The farm has won awards for its conservation work. The margins around the fields are left un-cropped which make them good habitats for hares to graze, sky-larks and corn buntings to nest and for barn owls to hunt. This also protects the water quality in the ditches and streams.

Over two thousand trees have been planted in the last five years. Thirty different bird-nesting boxes and bat boxes have been put round the farm.

Looks like we’ll be finding out plenty over the next twelve months then...

Autumn

1.0

When was the last time you stared at your plate of grub and thought ‘Now where does all this come from?’ And we don’t just mean the local supermarket. Well this year is The Year of Food and Farming, It’s time to start eating healthily and consider taking a trip into the countryside to see where it all happens. So over to our Essex farmer Guy Smith to give us a snapshot of what’s habaaaaning this month.

Just as for school children and teachers, the new year for the farmer starts in the autumn. The farmer has harvested his crops in the summer during the school summer break and now he prepares his cleared fields for seeding. The farming term for putting seeds in the ground is “drilling”. Having created a “seed-bed” with ploughs and cultivators, seeds are carefully placed in the soil.

The seeds need to be spaced evenly and at the right density. This optimises the uptake of the things a plant needs to grow (rain, sunshine and fertiliser) when the seed starts to sprout and turn into a green seedling. This is a bit like designing a class-room. Just as we need to put the right amount of students into a class room of a certain size and to space them out evenly so they have enough room to thrive, a farmer needs to put the right amounts of seeds into field. This involves a bit of maths for the farmer. He knows that one kilo of seed will have 100,000 seeds. He also knows that on every square metre of his field he wants 100 plants and he knows 100 seeds weigh 4 grammes.

The farmer doesn’t do all his drilling in the autumn. He only drills crops such as wheat and oilseed rape which he knows won’t be killed in the cold of the winter. Other plants such as potatoes and sugar beet are not sown until the spring because they won’t survive frosty weather. Wheat grows through the winter and spring and is finally harvested in the summer. One wheat seed sown in the autumn will grow into a plant that will give 60 grains back. This means from one hectare he will get about 7 to 8 tonnes per hectare. The farmer delivers the grains to the miller who turns them into flour. Children usually recognise that wheat goes to make things like bread or Weetabix, but a good challenge for them is to get them to identify where the wheat is in a pizza, or an apple pie.


2.0

Guy Smith, our own favourite farmer, reveals the fertility of the flock and the transitory lamb. It’s all about introducing the ram to the ewe; Ram, this is Ewe, Ewe, this is - oh I see, carry on.

Sheep farmers have been in the news a lot lately because of the trials and tribulations of movement restrictions due to attempts to prevent the spread of diseases such as Foot & Mouth and Blue Tongue. It is important to understand why these restrictions cause such problems.

As the nights get significantly longer in late autumn the sheep’s annual fertility cycle begins. Most Ewes become fertile at this time and the farmer needs to be timely in introducing the Ram. The more of the flock that fall pregnant the more profitable and productive sheep farming is. Traditionally the farmer knows if a ewe has been served by a ram by the presence of a “tupping mark” which is applied by a dye known as raddle attached to a harness worn by a ram. As the Ram mates with the Ewe he leaves a colourful calling card on the ewes back. More modern techniques such as ultra-sound scanning can tell the farmer if the ewe is carrying a lamb.

Furthermore with a gestation period of just under four months the farmer must time conception so that the lamb arrives when the farm, the grass and the market are ready for them. Once the lamb is born it will be left with the ewe to suckle on its mother milk for ten weeks. After that it will be fattened on grass until the autumn when it will go to market. At this point the lamb is either sent to slaughter or further fattened on another farm on grass or roots such as swedes. Traditionally sheep in Britain move off the hills in the north and the west where they were born and are fattened on lowland farms in the south and the east. Then in the hills the cycle is started all over again as the ewes annual fertility is induced by the shortening day.

So we can see that successful sheep farming is all about timing and about moving sheep around according to the seasons. If at any point in this cycle sheep movement is restricted in attempts to stop disease spreading then the farming year is disrupted and the farmer’s carefully preconceived plan is ruined.

