Contact: Radford Mill Farm, BA2 0QF. Phone 07908 088369 Email: info@radfordmillfarm.com
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The Radford Mill Diary - what we are trying to do
* Record - every week or month or so (hopefully) we'll add some news about what's going on at the Farm.
* Inform - we'll comment about some outside events that might affect our lives, and yours.
* Amuse - sometimes a funny thought is worth sharing.
* Persuade - on the soapbox with Richard the Rant.
April 28, 2024: The BBC tells us that we've just had the wettest 18 months on record. From a farming perspective it has been tough - - it's not possible to make use of the ground when it is very wet - - the tractors just dig great furrows and harvesting veg brings up a lot of mud. so we are weeks behind sowing our veg, and that means smaller crops as there will be less sunshine to get the full benefit of the growing season. But we're still here, "muddling through" as the British are used to saying. Sometimes I do wonder why.
under the wonderfully supportive guidance of this government we are now offered a whole range of possible subsidies generally on the theme of supporting environmental improvements, modernising our equipment and practices, and encouraging longer term benefits for the public and the earth. Being a very small farm we do the paperwork in the evenings and on Sundays - - we can't afford to employ staff to read through the hundreds of pages necessary to achieve these grants. So we slog though four or five hours of paperwork and we manage to get £150 for our efforts; and about 20 hours gives us perhaps £1,000 if we file additional paperwork a few months from now after having a one or two-hour inspection. so the reward is a bit better than minimum wage, but not really making a large contribution to our overall financial situation. Generally we fail to qualify for some of the grants because the funds are competitive - - so much is available for each region for each subject, and all the farmers bid for a share of the pot each year. Each farm scores some "points" which make their grant application more likely to succeed. In general one scores more points for making larger improvements in biodiversity. We tend to score somewhat low on several points because we already have a huge amount of biodiversity going on here - - big headlands, messy hedges, lots of old dead wood lying around, certified organic practices for nearly 50 years mean no pesticides or herbicides so we have lots of weeds. Permanent pastures yield a very wide mix of species all grouped under the label of "grass", and rotating animals and vegetable crops and composting everything builds fertility. All of which means we have lots of bugs and beasties and worms in the soil and hedgerows and that brings in lots of birds and other wild animals. so it is harder to achieve a big improvement in biodiversity. But still, it looks like some of the new ideas coming from DEFRA are constructive and useful.
I was part of a working group on agroecology a few years ago, and at the end of a year and a half of meetings and discussions between several small farmers and growers and other interested and informed people we came to the conclusion, surprisingly, that farm subsidies were not really the best way to design a food and landscape policy for a country. Although subsidies can be a useful stopgap in a transition period, they ultimately lead to a devalued food and landscape policy as the public does not need to understand the actual value of these fundamental aspects of our shared life. The big question then is how to bring the public to a better understanding of the actual human costs of these vital activities, and then how to drag the politicians into that "elevated" understanding. Unfortunately there are two very big hurdles: increasing the cost of food to members of the public when we are facing hard times financially is not likely to be popular; and denying businesses the right to maximise their profits in any way they can is not likely to be popular with big donors to the political parties. So although there have been big gains in public awareness about food issues and general environmental subjects in recent years, I am not overly confident there will be fundamental change in our approach to food any time soon. Currently 85% of the food consumed in this country go through the hands of the big 5 supermarkets, and they will never be willing partners to a fundamental reshaping of a really forward-looking national food policy. Supermarkets do not grow or produce food, or have any interest specifically in food other than the buying and selling of it to make a profit, and as long as large-scale transport is available at very low cost, they will always look to buy and sell quantities of goods from here to there if it makes a penny in the pound more profit than supporting local production, or healthy production, or biodiversity, or social well-being.
January 18, 2024: Here's a quick note to announce our Spring programme of Farm walks. We really like people visiting the Farm, and having interesting walks and talks on Saturdays and Sundays seems to be a popular activity. Generally the walks are gentle strolls, very family friendly, and about 2 hours or so. Well-behaved dogs or other pets are welcome; we're often graced with the presence of Ron, Bean, Jake or Jay-Jay, some of the four-legged residents here, and Fatty the bluejay who takes a great interest in visitors.
We have a FORAGING walk on two Sundays, March 17 and April 21 (click for more info)
and our annual SPRING WALKING TOUR on Saturday April 13, which includes a hearty soup and salad lunch.
Here on the farm we're somewhat insulated from world events; we don't import very many things, and we don't export anything, and most of us are too busy doing what we do to get heavily involved in protests, etc. But sometimes I wonder if our civilisation is just spinning out of control. The prime minister's Rwanda policy seems bonkers and his reversal on green energy commitments is really counterproductive, but not a patch on the choice of voters in Iowa yesterday. Two of us here were born and raised in the U.S. A., and one is from Iowa. It's a bit difficult to identify with people who give wholehearted support to crazy politicians and crazy public policies such as the gun culture in the U.S. and unlimited support for apartheid policies in Israel. We persevere with the ethics of organic farming , but one can't help but think there's a complete absence of ethical behaviour throughout our society. What then must we do? (Read Tolstoy's small book with that title.)
January 15, 2024: This is always an interesting month - - a slow start after the excessive foodfest at the end of December. By January all the turkey leftovers have been dispensed, one realises that one probably ate too much, there's no real pressure from the polytunnel or field crops, no events for a few months, apple tree pruning and oak tree planting to get on with, and time to finish a few the various projects that have got started over the last couple of months but not yet completed. There's a feeling that it's a new year, a new beginnings, and a time to correct all the mistakes and omissions of the previous year.
Well, that sort of relaxed optimism gets tested pretty quickly. The weather has caused some concern - - three buildings suffered some roof damage and our cherry picker decided yesterday that it didn't like minus 4 degrees yesterday so it stopped working; the trusty hair dryer on the pipes and patience until after lunch and we were back in business again, but with only two hours of daylight left, which meant we couldn't finish the job on the Dairy Barn roof. I've covered the hydraulic control parts of the machine with a tarpaulin tent, and installed a very small heater for the night which should make a difference, and hopefully we can get a full day's work up in the air tomorrow.
We've had a few customers who ask whether our organic produce is "free range" - - we don't tend to use that phrase on our labels. Why not use both descriptions? Well, here's why.
"Free range" or "Organic" ?
The main difference between these two labels is that "organic" has an agreed definition, legally binding, and regular annual inspections are carried out to check that the standards are being met. Also, the standards include all aspects of farming, land management and food production, not just "free range", whatever that might mean. "Free range" has no agreed legally binding standard - - anyone can use the phrase "free range" to mean whatever they say it means. So the RSPCA, the Red Tractor Scheme, and several other farm assurance schemes all have different definitions of "free range". That is about as useful as having no agreed standards for the MOT for your car; your local mechanic can just say, "yep, the brakes are good" without any reference to a national standard. "Organic" means the turkeys and laying hens and all the other animals kept on this land must have free access to pasture and must be managed so they are always outside. There's minimum sizes of pasture, minimum sizes for housing and perching, all of the feed and pasture must be certified organic so no routine antibiotics, no GMOs, no bee-killing pesticides or herbicides are used, and so on. You can read the standards for yourself (click here) and they are universally applied throughout this country and Europe.
One of the main issues that often gets lost in the free range advertising is whether the birds (or other livestock) actually spend much time out in a pasture, or whether they just have "access" to a pasture but frequently don't go out. Two months ago the RSPCA announced an improvement to their "standard" for poultry: the houses must have an outside veranda or covered porch. Why is this "upgrade" needed? Our birds, and generally all livestock kept under the organic system, really like dashing out as soon as the door is open - - they literally mob you at the door, and they rarely come in until the light fades, even though their cereal feed is always kept inside their houses. "Free range" birds often do not want to go out, they are more comfortable staying in, the system does not require them to go out, only to have "access" should they want to go out. The "veranda" upgrade is a sop to members of the public who might think this is an increase in the welfare for the birds. The question you want to ask is, "why do they need encouragement to go outside?" We have kept livestock under the organic system for 45 years and we have never had any birds choosing to stay inside whenever we open the pop-holes or doors; they always rush to get out as fast as possible, even on rainy days which they don't particularly like. And if you read further about "Free range" so-called standards you find that the animals must have some toys to keep them amused in their houses, and the keeper must take active steps to encourage the animals to go out.
