01590
688488
Mon - Sat 9am -5pm Sun 10am -2pm
Food you can taste....Food you can trust....
MID AUTUMN 2008
Well we got our Indian Summer then, and it lasted most of the weekend!
The swallows have been out in force, well over 500 of them swarming over
our late harvested wheat crops in numbers I have never seen before. As
I walked across the field to get a better look, they swarmed around me
like mackerel in a bait ball, creating a silence in the vortex –
a thrilling silence of a thousand flapping wings. I know that autumn is
full of surprises, but I would be interested to hear if anyone else has
noticed such numbers or did I chance upon a once in a lifetime natural
history phenomenon?
The
following day Alan Titchmarsh arrived to film the spectacle for his ITV
series about the seasons and there wasn’t a single swallow left
on the farm.
As much as you feel a
twinge of envy for the swallows, heading south for Africa as the chilly
nights draw in, autumn offers the double delights of all the fruits of
summer – raspberries, sweetcorn, tomatoes, runner beans, coupled
with the thrill of the comfort of winter – broccoli, leeks, squash,
parsnips. There is a freshness in the air that raises the appetite for
the longer, heartier evenings around a log fire. Those poor exhausted
swallows won’t be getting any of that in Africa!
The mystery of colony collapse disorder seems to have finally been explained
– and it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to us really,
that the use of insecticides (insect killing sprays), used in oilseed
rape, barley and sugar beet are wiping out whole colonies of bees. Most
countries have banned the sprays, and I can’t believe we haven’t.
Bees are more than just an intricate part of our flora and fauna; arguably
the survival and certainly the well being of the human race is directly
dependent upon their existence. It was Albert Einstein, no less, who asserted
that if bees died out then the human race would unquestionably follow.
There has been worldwide concern at widespread, devastating and until
now unexplained deaths of honey bees over the last two years. Bee keepers
have reported potentially catastrophic loss of bees from their hives ranging
anywhere from 30-90 percent. So "Colony Collapse Disorder" 
(CCD)
is not just a problem for beekeepers and farmers, but for consumers as
well, since bee pollination is essential for crop production. The US Department
of Agriculture says that one out of every three mouthfuls of food is dependant
on bee pollination, and globally up to two-thirds of all major crops rely
on pollination by bees.
Apart from actually encouraging bees through the widespread use of clover,
organic farming relies on a number of techniques to avoid the use of sprays
that kill insects, including not growing the same or similar crops every
year, and encouraging natural predators of insect pests (like wild birds,
ladybirds and lacewings).
The flower of oilseed rape is extremely attractive to insects and in particular
pollinating insects, attracted by the sweet smell of the pollen and nectar,
and by the bright yellow colour. Surely it is a madness then, or even
a crime against nature that we can spray those fields of flowering oilseed
rape with an insecticide, which will kill every insect in the crop?
The geese and the sheep are all, in their own way, getting ready for Christmas; the geese have been gleaning the stubbles for spilt grains and slugs. They spend a remarkable amount of energy arguing with one another as they waddle around the field hovering up the goodies.
The winter lambers have all been ultrasonically pregnancy scanned, to see how many lambs they are having, so we can feed accordingly. They will lamb in the barn throughout December.
Meanwhile I have been busy preparing the spring lambers for their hot date with their boyfriend; pedicures and bikini lines all round - really just foot paring and dagging! 28 days before the rams are let loose I flush the ewes on really good grazing, and with the rams in the field beside this teases them too. At the same time the rams are steamed on high energy feed so that when they go forth for service they can be sure to cover their allocated 50+ girlfriends in 28 days, as well as those that their friends have just covered!
Just as all commodities have increased in value, the cost of tractor diesel has doubled in the past year, thereby changing the whole equation with growing cereal crops, and has forced me to be resourceful. What I’ve found is incidentally quite pleasing and you realise that every now and again we all need a good kick up the backside in order to change an ingrained habit or method. To establish a cereal crop you normally would first plough, then break the ground down to create a seedbed, drill the seed and roll. Apart from the multiple passes requiring lots of diesel, an organic cereal crop is often overwhelmed by weeds which, having laid dormant, germinate in the ideal conditions of the seedbed that has been created.
So the plan is to create a permanent cover crop of mainly clover, which by flail topping I keep on mulching back in, thereby building fertility, improving organic matter content and soil structure, and increasing soil micro-biological activity. Chopping the heads off the weeds exhausts them and the clover soon dominates the sward. To establish the cereal crop I firstly top the clover then simply slot in the seed. No new weeds germinate so it’s then a race for supremacy between the wheat and the clover – which provides nitrogen for the growing crop. After harvest the permanent clover cover provides a habitat for innumerable species of birds and insects throughout the winter whilst ensuring there is no lost nutrients though soil erosion, nitrogen run off, vaporisation or mineralisation.
“Farm Life”, the 13 part
series about life on Warborne Farm, will be shown on Animal Planet (Sky)
on Monday 5th January, 2009 at 9pm. This prime time slot double bills
every Monday throughout January and February. We will hold the premiere
here in the barn and invite all customers to join us. The series has been
nominated for several industry awards, alongside David Attenborough and
“Animal Planet”.
George Heathcote
Warborne Farm
Archived Newsletters