Sheep farming is very important to the look of the countryside in the hillier areas such as the Lake District and Snowdonia. Without sheep the verdant grassy hill sides would be lost as the landscape is taken over by scrub, bracken and gorse. Sheep create a tussocky sward that is vital to species of bird and insect that need such habitat to forage and nest in.

Winter

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This week Guy Smith gets into ploughing and maths. Odd to think that so long after horses were commonplace, horsepower is still used when talking about a machine's power. So, is a Shetland pony half a horsepower?

December on the farm is a quiet time of year. The days are at their shortest and fieldwork tends to be a diurnal job. For the arable farmer the main concern is to complete the winter ploughing.

Ploughing as a technique is as old as farming itself. Basically it amounts to inverting the soil so that the trash from the previous crop is buried and a friable, loose seed-bed is created ready for the spring. This latter role is partly done by the farmer and partly done by the frost. The frost acts to break up the clods created by the plough so they form a fine tilth by the spring. Hence the farmer is keen to complete his ploughing in December before the hardest frosts arrive.

One hundred years ago ploughing was done by horses pulling single furrow ploughs. It was the accepted lore that one man and two horses could plough an acre a day. Today farmers use tractors instead of horses. Most tractors used for ploughing are rated at around 200 horsepower pulling five or six furrow ploughs.

Logically you might think such a team could achieve a hundred times more than two horses – that being ploughing one hundred acres. In fact a good ploughman in a 200 horsepower tractor will plough 50 acres a day. What this does mean is that what one tractor and one man can achieve today it would have taken fifty men and 200 horses to achieve a hundred years ago.

Some lament the passing of the age when the power of the farm was provided by horses and human muscle. It is true that the pleasure of working with horses and the camaraderie of working on farms which employed scores of men is now largely gone. What should be remembered though is that guiding a plough pulled by horses in winter weather for seven hours a day was hard and dull work. It could also be dangerous as it was not unknown for horses to trample on farm workers. Working in the warmth and comfort of a tractor cab is far more civilised and safer.

The fuel for horses was grown on the farm in the form of hay and oats. It is interesting that in the future farmers may grow fuel for tractors. Crops such as oilseed rape can be crushed and turned into bio-diesel. As mineral oil prices go up it becomes more financially attractive for farmers to grow their own diesel rather than buy it from oil companies.


2.0

Getting fed up with tractors clogging up your route to work? What are they doing anyway?! Here’s our Farmer-in-Residence, Guy Smith to tell us why...

The winter months are a good time for the farmer to catch up on all those seasonal maintenance jobs around the farm. One such is trimming the hedges. Hedges can be a bit of a controversial area because many tend to think the farmers have taken them all out. A quick trip to the countryside reminds us that the British hedge is alive and well.

Furthermore if you compare our landscape with, for instance, its foreign counterparts, you realise the British countryside is amongst the most hedged in the world. It is true that 30% of Britain’s hedges were taken out in the 1960s and 1970s to accommodate the new machinery that farmers were using on their farms but in the last thirty years there has been no more loss and farmers now plant hedges rather than remove them.

The present generation of farmers do get a bit fed up with being accused of doing something their father’s did, especially when their fathers were encouraged to do it by the Government in the first place. Most of Britain’s historic hedges are alive and well. They say you can tell how old a hedge is by counting the number of species of woody shrub there are in it. For instance if a hedge has a bit of elm, hawthorn and blackthorn in it then it is probably three hundred years old.

On many farms hedges have lost their old functions as fences to keep livestock in, but now they are increasingly recognised and managed for their role in conservation. Hedges act as highways of bio-diversity where birds, mammals and insects forage and nest. When we consider species with names like hedgehog and hedge-sparrow we realise how important the hedge is. Alongside the hedge you often find a ditch and a field margin. These also make for important conservation environments.