There are other aspects of those systems that most people would agree are lacking. Overall I think the use of the "free range" label is purposely misleading; it is designed and implemented to create an image for consumers of high quality welfare while skirting past activities and practices that are fundamentally not "free range". In other words, the label is greenwash. If you really want to have food products and farming practices that are wholesome, healthy, good for the soil and the environment, stick to the "organic" label. It may not have such a catchy feel as "free range", but it is truly a farming MOT you can trust.
We've several new residents arriving in the next couple of weeks: a welder from up north, a builder from Wales, and a bookkeeper from the Midlands. We hope they will employ their trades here so the Farm can continue its upward growth, and this ageing farmer can get on with turning some intriguing ideas into reality: electricity from water power, and an irrigation reservoir, and district heating for all our buildings with biomass boilers, and a lift to the top floor of the Mill using water power, and more solar power, and one or two other things.
Decades ago (1977-1981) we grew wheat on long straw for thatching. The straw was much more valuable than the wheat (this is clay soil, not so good for high-class cereals), but we used to grind a few kilos every fortnight and bake about ten loaves a week. There is nothing so tasty and so difficult to find as fresh-baked bread from wheat ground only minutes before turning it into dough. I think the flour achieved a really special flavour, extra sweet and nutty, because it was stone ground and still warm from the grinding when we made that dough. We also made our own butter back then, and it is one of my fantasies to get back to those halcyon days, full of Jersey milk and cream, and buttermilk and whey strained from our yoghurt. I remember having an ongoing argument with various people at the Soil Association in the early days of the organic certification, about whey. It is very good for adding to cakes, bread, and other baked goods, it adds moisture and a delicious mildly sour flavour that blends very well. We used to maintain a certified organic kitchen and we would sell lunch things to the Soil Association headquarters in Bristol. But most had never heard of whey so it could not possibly be certified, and those that had thought it was just pigfeed. They were all too young to have heard of Little Miss Muffet.
October 30, 2023: So, Hallowe'en is tomorrow, a scary occasion for some. For me it's the last day for doing the Farm payroll, and quite a few other administrative jobs that are demanded at the end of every month. Definitely the scariest time of the month.
The sun is shining right now, the calm before Storm Ciaran hits in a couple of days. Fortunately all our marquees are now down except for one that is sheltered in our Dairy yard where we are pressing apple juice, but that's an easy one to tie down. The main risks for us is very heavy rain - - our small river (the Cam Brook) is called a "flash" river in that it goes up and down in a matter of two or three hours. If the river rises three metres will it wipe out the supports we have for the footbridge? If it rises more than three metres will it flood our polytunnels and turn all our salad and other greens into useless brown leaves? We're planning a big move of the polytunnels to higher ground in another year or two, but it's with a sense of loss; we've been growing veg in the Mill field (which is bordered by the river) for 47 years, and it feels like we're "giving up" on one of the foundation activities of the Farm. Still, I suppose that is progress, planning for the long-term future with more likelihood of flooding due to climate change.
October 21, 2023: It's TURKEY TIME once again at Radford Mill Farm. We've just opened our Turkey book so you can book yours on our website. Only two months to go before it's time to eat all those lovely tasty birds. and once again we've done our sums and we're selling our organic Norfolk Blacks at a lower price than the competition. They are not as cheap as the cheapest in the supermarkets, but if you want an organic turkey i think you wil find ours are at the top of the list, even though our website is not as wonderful to look at as some of the others. We're more concerned with what's inside the package, rather than the appearance on the outside.
October 15, 2023: It's been awhile. We've had a busy summer, some successes, some backwards steps, some changes in who is living here now. We've a coupe of new Farm residents, an old but elegant converted bus names "Bonnie Scotland" is now ensconced on the Railway embankment, and we've new somewhat elegant black railings up on the wall of the Farm cottage.
We're taking orders for our Christmas turkeys, from today ! Have a look at our website for details.
this has been a bumper year for acorns; we've collected a few thousand, and they are happily sprouting away I will write a longer treatise on acorns soon; the subject is one of my passions (or obsessions). Watch this space.
Our market stall in Frome has brought up an interesting point for discussion: some customers have queried whether our eggs (and other things) are "free range" , because the label just says "organic", and does not actually say "free range". Clearly thee is some confusion over what the various labels mean.
"FREE RANGE" - - the phrase brings to mind an image of animals roaming around in beautiful lush green pastures, having a happy time as a result of the excellent management by the farmer. It's what many, probably most people would like to think about how animals should be reared. But what does it actually mean? The reality is that there is no agreed standard for "free range", it is whatever the person publishing the label wants it to mean. The RSPCA have one definition, the Red Tractor scheme has another description, and the Quality Standard Mark has yet a third set of ideas. There are several other schemes, each of which publishes beguiling words that their members can use on labels and in brochures, all designed to help producers increase their sales. The motivation for all of these schemes with their wonderfully reassuring descriptions is to increase sales by making the producer's less than perfect systems sound somewhat more desirable than they actually are in practice. Generally the definitions emphasise that the animals are free to leave heir houses or barns and wander around in a field somewhere nearby. There is no comment on some other aspects of animal welfare, or whether the animals actually do go outside every day, or do they choose to stay in their houses. In some of the systems there's an emphasis on adding features to the housing and pasture to entertain the animals so they don't get bored and act destructively. The requirements for housing space, feed, bedding material, density and size of flock or herd - - all of these "welfare" and husbandry essentials are either not mentioned, or not emphasised, and each of the assurance schemes have very different requirements. Each producer can choose which scheme will cause the least extra cost and still allow some popular reassuring words to be printed on the label. Livestock produced under "free range" systems are NOT required to be outside, nor is the pasture required to be green.
"ORGANIC" - - is the ONLY high-quality assurance scheme that actually has legally defined standards. (N.B. the "bio-dynamic" system is even more stringent and specialised than organic certification.) Organic producers are inspected at least once per year, very exacting records are scrutinised, and the standards cover virtually every aspect of husbandry and farm management: staff training, prevention of routine use of antibiotics, the condition and sizes of housing and pastures,, feed quality standards and no GMO's, overall veterinary health plan, overall declarations of everything brought onto the farm or taken off the farm, and so on. The motivation behind the organic certification is to maximise the animal husbandry aspects, protect and enrich the soil, increase bio-diversity throughout the farm holding, and minimise or eradicate the use of obnoxious substances and environmental degradation. Under the ORGANIC system all livestock are REQUIRED to be outside in green pastures for most of the days of their lives.; that is free ranging in practice, not just in advertising words.
October 14, 2023: We get asked, now and then, why the price of ORGANIC food is so much higher than the price of non-organic food, now that we are suffering from large price rises for nearly everything. Well, I could say, you get what you pay for, but that would be a bit glib. Why is organic food more expensive? And the parallel question - - why is non-organic food in the supermarkets so much lower? These are big questions, vey often widely misunderstood.
The quick answer is that food grown to organic standards is more expensive to produce primarily because of the cost of reducing weeds without pesticides and herbicides. The first year I was at Radford Mill Farm (1976) we grew a wheat crop which in the middle of May following a heavy rain was rapidly taken over by a bonanza of fat-hen. We could see that within a few days the fat-hen would be towering over the wheat and the crop would be lost. So we took the decision to use a weed herbicide, and I bought a back-pack sprayer, mixed up the recommended concentration and spent a half-day hand spraying what looked like many litres of water all over our 4 acre field; and then we watched. The only thing that happened was the fat-hen kept getting taller, until the fifth day. Then the tops of the fat-hen all started bending over, and on the sixth day the stems were getting shorter, and by the tenth day there was nothing left in the field other than a very vigorous crop of wheat - - not a blade of any weed in the whole field. it was a miraculous testimony to the power of weed-killers. We produced a record crop of long straw for thatching that year, but we also joined the Soil Association the next year and have never used any herbicides since. I often remember that experience, how a one-litre bottle of poison can protect a four-acre field, and how time-consuming and incomplete our organic weeding methods are. We're committed to the organic system because it is clearly the right way to farm; but it is not the most profitable thing to do, not by a long shot.. so although we charge higher prices for our produce, we also pay considerably more for the labour to grow everything.
If organic production was equally profitable as conventional methods, we would see many more organic farmers, instead of the measly 2.8% of U.K. farmland now under organic certification. Most European countries have more than 10% of their farmland converted to organic, with several of the larger countries (Austria -27%, Estonia and Sweden - above 20%, Italy and the Czech Republic above 15%, etc.). The U.K. ranks about 48 out of 55 developed western countries. That's not a very enviable record.
