My stars of the year are the farmers of West Dorset, many of
whom have brought in record crops this season. It's not fashionable
to praise farmers. In the public eye, they have become villains. I
am fed up with hearing what villains they are. Over and over again,
the same vitriol is poured from the same cracked jugs: farmers are
ruining the countryside; farmers are poisoning the land. The fact
is, acre for acre, gardeners use far more nitrogenous fertilisers,
fungicides, herbicides and insecticides than farmers. Farmers can't
afford to chuck the stuff around in the quantities that gardeners
do. Why can we be allowed to take pleasure in a well-grown row of
beans while they are vilified for a fine field of corn?
Many gardeners with apple trees, pear trees and plums, have had
wonderful crops this year. So let's give thanks for our good
fortune in living in a country with the kind of land and the kind
of climate capable of producing plenty of food. Let's also
celebrate the skill of farmers that know how to use those
advantages. This season, round here, the harvest of spring barley
has been good, the winter wheat even better and the sileage cuts
exceptional in quality as well as quantity. Whisky drinkers in
particular should be toasting the spring barley. Quite a lot of
that is destined for malting and so is grown with very little added
nitrogen – it spoils the taste.
Despite the long, cold winter, there have been record yields of
winter wheat. The dryness of spring kept the wheat free of disease,
then the rain at the beginning of June came just in time to keep
the crop growing without check. Arable is increasing in Dorset, as
the annual income of small dairy farmers in the West Country drops
to around £8,000 a year. Despite that, Dorset is still a place with
plenty of pasture. Good milk and good sheep is what it's chiefly
known for, which is why the sileage cuts are so important.
Sileage making was a whole new strategy for my farming uncles in
the 1950s. It means cutting the grass green and packing it into
clamps where it cooks into delicious smelling stuff like fruit
cake. In a good season, such as this last one, you can get at least
three (sometimes five) cuts off the same field. It's like
lawnmowing, but you put the grass to better use. Before sileage,
farmers made hay to feed to their animals through winter, but
hay-making, in a climate as damp as ours, with wildly unpredictable
summers, is a nerve-wracking business.
Certainly, on the right kind of day in late June, with the right
kind of butterfly hovering over the right kind of flower, a hay
meadow is a wonderful place. But they ebb and flow with the
seasons. Different plants dominate in different years. Early summer
rain may beat down the tall grasses. This summer, there were very
few windows for making hay. There were scarcely three days together
when it didn't rain. But when a hay meadow is cut, the grass needs
to dry as quickly as possible. As the season marches on, heavy dews
in August and early September compound the problem.
So it's not surprising that hay meadows have become less common
than they used to be. Hay-making now is an indulgence available
only to nature trusts (and people like me) who don't depend on the
crop for their living. When we first came here, we started making
hay on our top field, the only bit of flat land in the whole place.
But first we had to widen the gateways, because tractors are much
bigger than they used to be. Then we had to sort out the fences to
stop the sheep getting into the field while the hay was growing.
This year, it wasn't cut until mid-September, by which time it was
pretty useless as winter feed.
"You haven't got any poppies," said a rambler, leaning over our
gate this summer, watching me pull ragwort in the meadow. The tone
was accusing. "No," I said. And I tried to explain that poppies are
flowers of the cornfield, not a hay meadow. They are annuals, that
depend on ground being turned over every year to give their seed a
chance to germinate. "There's no chance for them to grow in a
permanent sward," I said. But I could tell from the look on his
face that he didn't believe me. What I wanted from him, of course,
was not accusations about poppies, but some help with the ragwort.
Pulling it is a hard job.
Sometimes I wonder whether, in a few years, there will be any
farmers left who have the machines necessary to toss our hay, tidy
it into rows and bale it. Or the inclination to tow all this
paraphernalia through the narrow lanes to deal with our indulgent
bit of landscape, our escape from reality. In the future, will all
farmers have to grow corn as fast as nature allows?
At the end of October this year, the UN broadcast the fact that,
with the birth of Danica May Camacho in the Philippines, the world
population had reached seven billion. Much of this population
growth (from two and a half billion in 1950) has been in the parts
of the world where droughts and poor ground mean that farmers can
rarely celebrate a good harvest.
There have been terrible famines in those 60 years, but new
kinds of rice, new kinds of corn, have meant that a higher
proportion of the world's ever-increasing population could be fed
than would otherwise be the case. Writing in our prize-winning
parish magazine, local farmer Mark Roberts highlighted a new
dilemma. A strain of wheat widely grown in Uganda is being attacked
by a debilitating kind of rust. The disease has already spread from
Africa into the Yemen. But what if it reaches the Punjab, which
presently supplies almost a fifth of the world's wheat? Those who
deal in the grim business of famine reckon that if the Punjab crop
fails, 200 million people could die.
The dilemma is this. The rust, at the moment, is being held in
check by vast quantities of fungicide. But at the John Innes Centre
in East Anglia, scientists have bred a new variety of wheat that is
resistant to both drought and the rust, and so can be grown without
being drenched with chemicals. Good news? It depends on which part
of your brain has been washed. The new wheat is genetically
modified. Is this worse than the fungicide? Is either of these
worse than the prospect of a child dying, when it could be fed? As
the man with the moustaches says, it's not easy being green.
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