It is important the hedge is trimmed every so often to stop it growing “leggy and gappy”. As a dense, well trimmed, bush it makes for a better environment for all manner of wildlife. Just to make life a bit more complicated the farmer needs to trim his hedge at exactly the right time. If he does it too early in the late winter then he risks removing all the hips, haws and berries that act as an important winter larder for birds. If he leaves it too late then he might disturb birds that are starting to nest. It’s tricky sometimes being both a farmer and a conservationist.


3.0

As the month of March approaches, the question for the farmer is when he should start his spring work. If he starts too early and the weather turns back to winter then he will rue the fact he jumped the gun. On the other hand, too much delay can mean an opportunity is wasted.

There is an old adage in farming which posits the question “what is the difference between a good farmer and a bad farmer”, the answer being “about a month”. The point being made is that the good farmer is timely in his farming and works with the weather rather than against it. The problem is that, in hindsight, the weather can make a fool of the wisest farmer. Another piece of folklore is that if the farmer wanted to know if his fields were warm enough for spring seeding then the best way to work it out was to remove all clothing below the belt and sit on the soil. Too much discomfort meant it would be too uncomfortable for seeds as well. (This is conjuring up some fairly ghastly images – Ed. “No Constable you don’t understand, I was merely assessing the conditions!”)

Most cows produce one calf each year and the gestation period is 9 months. Sound familiar? Beef farmers plan for their cows to have their calves in the winter to make best use of the peak grow of grazing grass in April, May and June. When the grass is growing at its best the grazing cows produce better milk and hence feed the calves better. Peak milk production is timed to coincide with peak demand from the calf.

For the dairy farmers the question is whether or not he should turn his cows out to graze grass. It is always cheaper for the farmer to feed his cows grass rather than keep them in the barn eating expensive cow cake. When we use the term “cow cake” we should point out that farmers do not feed cows a nice iced sponge or a bit of Battenburg (shame) but rather a compressed pellet containing things like milled barley or ground beans. Again the problem is that if the farmer turns his cows out too early then the grass will suffer as it is not in the full flush of its spring growth. Similarly grazing too early can spoil the sward as the cows hooves churn it up.

One frustration for the farmer is that while we have lots of experts predicting what the weather is going to be like for the next fifty years, no one can tell the farmer accurately what the weather is going to be like in the next fortnight.

Spring

1.0

Here comes the Easter bunny! Oh no, our mistake, it’s the eggs that threw us – it’s Farmer-in Residence, Guy Smith to tell us what’s happening this month...

Easter is a time we associate with eggs - usually chocolate ones. But it is only right that we associate the Easter period (early spring) with real eggs as well. It is at this time that wild birds are nesting and laying eggs.

In contrast to wild birds, farm chickens lay eggs all year round. This is just as well if we want farm fresh eggs. Most chickens will lay at least one egg a day, in fact the average chicken lays 300 eggs a year. The average person in Britain eats 170 eggs every year. 140 of these are eaten as shell-eggs and 30 are consumed in processed food. These facts could inspire some maths puzzles; it might also be a challenge to name some foods with eggs in where you cannot see the egg - i.e. custard and cakes.

Out in the fields spring is a time when the wheat and barley plants sown in the autumn start to grow rapidly. Having been sown around October the seeds have sprouted and established themselves as small plants that don't get more than ankle high and stay largely dormant through the cold, dark winter months. From the roadside such fields of wheat and barley crops look like endless acres of thin scrubby grass.

As the days get longer after the spring equinox and the weather gets warmer the plants respond, and by May they will be above welly-boot height. In the spring the farmer has to give his crops fertiliser to sustain this growth spurt so they will give maximum yield of grain at harvest time in August.

The grower must also be careful not to give too much fertiliser or the plants will have grow too tall and then fall over. If a plant falls over it will not provide good grain in its ear. Also it is much easier for the driver of the combine to harvest plants that are standing up. Fertiliser is very expensive so it must be placed accurately so it is used by each plant to best effect.

Fertiliser applications are done to the nearest 5 kg per hectare (100 x 100 m). Imagine how many bags of sugar that is spread over a football pitch? Fertiliser spreading is usually done by a spinner mounted to a tractor that throws the fertiliser granules evenly across the field as the tractor drives up and down the field.