Now that I have warmed up on the subject of food pricing I will continue on with a long rant about the iniquities and imbalances in the supply of our food.
The fundamental question is: how does anyone figure out the price of a product? There is not an easy answer here. When I was about 8 years old I was selling lemonade with my sister on a street corner that had a traffic light. When the cars all stopped for the red light, we would sell one or two or maybe three small paper cups of fresh (and very tasty) lemonade and drivers would happily pay us 5 cents for each cup. (This was in Los Angeles where it is pretty hot most days, and it was about 70 years ago when 5 cents was a good bit of pocket money for a small child.) Needless to say we made quite a bit of money for a few hours' work on a Saturday afternoon. And the cost of the product? Well, our mother provided the lemons and the sugar and the table, and we had to pay for the paper cups which were about 10 cents for 25 of them. Mother never claimed for the her costs. So my sister and I were free to split the $2-3 we would collect, and we only had to reimburse Mother about 20 cents for that day's paper cups. I guess that's where I learned about selling direct to the public. But now that I am a bit older I realise that I really didn't understand the actual cost of a cup of that lemonade. Nowadays we pay about £1 for 1,800- spinach seeds, and we get about 75% germination. Each full-grown plant produces about 1 kg of saleable spinach, compared to a seed cost of almost nothing. How much should we charge? Well, obviously we have some costs - - there's water (the Farm water bill is about £2,500 per year), the tractors and other tools for cultivating, the labour costs to sow, weed, harvest, pack, label and transport the spinach packets. All of those costs are impossible to calculate on a 1-plant basis, and there are other hidden costs - - rates, taxes, admin, mixing and spreading compost, processing the farm yard manure to make the compost, and so on. Clearly the calculation is not practical, so we don't even try to do it; we sell our products at "what the market will bear" - - that is, we look at organic spinach being sold by other people and we decide to price ours either just a bit higher, or just a bit lower, than the average of our competitors, depending on whether we have a lot of spinach to sell, or not so much. .Nearly all of our Farm produce is sold to final consumers; we don't have any supermarket contracts or other big wholesale arrangements. So we take a gamble and price our spinach this summer at £8.00 per kg. "The market" dictates how much we can can charge - - if we raise our price much above the average, we don't sell so much. At the end of the year we count our pennies, add up all our yearly costs, pay a small bonus to our workers if we've made a profit, and soldier on to the next year with another 200 kg of spinach.
Nowadays the price of food is largely set by the main supermarkets; the big five sell about 75% of all the groceries in this country. Generally speaking they are notorious for giving the food producers very low prices, which means only ever larger companies can successfully deal with supermarkets. They use "big data" to analyse costs all over the world, customer preferences, competitor prices, marketing exercises that sway customer choices, and so on. And their reported profits are in the billions each year. They have identified "organic" as a niche area for pricey foods - - just enough customers will pay considerably higher prices for that label to warrant the shelf space. And they have to make some offering, because Lidl in particular has consistently offered a few organic items at very low prices, as a device to buy loyalty from better off customers.
Our local MP, Jacob Rees-Mogg has raised the question of cheaper food by allowing free trade to prevail over protective tariffs. His main example is beef: 200,000 tonnes is imported every year from European sources but the prices are relatively high, so Rees-Mogg argues we should allow Australian beef in without tariff restrictions, which would replace that 200,000 tonnes with lower costs for the consumer. He argues that it would not affect British farmers, which is a completely untrue notion - - if the price of beef falls due to lower-cost imports that is bound to reflect badly on beef farmers here. Rees-Mogg states this would be good for local farmers because it would make them more efficient, which is analogous to saying if you reduce the number of wheels on a care or a bicycle it will be more efficient. He completely fails to address the question of higher animal welfare standards in this country compared to low-cost Australia or Thailand, where hormones are routinely used for growth promoting, and other practices. it is a classic case of ideology over intelligence.
But such is his eloquence, and the poor level of debate and curiosity about the subject, that his thesis that lower priced beef would be good for consumers and good for the industry all sounds somewhat believable. Generally I think tariffs and protectionism are not desirable arrangements, but there should be clear and available information about the quality of a product including its environmental and social costs. Allowing low-standard products to mix with higher-standard products where the main observable difference is price is a big mistake. We need honest, meaningful labelling on all our foodstuffs and advertising, meaningful standards that mitigate against "greenwash" and misleading statements from some of the "quality assurance" schemes, and a society-wide educational programme about food quality and marketing gimmicks. At the moment, how easy is it to discover that Australian beef standards allow growth hormones, imported chicken from Thailand and the United states is often chlorine-washed due to low processing standards, and many food items are labelled in very misleading ways. If consumers were actually given full and honest information about their foodstuffs there would be a dramatic change in sales of low-quality imports.
Remember Edwina Currie's remark about nearly all laying hens in the UK had salmonella infection? Within a day nationwide egg sales fell through the floor, except for "organic" eggs, which were thought to be proof against such disease-carrying characteristics. In our Shop our sales tripled of unpackaged eggs which were displayed on cardboard trays. When asked, most of our egg customers thought the ones on the trays were fresher and more healthy and therefore more free of salmonella, and most thought the organic certification was a safeguard against bacteria. All of those opinions were not actually true, except Ms. Currie's statement: it is true that nearly all laying hens in this country and elsewhere carry the salmonella bacteria. it is not true that the eggs displayed on our trays were fresher, nor that organic certification means free from bacteria. But such is the level of poor public awareness about the food industry, nearly everybody believed the rumours and habits changed, overnight. We were happy to sell out all our eggs at a higher price, but not happy that there was widespread misunderstanding about some basic food facts.
Nowadays the advertising machines of very big companies tell you that "free range" as guaranteed by the Red Tractor scheme is the highest standard of animal welfare. That is not true, but it is a common belief among many people.
March 26, 2023: Yesterday we had our first Farm Walk of the year, which gets us in the mood for events that are coming up, welcoming many people who come to visit the Farm during the year. After "slumbering" for six months with very few visitors, it is always an inspiring occasion to see a group of mostly strangers ooh and ahh as they come across the footbridge and enter the Circle Garden. (One scurrilous old-timer commented "The oohs and aahs are because the bridge is really scary") Yesterday the group joined us for a walk, talks, lots of questions, and two flavours of delicious soup with bread, along with some homegrown apple juice and chutney. The next walk will be in the summer,
March 25, 2023: The new BIG environmental issue for the Farm is this: what is the best way to provide space heat and hot water for the Farm? Currently we use mostly LPG gas, and electric heat throughout most areas of the Farm, though a few of the dwelling spaces have small wood stoves. The Farm produces several tonnes of firewood each year from our 15 miles or so of hedges, and we have the capacity to cut it and haul it and of course everyone likes a wood fire and a glowing wood stove, right? The problem is that the latest advice from various official sources (e.g. the government) suggests that wood stoves are environmental black spots producing greenhouse gases and dirty-air particulates. Add to that the difficulties and expense of installing modern high-efficiency wood stoves and finding certified installers to do such work..
Electric heat is really quick, cheap and simple to install, seemingly good for the environment (if you don't consider the environmental and social costs of the nuclear power stations) and very expensive to run, which costs are likely to continue to rise as we go forward. Gas heat is sort of a compromise, somewhat more expensive to install but not likely to be quite so expensive to run. And of course more insulation everywhere, and encouraging everyone to put on more woolly jumpers are all useful ways to reduce this year's costs of whichever fuel one uses.
Somehow these approaches all seem not really the best that we can do; they all are compromises, and I think the jury is out about the overall environmental comparisons between wood, gas and electricity. We've considered heat pumps, both water/ground sourced and air-sourced, and we may yet build such devices, but they would have to be very extensive and expensive to cover all of our heating needs - - we have more than 10 buildings and a few outbuildings to heat. We've been installing under-floor water heating pipes for decades now and all of our permanent buildings have under-floor heating capacity, which is well suited to a low-temperature system. But which fuel to use is still an open question.
My current front-running idea is to think about a really efficient large sized "log-gasification" boiler with a large water-storage tank as the main components of a district heating plan; one for the Mill area and another for the Farmhouse side of the Farm. The Mill area is the most needy, so we might start there. We have plenty of wood, and this year we're building a solar-heated wood-drying kiln so we get much better value from our firewood. If this works well it will feed in to the large wood-burning boiler idea. The boiler itself is just something off the shelf that one buys (atr great expense, of course) from this or that supplier - - it looks like the Scandinavians and the Germans have the best equipment available.
