem?”, because there were no public paths in that fi eld. “Someone might get lost and stumble in the ditch overnight,” he said, leaving me with clear instructions to “put posts in at three yards and fi ve, yes fi ve, strands of barbed wire”.

So we changed it to three strands of barbed wire. Shortly after, we heard he had been moved on to greater things. A real expert. We never saw him or a replacement again, and no one ever fell in the ditch. There was no sense in what he said and he had no idea of the cost of providing and maintaining his ‘ideal’ fences. Is it possible he was just overcome with his authority?

We always had the view that if any offi cial was coming to inspect anything, you needed to leave them some aspect they could fault, and so exercise their ‘enforcement powers’ to justify their existence. Then you would engage them in small talk as you skirted what you felt were any potential problem areas (slurry pits…) and they would walk past chatting cheerfully about their holidays, football or children. That was an old technique; of course, nobody would surely use it these days. But it usually worked.

> Only three strands here yet the fellow wanted fi ve...

Nicks latest book Its Straight Downhill Now is available by emailing hamletpublishing@gmail.com at £13.00 and £2.00 donation to RABI. incl postage

Entering the world of measuring carbon usage, carbon sequestration (the carbon your natural resources absorb from the atmosphere) and ultimately your business carbon footprint is probably something that falls into this category for most of us.

However, we are entering a future of targets being set for having businesses that are carbon neutral (net zero), so it’s time to roll the sleeves up and get stuck in. The forward thinking amongst us are probably a long way down the road already, but better late than never, as someone much wiser than me once said.

After a few hours of research, I realised that an agricultural business currently has three software tools available to measure its carbon footprint. The NIAB farm carbon tool kit, the Cool Farm Tool and the Scottish Government-backed Agrecalc. The three are not currently compatible. I signed up for an ARTIS online training day entitled Improving Soil Organic Matter and Farm Carbon Management. It was an excellent training day and was linked to the NIAB tool, so I decided to go with that one.

It was self-explanatory and easy to follow, just lots of leg work. You really do get out what you put in. After 36 hours of data input, it was complete and accurate to the best of my ability.

During this marathon of data input I had been in conversation with my biggest customer about carbon measurement and producing a baseline for the business. I had this little voice at the back of my head telling me that at some point during the process my customer would demand a different measuring tool (to standardise their supply base). And so it happened! Literally the moment I completed the farm carbon tool kit, my customer rang me and grandly announced that they wanted all of their suppliers to use the Cool Farm Tool.

I was now in full flow after a full week of immersing myself in all things carbon so I just carried on and did the Cool Farm Tool as well.

Some really interesting things came from this exercise. Electricity has a low carbon footprint. Soil management (quite rightly) has a massive impact on the carbon offset. We have 26 hectares of deciduous woodland and around 15,000m of hedgerows of varying sizes and the sequestration from this was around 300 tonnes of carbon. Sequestration from soil management was 1,200 tonnes of carbon.

We started measuring the organic matter percentage of each field in 2014. We have embraced winter cover crops, ploughed in wheat stubbles and used compost from a local recycling plant. All this has helped to improve our organic matter percentage in the soil marginally, but the value in sequestration terms was judged to be four times more than from our trees and hedgerows. This surprised me.

We use around 220kg of carbon for every

GETTING TO GRIPS WITH ALL THINGS CARBON

It can be daunting trying to re-set priorities and definitions of ‘what is success?’ for any business, writes Nick Ottewell, production and commercial director with Laurence J. Betts Ltd, Church Farm, Offham.

1,000kg of lettuce that we produce. I’m not really sure what this means. I have no idea if it is good, bad or average. The next stage for us means hopefully we will be to be able to benchmark this figure against other field-scale veg growers.

Clearly, we are not carbon neutral and we have a journey to go on, but we have produced a baseline. Interestingly, both tools gave a very similar result. That might be just a fluke based on our particular farm model, and I don’t think this will necessarily be the case for a lot of farming businesses.

We now need a period of reflection to digest the information generated by going through this process, but my overall feeling is a sense of relief that the baseline has been produced. So if you haven’t created a baseline yet, then it really is time to have a go. You will learn things about your business and the process might help you to find some ways to lower costs or be more efficient. The farming industry now needs to find a way to benchmark all of our businesses against each other to add some context to the overload of data!