To help the accuracy of this the field has "tramlines" spaced every 24 metres in the crop which the tractor drives down. These farmer "tramlines" are simply gaps in the rows of plants where the tractor places its wheels. Sometimes you can see these from the road. The spinner is then set up to spread the fertiliser granules 24 metres at a certain rate calibrated according to the forward speed of the tractor. Sometimes farming can seem like a maths lesson!


2.0

April is a nervy month for the sugar-beet farmer. He walks his fields anxiously checking to see if he has the number of newly emerging plants he wants and at the right spacing. Sugar-beet seed is ideally sown in late March.

The trick is to sow it early enough so it has a long growing season and late enough so it avoids any late frosts. If the emerged plant experiences too much cold weather it "bolts" and instead of producing the desired fleshy root, the plant thinks it has experienced a winter and so puts all its efforts into producing seeds which is the last thing the farmer wants.

The other complication is that chitted sugar beet seeds are a bit puny so if the seed-bed caps (i.e. forms a crust on top from strong rainfall) then the emerging shoot struggles to break through into the sunlight. Thirty years ago, farmers would plant more seeds per square metre than the desired plant population per square metre. The assumption being only a percentage would grow into strong seedlings. When the beet emerged, gangs would be sent out into the fields to hoe out the excess so that optimum plant densities would be achieved.

Today beet seeds are more vigorous than they were and are given little clay coats to make them easier to place. This means emergence and establishment is better and, mercifully, the unpleasant back breaking job of hoeing is no longer necessary. Despite these advances, the sugar beet farmer doesn't sleep properly until he can see orderly rows of cotylenes running up and down his field.

After that, there are only minor things to worry about such as keeping the weeds at bay with herbicides and giving the plants proper amounts of boron, nitrogen, potash and manganese fertilisers to optimise their growth. There is also the issue of praying for enough rain so the beet puts on weight and the right amount of sunshine so it has the right sugar content.

The latter fact is a good reminder how sunshine on green leaves produces sugar in the root. By the late autumn hopefully he has achieved 50-60 tonne of roots per hectare with 15-20% sugar content.

The reaction of photosynthesis can be written as the following chemical equation when sugar is being made:

12 CO₂ + 11 H₂ O = C₁₂ H₂₂ O₁₁ + 12 O₂
carbon dioxide + water = sugar + oxygen

If you can find a sugar beet (ask a local farmer) then it might be interesting to show the beet to the students and then get them to devise an experiment to get the sugar out of it. Basically the process is a matter of chopping the beet up then boiling it at the right temperature which gives you a sweet liquor. If the water is then evaporated off it will eventually crystallise into sugar.

Sugar production is a tricky business combining biology and chemistry. A word of warning, it is best to do this in theory explaining the principles of distillation and crystallisation. Attempts to do it in practice are not recommended and would probably end up in a lot of steaming hot pans containing a nasty brown sludge.

Summer

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Britain has the best weather in the world for growing cereal crops such as wheat and barley and consequently we have higher yields than most other countries. In East Anglia wheat crops will yield more than twice what they will in the mid-west of America.

Our mild maritime climate means the winters are not so severe as to kill the crop and the summers not too harsh to stress it. Having said that there is an old stereotype about how the farmer is never happy with the weather. It is not without basis as the farmer wants perfect growing weather which, naturally, he seldom gets.

This is particularly true in June as the wheat crop starts its final growth stages before harvest. What the farmer requires at this time is dry sunny weather to help the wheat plant flower and stay free of disease.

At the same time he wants rain so that the plants have enough moisture as they start to fill the grain sites in their ears. But outside of growing wheat in irrigated greenhouses (which would not be economic) the farmer has to make do with the weather he is given.

One thing he can do is use fungicides. These are materials that are designed to combat diseases such as mildew and rust so that the leaf area stays green so that it might maximise its ability to photosynthesise the suns energy.

Most wheat crops will receive two or three fungicide applications. Fungicides are expensive and the farmer does not want to be driving his sprayer through his crop unnecessarily. So disease in the crop is carefully monitored so that fungicides are only used where they are cost effective.