Alongside the boiler one needs a heat storage system, and that is likely to be a giant water storage tank, heavily insulated. There is such a tank in the science museum in Bristol (We the curious), and another one at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) in west Wales,. I will be looking at these two installations in the next month or so, and hoping I can come up with some useful evaluation. Both of these institutions publicised their facilities when they were built, about ten years ago, but nowadays there is almost no-one at either site that knows much about these tanks and the heating systems, a fact I find uncomfortably curious. Perhaps they are not as effective as they promised to be, or perhaps they are so efficient that their users now take them for granted. Either way i want to find out.
March 15, 2023: As I look around here throughout the early Spring two things always come to mind: 1) the wondrous event that nature does each year, everything popping up, fresh new growth in a thousand different ways; and 2) how brown everything is, and how many projects we have not yet finished that were supposed to be done before the first of April, and how much mess there is yet to be cleared up. I have sort of a love-hate relationship with the Farm, rather like having a teenage child I think: you love it, but it misbehaves quite a bit, and causes some trouble every now and then which is really irritating. Delivering seven lambs on a rainy windy night up the top of a field is "misbehaving" in my book; I do the 1 am to 3 am watch, and I have never liked that aspect of this job. But then there is the amazing "miracle" of seeing little lambs come out of their gooey plastic bags and within 3 or 4 minutes they are up on their feet and beginning to suckle. Much more immediately impressive than growing apples or acorns.
We have two areas on the Farm that are full of rubbish; the Mill yard and the upper car park just above where Russ has his wood workshop. The Mill yard is usually kept clear and tidy because lots of people walk through there and Frank keeps the landscape looking really good - - we've doubled the size of the flower borders this year, built a new set of steps that look very impressive, we've re-built about 20% of the original Mill House over the winter, and we've put in a new three-phase electricity supply with all new electric cables to each of the outbuildings and the flower polytunnel, and got rid of an eyesore of a power pole that was right in the middle of the yard. But none of those projects are completely finished - - the flower border is just bare earth and slightly muddy at this stage, the new set of steps are unusable because we've parked the cherry picker and other rubbish in front of them, the new rooms in the Mill House still have another two weeks to go and 40 years of rubbish from what has been parked there is now parked outside all over the yard, the all-new and much-increased-capacity electric cables are still on top of the ground instead of under it, waiting for the ditches to be dug and then filled, and the eyesore of a power pole is lying across the middle of the croquet lawn. In short the area is a mess. I keep saying to myself, "another two weeks and all of that will be cleared up", but I have been saying that for several weeks now.
The other very messy area is our "driveway upper car park", which is the main location for all the Farm's waste, waiting to be sorted and disposed of. About three months ago we had a very big (20-yard) skip parked there, filled it in two days, and for a brief time the car park looked like it was going to rise again from the ashes. But almost before the skip truck drove away there was yet more rubbish arriving, and now we are ready for another very large skip-load to be taken away. These maxi-skips cost about £1,000 each trip, so not to be relied on too often. Apart from the financial cost, I don't like the idea that the Farm produces several tonnes of land-fill waste each year, despite all of our efforts to recycle metal, glass, and plastics.
October 16, 2022: The plan is to write something every week or two, as things happen or are planned at the Farm. It turns out that writing a blog every now and then is not as easy as it sounds; although there are many things one might write about almost daily, actually finding the time and headspace to sit down and write something coherent, and then upload to this site, seems to be quite a challenge. Frequently when I set out to write something, "life" intervenes, in the form of a leaking water pipe or an electrical outage, or a sheep escaping from its carefully fenced paddock, or a lame horse, or a dislodged roof-tile that is letting the rain in. As I've been here for 46 years, I'm the one who knows where all the water pipes are, and how to fix all the different kinds of water leaks we have. Maintaining a 115 acre Farm with about 15 miles of hedges and 6 miles of water pipes and electrical cables, and keeping all the people and machinery running in good order, seems to take up more than 50 hours per week, so some things (such as writing an entry for this blog) get pushed down the priority list.
What's been happening on the Farm recently? Yesterday we had our annual Harvest Festival, and it was a great success - - very friendly vibe, everyone in good spirits and pleased to be out enjoying exceptionally sunny weather . The cake stall and the stone sculpting demonstrations were particularly well attended, and the two musical performances (the Band of Pilgrims and Choir-Jam) were much appreciated by all. A modest number of people and stallholders attended, and we are already planning for a much bigger event for 2023.
This Spring and summer has been challenging in several ways: the long stretch of dry weather has affected many o the crops, the "freedom from Covid restrictions" has encouraged a record number of weddings and other events to be hosted here, and the changing roles of some of the folks in our Farm community has meant extra time making sure everyone is on the same page. But all in all, a very good year.
The weather has meant a bumper year for apples and acorns; the apples are very prolific but a couple of weeks late, and generally the average size of apple is a bit smaller than usual. Oak trees on the other hand have gone into overdrive and produced an absolute record number of fat acorns - - even some of our very young trees (such as some 8-year-olds) were producing almost as many acorns as leaves. I guess this is a sign of stress for the trees, but from our point of view, a bonanza; we should have more than 3,000 little oaks to plant out in about three years, and many have started to sprout already, which is very quick.
We've had some success with our cut-flowers - - some doing well, others not so well. The fig trees suffered an early setback with dryness and a late frost, but have recovered very well and look quite healthy; unfortunately the second flush of figs are way too late in the season and will not ripen. Some of our grape vines have had their best production year yet, though others (the red grapes in particular) have not done so well. We sold quite a few pints of unpasteurised fresh-squeezed grape juice at our Harvest Festival.
We've a new ram at the Farm - - Cadwallader, who comes from the Forest of Dean. He will be serving our younger flock of ewes, and Warrior will continue his work with the older ewes. In April this year we had a large percentage of females and twins, better than the national average, so we seem to be getting the breeding right. Let's hope we have another good outcome next April. It will be interesting to see how the two rams perform ; we plot the history and genetic lines of all our sheep, and we cull out any that don't meet high specifications. All our sheep are pure-bred Wiltshire Horns, and we're hoping to do our bit to improve the national gene pool for this rare breed that has been brought back from near-extinction in recent years.
Jay-Jay, our most popular horse is now seen up in the village and round the lanes, in addition to giving rides to various children here on the Farm; he was a particular hit yesterday at the Harvest Festival, with Elora riding through the festival site and showing off the decorative livery she and her mum produced.
We've hired a professional veg manager, Lucas, in mid-summer, so we are looking forward to dramatic developments in the coming year, as we focus on veg to supply our Farm Shop in Bristol and our on-Farm catering activities. Early in the year we converted two old caravans that had seem better service in times past, one has become the "Radford Spirit" - our mobile drinks bar; and the other is our mobile Breakfast bar. These two were in service all summer long, and along with our mobile ice cream cart have proved their worth during the many events we've hosted in recent months.
And of course our shiny new tractor has been a mainstay for cultivation and other jobs, and is soon to be matched to a flail hedge cutter to keep all those miles of unruly brambles and blackthorns in check. Josh has ben indispensable as our no. 1 tractor driver, backed up by Pete, our no. 1 strimmer, slasher and weed basher.
Aaron has returned to work several days each fortnight on the Farm; he was first here 30 years ago as a very small boy along with his even smaller sister. The sister has produced Elora, who in addition to her equine talents has been doing grand service in the Piggery kitchen on weekends.
Another old friend just turned up out of the woodwork - - Pogul arrived to sell his homemade miso at the Harvest Festival yesterday. Pogul used to be a regular visitor 40 years ago as he captured some of our prized spring water to keep him healthy and happy.
Throughout the year we - - like everyone else - - have been affected by the questionable economy. Our Bristol shop has seen a downturn in trade, and on the Farm we're affected by the doubling of electricity, sharp rise in propane gas and water, and near doubling of animal feed prices. Because our activities are quite diversified we're somewhat protected from immediate shocks, but over the long run the economic pressure is on, and we also feel increasingly concerned about reducing our carbon footprint both now and for the future.. We will be installing wood-fired heat for most buildings on the Farm and directly reducing our consumption of gas and electricity. We'll be installing more solar panels, and a small waterwheel will go into service this winter to provide some "free" electricity at the Mill end of the Farm. We are now considering the possibility of building a district heating system that will be powered by wood gasification; this will require a very large hot water storage tank and quite a big investment, but our heating should be pennies per kilowatt going forward, and those miles of hedges grow tonnes of suitable firewood every year.
Let's hope the government (hmm, what government?) will come up with halfway sensible policies as it re-vamps the agricultural policies for the next years and decades.
under the wonderfully supportive guidance of this government we are now offered a whole range of possible subsidies generally on the theme of supporting environmental improvements, modernising our equipment and practices, and encouraging longer term benefits for the public and the earth. Being a very small farm we do the paperwork in the evenings and on Sundays - - we can't afford to employ staff to read through the hundreds of pages necessary to achieve these grants. So we slog though four or five hours of paperwork and we manage to get £150 for our efforts; and about 20 hours gives us perhaps £1,000 if we file additional paperwork a few months from now after having a one or two-hour inspection. so the reward is a bit better than minimum wage, but not really making a large contribution to our overall financial situation. Generally we fail to qualify for some of the grants because the funds are competitive - - so much is available for each region for each subject, and all the farmers bid for a share of the pot each year. Each farm scores some "points" which make their grant application more likely to succeed. In general one scores more points for making larger improvements in biodiversity. We tend to score somewhat low on several points because we already have a huge amount of biodiversity going on here - - big headlands, messy hedges, lots of old dead wood lying around, certified organic practices for nearly 50 years mean no pesticides or herbicides so we have lots of weeds. Permanent pastures yield a very wide mix of species all grouped under the label of "grass", and rotating animals and vegetable crops and composting everything builds fertility. All of which means we have lots of bugs and beasties and worms in the soil and hedgerows and that brings in lots of birds and other wild animals. so it is harder to achieve a big improvement in biodiversity. But still, it looks like some of the new ideas coming from DEFRA are constructive and useful.
I was part of a working group on agroecology a few years ago, and at the end of a year and a half of meetings and discussions between several small farmers and growers and other interested and informed people we came to the conclusion, surprisingly, that farm subsidies were not really the best way to design a food and landscape policy for a country. Although subsidies can be a useful stopgap in a transition period, they ultimately lead to a devalued food and landscape policy as the public does not need to understand the actual value of these fundamental aspects of our shared life. The big question then is how to bring the public to a better understanding of the actual human costs of these vital activities, and then how to drag the politicians into that "elevated" understanding. Unfortunately there are two very big hurdles: increasing the cost of food to members of the public when we are facing hard times financially is not likely to be popular; and denying businesses the right to maximise their profits in any way they can is not likely to be popular with big donors to the political parties. So although there have been big gains in public awareness about food issues and general environmental subjects in recent years, I am not overly confident there will be fundamental change in our approach to food any time soon. Currently 85% of the food consumed in this country go through the hands of the big 5 supermarkets, and they will never be willing partners to a fundamental reshaping of a really forward-looking national food policy. Supermarkets do not grow or produce food, or have any interest specifically in food other than the buying and selling of it to make a profit, and as long as large-scale transport is available at very low cost, they will always look to buy and sell quantities of goods from here to there if it makes a penny in the pound more profit than supporting local production, or healthy production, or biodiversity, or social well-being.
January 18, 2024: Here's a quick note to announce our Spring programme of Farm walks. We really like people visiting the Farm, and having interesting walks and talks on Saturdays and Sundays seems to be a popular activity. Generally the walks are gentle strolls, very family friendly, and about 2 hours or so. Well-behaved dogs or other pets are welcome; we're often graced with the presence of Ron, Bean, Jake or Jay-Jay, some of the four-legged residents here, and Fatty the bluejay who takes a great interest in visitors.
We have a FORAGING walk on two Sundays, March 17 and April 21 (click for more info)
and our annual SPRING WALKING TOUR on Saturday April 13, which includes a hearty soup and salad lunch.
Here on the farm we're somewhat insulated from world events; we don't import very many things, and we don't export anything, and most of us are too busy doing what we do to get heavily involved in protests, etc. But sometimes I wonder if our civilisation is just spinning out of control. The prime minister's Rwanda policy seems bonkers and his reversal on green energy commitments is really counterproductive, but not a patch on the choice of voters in Iowa yesterday. Two of us here were born and raised in the U.S. A., and one is from Iowa. It's a bit difficult to identify with people who give wholehearted support to crazy politicians and crazy public policies such as the gun culture in the U.S. and unlimited support for apartheid policies in Israel. We persevere with the ethics of organic farming , but one can't help but think there's a complete absence of ethical behaviour throughout our society. What then must we do? (Read Tolstoy's small book with that title.)
January 15, 2024: This is always an interesting month - - a slow start after the excessive foodfest at the end of December. By January all the turkey leftovers have been dispensed, one realises that one probably ate too much, there's no real pressure from the polytunnel or field crops, no events for a few months, apple tree pruning and oak tree planting to get on with, and time to finish a few the various projects that have got started over the last couple of months but not yet completed. There's a feeling that it's a new year, a new beginnings, and a time to correct all the mistakes and omissions of the previous year.
Well, that sort of relaxed optimism gets tested pretty quickly. The weather has caused some concern - - three buildings suffered some roof damage and our cherry picker decided yesterday that it didn't like minus 4 degrees yesterday so it stopped working; the trusty hair dryer on the pipes and patience until after lunch and we were back in business again, but with only two hours of daylight left, which meant we couldn't finish the job on the Dairy Barn roof. I've covered the hydraulic control parts of the machine with a tarpaulin tent, and installed a very small heater for the night which should make a difference, and hopefully we can get a full day's work up in the air tomorrow.
We've had a few customers who ask whether our organic produce is "free range" - - we don't tend to use that phrase on our labels. Why not use both descriptions? Well, here's why.
"Free range" or "Organic" ?
The main difference between these two labels is that "organic" has an agreed definition, legally binding, and regular annual inspections are carried out to check that the standards are being met. Also, the standards include all aspects of farming, land management and food production, not just "free range", whatever that might mean. "Free range" has no agreed legally binding standard - - anyone can use the phrase "free range" to mean whatever they say it means. So the RSPCA, the Red Tractor Scheme, and several other farm assurance schemes all have different definitions of "free range". That is about as useful as having no agreed standards for the MOT for your car; your local mechanic can just say, "yep, the brakes are good" without any reference to a national standard. "Organic" means the turkeys and laying hens and all the other animals kept on this land must have free access to pasture and must be managed so they are always outside. There's minimum sizes of pasture, minimum sizes for housing and perching, all of the feed and pasture must be certified organic so no routine antibiotics, no GMOs, no bee-killing pesticides or herbicides are used, and so on. You can read the standards for yourself (click here) and they are universally applied throughout this country and Europe.
One of the main issues that often gets lost in the free range advertising is whether the birds (or other livestock) actually spend much time out in a pasture, or whether they just have "access" to a pasture but frequently don't go out. Two months ago the RSPCA announced an improvement to their "standard" for poultry: the houses must have an outside veranda or covered porch. Why is this "upgrade" needed? Our birds, and generally all livestock kept under the organic system, really like dashing out as soon as the door is open - - they literally mob you at the door, and they rarely come in until the light fades, even though their cereal feed is always kept inside their houses. "Free range" birds often do not want to go out, they are more comfortable staying in, the system does not require them to go out, only to have "access" should they want to go out. The "veranda" upgrade is a sop to members of the public who might think this is an increase in the welfare for the birds. The question you want to ask is, "why do they need encouragement to go outside?" We have kept livestock under the organic system for 45 years and we have never had any birds choosing to stay inside whenever we open the pop-holes or doors; they always rush to get out as fast as possible, even on rainy days which they don't particularly like. And if you read further about "Free range" so-called standards you find that the animals must have some toys to keep them amused in their houses, and the keeper must take active steps to encourage the animals to go out.
There are other aspects of those systems that most people would agree are lacking. Overall I think the use of the "free range" label is purposely misleading; it is designed and implemented to create an image for consumers of high quality welfare while skirting past activities and practices that are fundamentally not "free range". In other words, the label is greenwash. If you really want to have food products and farming practices that are wholesome, healthy, good for the soil and the environment, stick to the "organic" label. It may not have such a catchy feel as "free range", but it is truly a farming MOT you can trust.