2.0

Early July is a test of the arable farmer’s patience. There is little else to do but watch the crops ripen and get the combine ready. For most farmers the combine is the most expensive machine on the farm with most models costing in excess of £100,000. The irony is that it only works for a few weeks of the year.

Combine harvesters take their name from the fact they “combine” the two main harvesting jobs into one machine – cutting and threshing. As little as fifty years ago these two jobs were still done separately. Crops would be cut and put into stooks (bundles) to dry in the field and then carted to the farm yard to be put into stacks.

At a later date, usually in the winter, the stacks would be put through a thresher to separate the grain from the straw and the chaff. The arrival of the combine in the decade after the Second World War meant threshed grain was suddenly carted straight from the field.

It was all part of the mechanisation revolution whereby the horse was replaced by the diesel engine as the power house of the farm. There were 600,000 working horses on British farms in 1940. By the mid 1960s they had more or less disappeared. In contrast, tractor numbers rose from 168,000 in 1944 to 512,000 in 1961.

In the same period combine numbers went from virtually nothing to 55,000. The main effect of this was that arable farms no longer needed so much labour. Whereas in 1940 a 500 acre cropping farm would need over ten men, today it can be staffed with just one.

What this represented was quite simply a revolution and it all took place quite quickly - in the space of one generation of farmers and farm workers. It might be interesting for students to consider the impact of machines on the process of food production.

There were huge consequences not just in terms of efficiency and productivity but also in terms of society. Agriculture quite quickly lost its dominance in the economy of village and rural life. And it was largely down to the diesel engine.

As we now ask fundamental questions about the future of relying on the diesel engine, it might be a thought provoking exercise to ask how we will be feeding ourselves in fifty years time. Will the change be as revolutionary as it has been in the last fifty?


3.0

As someone who recollects only too well the delights of studying for GCSE’s/ A-Levels and then went on to become a farmer I’ve always found it curious how the farming year has a strange parallels with the academic year. Things kick off in the autumn and after eleven months of hard work you get your results in August.

The results for the farmer is the summer harvest which is the culmination by which the previous year’s work will be judged. A good harvest is a combination of good yield and good quality which are determined, in turn, by a combination of good farming and good weather.

Harvest results can go from crop failure through to satisfactory through to excellent. Yields are expressed in tonnes per hectare. In the case of wheat the scoring goes something like this

5 tonne/hectare and below = fail
7.5 tonne/hectare = an average pass
10 tonne/hectare and above = gold stars and merit points all round.

Either way, farmers will usually note in their annual report “could do better”.

The king of the harvest is the man that drives the combine harvester. Perched high up in his cab looking over his combine reel, the driver has to ensure he feeds the crops evenly into the belly of the combine where a thrashing drum separates the grain from the chaff.

If he goes too slowly then he wastes time, if he goes too fast then the threshing mechanisms will not cope and good grain will be spat out and wasted at the back of the machine. If he drives much too fast then he may even jam the works causing a "bung up".

A "bung up" is a crime well worth avoiding as the punishment is time spent crawling around inside the machine scraping knuckles trying to clear the excess.

Ideally the farmer wants to harvest his wheat at 15% moisture. If it is above this figure then it will not store well and he will get penalised when he sells it on. The question the farmer asks himself at harvest time is will he be patient and let the sun and wind dry the crop for him or does he seize the moment by harvesting as soon as the crops will thresh through the combine harvester and then dry it artificially in a grain drier.

This is where the farmer needs an accurate long term weather forecast. If the summer is hot and dry then patience is the order of the day; the crop will dry naturally and expensive grain drier fuel will be saved.

If the summer is wet and changeable then rather than leaving the crop too long in the field and risk its quality deteriorating the farmer will harvest it wet and then dry it.

The key question in all of this is where does the farmer get an accurate long term weather forecast from so he can decide which policy to follow? Just like summer holiday destinations, such decisions are usually proven right or wrong in hindsight.

So here is wishing you good weather for your summer holidays, especially in the unlikely event that you are holidaying near my farm.

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