We've several new residents arriving in the next couple of weeks: a welder from up north, a builder from Wales, and a bookkeeper from the Midlands. We hope they will employ their trades here so the Farm can continue its upward growth, and this ageing farmer can get on with turning some intriguing ideas into reality: electricity from water power, and an irrigation reservoir, and district heating for all our buildings with biomass boilers, and a lift to the top floor of the Mill using water power, and more solar power, and one or two other things.
Decades ago (1977-1981) we grew wheat on long straw for thatching. The straw was much more valuable than the wheat (this is clay soil, not so good for high-class cereals), but we used to grind a few kilos every fortnight and bake about ten loaves a week. There is nothing so tasty and so difficult to find as fresh-baked bread from wheat ground only minutes before turning it into dough. I think the flour achieved a really special flavour, extra sweet and nutty, because it was stone ground and still warm from the grinding when we made that dough. We also made our own butter back then, and it is one of my fantasies to get back to those halcyon days, full of Jersey milk and cream, and buttermilk and whey strained from our yoghurt. I remember having an ongoing argument with various people at the Soil Association in the early days of the organic certification, about whey. It is very good for adding to cakes, bread, and other baked goods, it adds moisture and a delicious mildly sour flavour that blends very well. We used to maintain a certified organic kitchen and we would sell lunch things to the Soil Association headquarters in Bristol. But most had never heard of whey so it could not possibly be certified, and those that had thought it was just pigfeed. They were all too young to have heard of Little Miss Muffet.
October 30, 2023: So, Hallowe'en is tomorrow, a scary occasion for some. For me it's the last day for doing the Farm payroll, and quite a few other administrative jobs that are demanded at the end of every month. Definitely the scariest time of the month.
The sun is shining right now, the calm before Storm Ciaran hits in a couple of days. Fortunately all our marquees are now down except for one that is sheltered in our Dairy yard where we are pressing apple juice, but that's an easy one to tie down. The main risks for us is very heavy rain - - our small river (the Cam Brook) is called a "flash" river in that it goes up and down in a matter of two or three hours. If the river rises three metres will it wipe out the supports we have for the footbridge? If it rises more than three metres will it flood our polytunnels and turn all our salad and other greens into useless brown leaves? We're planning a big move of the polytunnels to higher ground in another year or two, but it's with a sense of loss; we've been growing veg in the Mill field (which is bordered by the river) for 47 years, and it feels like we're "giving up" on one of the foundation activities of the Farm. Still, I suppose that is progress, planning for the long-term future with more likelihood of flooding due to climate change.
October 21, 2023: It's TURKEY TIME once again at Radford Mill Farm. We've just opened our Turkey book so you can book yours on our website. Only two months to go before it's time to eat all those lovely tasty birds. and once again we've done our sums and we're selling our organic Norfolk Blacks at a lower price than the competition. They are not as cheap as the cheapest in the supermarkets, but if you want an organic turkey i think you wil find ours are at the top of the list, even though our website is not as wonderful to look at as some of the others. We're more concerned with what's inside the package, rather than the appearance on the outside.
October 15, 2023: It's been awhile. We've had a busy summer, some successes, some backwards steps, some changes in who is living here now. We've a coupe of new Farm residents, an old but elegant converted bus names "Bonnie Scotland" is now ensconced on the Railway embankment, and we've new somewhat elegant black railings up on the wall of the Farm cottage.
We're taking orders for our Christmas turkeys, from today ! Have a look at our website for details.
this has been a bumper year for acorns; we've collected a few thousand, and they are happily sprouting away I will write a longer treatise on acorns soon; the subject is one of my passions (or obsessions). Watch this space.
Our market stall in Frome has brought up an interesting point for discussion: some customers have queried whether our eggs (and other things) are "free range" , because the label just says "organic", and does not actually say "free range". Clearly thee is some confusion over what the various labels mean.
"FREE RANGE" - - the phrase brings to mind an image of animals roaming around in beautiful lush green pastures, having a happy time as a result of the excellent management by the farmer. It's what many, probably most people would like to think about how animals should be reared. But what does it actually mean? The reality is that there is no agreed standard for "free range", it is whatever the person publishing the label wants it to mean. The RSPCA have one definition, the Red Tractor scheme has another description, and the Quality Standard Mark has yet a third set of ideas. There are several other schemes, each of which publishes beguiling words that their members can use on labels and in brochures, all designed to help producers increase their sales. The motivation for all of these schemes with their wonderfully reassuring descriptions is to increase sales by making the producer's less than perfect systems sound somewhat more desirable than they actually are in practice. Generally the definitions emphasise that the animals are free to leave heir houses or barns and wander around in a field somewhere nearby. There is no comment on some other aspects of animal welfare, or whether the animals actually do go outside every day, or do they choose to stay in their houses. In some of the systems there's an emphasis on adding features to the housing and pasture to entertain the animals so they don't get bored and act destructively. The requirements for housing space, feed, bedding material, density and size of flock or herd - - all of these "welfare" and husbandry essentials are either not mentioned, or not emphasised, and each of the assurance schemes have very different requirements. Each producer can choose which scheme will cause the least extra cost and still allow some popular reassuring words to be printed on the label. Livestock produced under "free range" systems are NOT required to be outside, nor is the pasture required to be green.
"ORGANIC" - - is the ONLY high-quality assurance scheme that actually has legally defined standards. (N.B. the "bio-dynamic" system is even more stringent and specialised than organic certification.) Organic producers are inspected at least once per year, very exacting records are scrutinised, and the standards cover virtually every aspect of husbandry and farm management: staff training, prevention of routine use of antibiotics, the condition and sizes of housing and pastures,, feed quality standards and no GMO's, overall veterinary health plan, overall declarations of everything brought onto the farm or taken off the farm, and so on. The motivation behind the organic certification is to maximise the animal husbandry aspects, protect and enrich the soil, increase bio-diversity throughout the farm holding, and minimise or eradicate the use of obnoxious substances and environmental degradation. Under the ORGANIC system all livestock are REQUIRED to be outside in green pastures for most of the days of their lives.; that is free ranging in practice, not just in advertising words.
October 14, 2023: We get asked, now and then, why the price of ORGANIC food is so much higher than the price of non-organic food, now that we are suffering from large price rises for nearly everything. Well, I could say, you get what you pay for, but that would be a bit glib. Why is organic food more expensive? And the parallel question - - why is non-organic food in the supermarkets so much lower? These are big questions, vey often widely misunderstood.
The quick answer is that food grown to organic standards is more expensive to produce primarily because of the cost of reducing weeds without pesticides and herbicides. The first year I was at Radford Mill Farm (1976) we grew a wheat crop which in the middle of May following a heavy rain was rapidly taken over by a bonanza of fat-hen. We could see that within a few days the fat-hen would be towering over the wheat and the crop would be lost. So we took the decision to use a weed herbicide, and I bought a back-pack sprayer, mixed up the recommended concentration and spent a half-day hand spraying what looked like many litres of water all over our 4 acre field; and then we watched. The only thing that happened was the fat-hen kept getting taller, until the fifth day. Then the tops of the fat-hen all started bending over, and on the sixth day the stems were getting shorter, and by the tenth day there was nothing left in the field other than a very vigorous crop of wheat - - not a blade of any weed in the whole field. it was a miraculous testimony to the power of weed-killers. We produced a record crop of long straw for thatching that year, but we also joined the Soil Association the next year and have never used any herbicides since. I often remember that experience, how a one-litre bottle of poison can protect a four-acre field, and how time-consuming and incomplete our organic weeding methods are. We're committed to the organic system because it is clearly the right way to farm; but it is not the most profitable thing to do, not by a long shot.. so although we charge higher prices for our produce, we also pay considerably more for the labour to grow everything.
If organic production was equally profitable as conventional methods, we would see many more organic farmers, instead of the measly 2.8% of U.K. farmland now under organic certification. Most European countries have more than 10% of their farmland converted to organic, with several of the larger countries (Austria -27%, Estonia and Sweden - above 20%, Italy and the Czech Republic above 15%, etc.). The U.K. ranks about 48 out of 55 developed western countries. That's not a very enviable record.
Now that I have warmed up on the subject of food pricing I will continue on with a long rant about the iniquities and imbalances in the supply of our food.
The fundamental question is: how does anyone figure out the price of a product? There is not an easy answer here. When I was about 8 years old I was selling lemonade with my sister on a street corner that had a traffic light. When the cars all stopped for the red light, we would sell one or two or maybe three small paper cups of fresh (and very tasty) lemonade and drivers would happily pay us 5 cents for each cup. (This was in Los Angeles where it is pretty hot most days, and it was about 70 years ago when 5 cents was a good bit of pocket money for a small child.) Needless to say we made quite a bit of money for a few hours' work on a Saturday afternoon. And the cost of the product? Well, our mother provided the lemons and the sugar and the table, and we had to pay for the paper cups which were about 10 cents for 25 of them. Mother never claimed for the her costs. So my sister and I were free to split the $2-3 we would collect, and we only had to reimburse Mother about 20 cents for that day's paper cups. I guess that's where I learned about selling direct to the public. But now that I am a bit older I realise that I really didn't understand the actual cost of a cup of that lemonade. Nowadays we pay about £1 for 1,800- spinach seeds, and we get about 75% germination. Each full-grown plant produces about 1 kg of saleable spinach, compared to a seed cost of almost nothing. How much should we charge? Well, obviously we have some costs - - there's water (the Farm water bill is about £2,500 per year), the tractors and other tools for cultivating, the labour costs to sow, weed, harvest, pack, label and transport the spinach packets. All of those costs are impossible to calculate on a 1-plant basis, and there are other hidden costs - - rates, taxes, admin, mixing and spreading compost, processing the farm yard manure to make the compost, and so on. Clearly the calculation is not practical, so we don't even try to do it; we sell our products at "what the market will bear" - - that is, we look at organic spinach being sold by other people and we decide to price ours either just a bit higher, or just a bit lower, than the average of our competitors, depending on whether we have a lot of spinach to sell, or not so much. .Nearly all of our Farm produce is sold to final consumers; we don't have any supermarket contracts or other big wholesale arrangements. So we take a gamble and price our spinach this summer at £8.00 per kg. "The market" dictates how much we can can charge - - if we raise our price much above the average, we don't sell so much. At the end of the year we count our pennies, add up all our yearly costs, pay a small bonus to our workers if we've made a profit, and soldier on to the next year with another 200 kg of spinach.
Nowadays the price of food is largely set by the main supermarkets; the big five sell about 75% of all the groceries in this country. Generally speaking they are notorious for giving the food producers very low prices, which means only ever larger companies can successfully deal with supermarkets. They use "big data" to analyse costs all over the world, customer preferences, competitor prices, marketing exercises that sway customer choices, and so on. And their reported profits are in the billions each year. They have identified "organic" as a niche area for pricey foods - - just enough customers will pay considerably higher prices for that label to warrant the shelf space. And they have to make some offering, because Lidl in particular has consistently offered a few organic items at very low prices, as a device to buy loyalty from better off customers.
Our local MP, Jacob Rees-Mogg has raised the question of cheaper food by allowing free trade to prevail over protective tariffs. His main example is beef: 200,000 tonnes is imported every year from European sources but the prices are relatively high, so Rees-Mogg argues we should allow Australian beef in without tariff restrictions, which would replace that 200,000 tonnes with lower costs for the consumer. He argues that it would not affect British farmers, which is a completely untrue notion - - if the price of beef falls due to lower-cost imports that is bound to reflect badly on beef farmers here. Rees-Mogg states this would be good for local farmers because it would make them more efficient, which is analogous to saying if you reduce the number of wheels on a care or a bicycle it will be more efficient. He completely fails to address the question of higher animal welfare standards in this country compared to low-cost Australia or Thailand, where hormones are routinely used for growth promoting, and other practices. it is a classic case of ideology over intelligence.
But such is his eloquence, and the poor level of debate and curiosity about the subject, that his thesis that lower priced beef would be good for consumers and good for the industry all sounds somewhat believable. Generally I think tariffs and protectionism are not desirable arrangements, but there should be clear and available information about the quality of a product including its environmental and social costs. Allowing low-standard products to mix with higher-standard products where the main observable difference is price is a big mistake. We need honest, meaningful labelling on all our foodstuffs and advertising, meaningful standards that mitigate against "greenwash" and misleading statements from some of the "quality assurance" schemes, and a society-wide educational programme about food quality and marketing gimmicks. At the moment, how easy is it to discover that Australian beef standards allow growth hormones, imported chicken from Thailand and the United states is often chlorine-washed due to low processing standards, and many food items are labelled in very misleading ways. If consumers were actually given full and honest information about their foodstuffs there would be a dramatic change in sales of low-quality imports.
Remember Edwina Currie's remark about nearly all laying hens in the UK had salmonella infection? Within a day nationwide egg sales fell through the floor, except for "organic" eggs, which were thought to be proof against such disease-carrying characteristics. In our Shop our sales tripled of unpackaged eggs which were displayed on cardboard trays. When asked, most of our egg customers thought the ones on the trays were fresher and more healthy and therefore more free of salmonella, and most thought the organic certification was a safeguard against bacteria. All of those opinions were not actually true, except Ms. Currie's statement: it is true that nearly all laying hens in this country and elsewhere carry the salmonella bacteria. it is not true that the eggs displayed on our trays were fresher, nor that organic certification means free from bacteria. But such is the level of poor public awareness about the food industry, nearly everybody believed the rumours and habits changed, overnight. We were happy to sell out all our eggs at a higher price, but not happy that there was widespread misunderstanding about some basic food facts.
Nowadays the advertising machines of very big companies tell you that "free range" as guaranteed by the Red Tractor scheme is the highest standard of animal welfare. That is not true, but it is a common belief among many people.
March 26, 2023: Yesterday we had our first Farm Walk of the year, which gets us in the mood for events that are coming up, welcoming many people who come to visit the Farm during the year. After "slumbering" for six months with very few visitors, it is always an inspiring occasion to see a group of mostly strangers ooh and ahh as they come across the footbridge and enter the Circle Garden. (One scurrilous old-timer commented "The oohs and aahs are because the bridge is really scary") Yesterday the group joined us for a walk, talks, lots of questions, and two flavours of delicious soup with bread, along with some homegrown apple juice and chutney. The next walk will be in the summer,
March 25, 2023: The new BIG environmental issue for the Farm is this: what is the best way to provide space heat and hot water for the Farm? Currently we use mostly LPG gas, and electric heat throughout most areas of the Farm, though a few of the dwelling spaces have small wood stoves. The Farm produces several tonnes of firewood each year from our 15 miles or so of hedges, and we have the capacity to cut it and haul it and of course everyone likes a wood fire and a glowing wood stove, right? The problem is that the latest advice from various official sources (e.g. the government) suggests that wood stoves are environmental black spots producing greenhouse gases and dirty-air particulates. Add to that the difficulties and expense of installing modern high-efficiency wood stoves and finding certified installers to do such work..
Electric heat is really quick, cheap and simple to install, seemingly good for the environment (if you don't consider the environmental and social costs of the nuclear power stations) and very expensive to run, which costs are likely to continue to rise as we go forward. Gas heat is sort of a compromise, somewhat more expensive to install but not likely to be quite so expensive to run. And of course more insulation everywhere, and encouraging everyone to put on more woolly jumpers are all useful ways to reduce this year's costs of whichever fuel one uses.
Somehow these approaches all seem not really the best that we can do; they all are compromises, and I think the jury is out about the overall environmental comparisons between wood, gas and electricity. We've considered heat pumps, both water/ground sourced and air-sourced, and we may yet build such devices, but they would have to be very extensive and expensive to cover all of our heating needs - - we have more than 10 buildings and a few outbuildings to heat. We've been installing under-floor water heating pipes for decades now and all of our permanent buildings have under-floor heating capacity, which is well suited to a low-temperature system. But which fuel to use is still an open question.
My current front-running idea is to think about a really efficient large sized "log-gasification" boiler with a large water-storage tank as the main components of a district heating plan; one for the Mill area and another for the Farmhouse side of the Farm. The Mill area is the most needy, so we might start there. We have plenty of wood, and this year we're building a solar-heated wood-drying kiln so we get much better value from our firewood. If this works well it will feed in to the large wood-burning boiler idea. The boiler itself is just something off the shelf that one buys (atr great expense, of course) from this or that supplier - - it looks like the Scandinavians and the Germans have the best equipment available.
Alongside the boiler one needs a heat storage system, and that is likely to be a giant water storage tank, heavily insulated. There is such a tank in the science museum in Bristol (We the curious), and another one at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) in west Wales,. I will be looking at these two installations in the next month or so, and hoping I can come up with some useful evaluation. Both of these institutions publicised their facilities when they were built, about ten years ago, but nowadays there is almost no-one at either site that knows much about these tanks and the heating systems, a fact I find uncomfortably curious. Perhaps they are not as effective as they promised to be, or perhaps they are so efficient that their users now take them for granted. Either way i want to find out.
March 15, 2023: As I look around here throughout the early Spring two things always come to mind: 1) the wondrous event that nature does each year, everything popping up, fresh new growth in a thousand different ways; and 2) how brown everything is, and how many projects we have not yet finished that were supposed to be done before the first of April, and how much mess there is yet to be cleared up. I have sort of a love-hate relationship with the Farm, rather like having a teenage child I think: you love it, but it misbehaves quite a bit, and causes some trouble every now and then which is really irritating. Delivering seven lambs on a rainy windy night up the top of a field is "misbehaving" in my book; I do the 1 am to 3 am watch, and I have never liked that aspect of this job. But then there is the amazing "miracle" of seeing little lambs come out of their gooey plastic bags and within 3 or 4 minutes they are up on their feet and beginning to suckle. Much more immediately impressive than growing apples or acorns.
We have two areas on the Farm that are full of rubbish; the Mill yard and the upper car park just above where Russ has his wood workshop. The Mill yard is usually kept clear and tidy because lots of people walk through there and Frank keeps the landscape looking really good - - we've doubled the size of the flower borders this year, built a new set of steps that look very impressive, we've re-built about 20% of the original Mill House over the winter, and we've put in a new three-phase electricity supply with all new electric cables to each of the outbuildings and the flower polytunnel, and got rid of an eyesore of a power pole that was right in the middle of the yard. But none of those projects are completely finished - - the flower border is just bare earth and slightly muddy at this stage, the new set of steps are unusable because we've parked the cherry picker and other rubbish in front of them, the new rooms in the Mill House still have another two weeks to go and 40 years of rubbish from what has been parked there is now parked outside all over the yard, the all-new and much-increased-capacity electric cables are still on top of the ground instead of under it, waiting for the ditches to be dug and then filled, and the eyesore of a power pole is lying across the middle of the croquet lawn. In short the area is a mess. I keep saying to myself, "another two weeks and all of that will be cleared up", but I have been saying that for several weeks now.
The other very messy area is our "driveway upper car park", which is the main location for all the Farm's waste, waiting to be sorted and disposed of. About three months ago we had a very big (20-yard) skip parked there, filled it in two days, and for a brief time the car park looked like it was going to rise again from the ashes. But almost before the skip truck drove away there was yet more rubbish arriving, and now we are ready for another very large skip-load to be taken away. These maxi-skips cost about £1,000 each trip, so not to be relied on too often. Apart from the financial cost, I don't like the idea that the Farm produces several tonnes of land-fill waste each year, despite all of our efforts to recycle metal, glass, and plastics.
October 16, 2022: The plan is to write something every week or two, as things happen or are planned at the Farm. It turns out that writing a blog every now and then is not as easy as it sounds; although there are many things one might write about almost daily, actually finding the time and headspace to sit down and write something coherent, and then upload to this site, seems to be quite a challenge. Frequently when I set out to write something, "life" intervenes, in the form of a leaking water pipe or an electrical outage, or a sheep escaping from its carefully fenced paddock, or a lame horse, or a dislodged roof-tile that is letting the rain in. As I've been here for 46 years, I'm the one who knows where all the water pipes are, and how to fix all the different kinds of water leaks we have. Maintaining a 115 acre Farm with about 15 miles of hedges and 6 miles of water pipes and electrical cables, and keeping all the people and machinery running in good order, seems to take up more than 50 hours per week, so some things (such as writing an entry for this blog) get pushed down the priority list.
What's been happening on the Farm recently? Yesterday we had our annual Harvest Festival, and it was a great success - - very friendly vibe, everyone in good spirits and pleased to be out enjoying exceptionally sunny weather . The cake stall and the stone sculpting demonstrations were particularly well attended, and the two musical performances (the Band of Pilgrims and Choir-Jam) were much appreciated by all. A modest number of people and stallholders attended, and we are already planning for a much bigger event for 2023.
This Spring and summer has been challenging in several ways: the long stretch of dry weather has affected many o the crops, the "freedom from Covid restrictions" has encouraged a record number of weddings and other events to be hosted here, and the changing roles of some of the folks in our Farm community has meant extra time making sure everyone is on the same page. But all in all, a very good year.
The weather has meant a bumper year for apples and acorns; the apples are very prolific but a couple of weeks late, and generally the average size of apple is a bit smaller than usual. Oak trees on the other hand have gone into overdrive and produced an absolute record number of fat acorns - - even some of our very young trees (such as some 8-year-olds) were producing almost as many acorns as leaves. I guess this is a sign of stress for the trees, but from our point of view, a bonanza; we should have more than 3,000 little oaks to plant out in about three years, and many have started to sprout already, which is very quick.
We've had some success with our cut-flowers - - some doing well, others not so well. The fig trees suffered an early setback with dryness and a late frost, but have recovered very well and look quite healthy; unfortunately the second flush of figs are way too late in the season and will not ripen. Some of our grape vines have had their best production year yet, though others (the red grapes in particular) have not done so well. We sold quite a few pints of unpasteurised fresh-squeezed grape juice at our Harvest Festival.
We've a new ram at the Farm - - Cadwallader, who comes from the Forest of Dean. He will be serving our younger flock of ewes, and Warrior will continue his work with the older ewes. In April this year we had a large percentage of females and twins, better than the national average, so we seem to be getting the breeding right. Let's hope we have another good outcome next April. It will be interesting to see how the two rams perform ; we plot the history and genetic lines of all our sheep, and we cull out any that don't meet high specifications. All our sheep are pure-bred Wiltshire Horns, and we're hoping to do our bit to improve the national gene pool for this rare breed that has been brought back from near-extinction in recent years.
Jay-Jay, our most popular horse is now seen up in the village and round the lanes, in addition to giving rides to various children here on the Farm; he was a particular hit yesterday at the Harvest Festival, with Elora riding through the festival site and showing off the decorative livery she and her mum produced.
We've hired a professional veg manager, Lucas, in mid-summer, so we are looking forward to dramatic developments in the coming year, as we focus on veg to supply our Farm Shop in Bristol and our on-Farm catering activities. Early in the year we converted two old caravans that had seem better service in times past, one has become the "Radford Spirit" - our mobile drinks bar; and the other is our mobile Breakfast bar. These two were in service all summer long, and along with our mobile ice cream cart have proved their worth during the many events we've hosted in recent months.
And of course our shiny new tractor has been a mainstay for cultivation and other jobs, and is soon to be matched to a flail hedge cutter to keep all those miles of unruly brambles and blackthorns in check. Josh has ben indispensable as our no. 1 tractor driver, backed up by Pete, our no. 1 strimmer, slasher and weed basher.
Aaron has returned to work several days each fortnight on the Farm; he was first here 30 years ago as a very small boy along with his even smaller sister. The sister has produced Elora, who in addition to her equine talents has been doing grand service in the Piggery kitchen on weekends.
Another old friend just turned up out of the woodwork - - Pogul arrived to sell his homemade miso at the Harvest Festival yesterday. Pogul used to be a regular visitor 40 years ago as he captured some of our prized spring water to keep him healthy and happy.
Throughout the year we - - like everyone else - - have been affected by the questionable economy. Our Bristol shop has seen a downturn in trade, and on the Farm we're affected by the doubling of electricity, sharp rise in propane gas and water, and near doubling of animal feed prices. Because our activities are quite diversified we're somewhat protected from immediate shocks, but over the long run the economic pressure is on, and we also feel increasingly concerned about reducing our carbon footprint both now and for the future.. We will be installing wood-fired heat for most buildings on the Farm and directly reducing our consumption of gas and electricity. We'll be installing more solar panels, and a small waterwheel will go into service this winter to provide some "free" electricity at the Mill end of the Farm. We are now considering the possibility of building a district heating system that will be powered by wood gasification; this will require a very large hot water storage tank and quite a big investment, but our heating should be pennies per kilowatt going forward, and those miles of hedges grow tonnes of suitable firewood every year.
Let's hope the government (hmm, what government?) will come up with halfway sensible policies as it re-vamps the agricultural policies for the next years and decades.
