From LEAF Farmer Duncan Farrington
February Newsletter
Christmas festivities seem a distant memory,
the snow has melted, and the countryside is left with a post winter hangover, with everything looking wet, cold and miserable after the winter period. The ground is saturated, the crops look lifeless and ravaged by the weeks of cold weather, as well as the rabbits and pigeons that have fed on them, livestock animals are still in their winter accommodation on their winter rations, and wild birds appear fed up and hungry hoping to get through the next few weeks alive.
Hang on a minute though, things are not that bad. Have you noticed the days are getting longer? Then on the days when the sun shines, things look so much better; during February everything will start waking up, and spring will be just around the corner. The ditches we have been cleaning out over the last couple of years are flowing with water from saturated fields, helping them dry out quicker and be ready to warm up when conditions allow.
Later in the month we will get ready to plant our spring beans once conditions allow, and then before we know it, the spring workload of another growing season will be upon us. Until then we are still busy with the winter jobs on the list, for example we have recently been doing our bit of recycling, by sorting out any left over bits of scrap metal that accumulate around a farmyard, and taking these to the scrap metal merchants. We have also been busy with training courses and audits, in Health and Safety regulations; chainsaw use; slug pellet use; meetings with our agronomist to discuss plans for the coming season’s crop management; soil nutrition and management, and so on.I have so far had a very helpful discussion with the RSBP on the target species they would like us to concentrate on, and some examples of how best we can achieve this. Now I will talk with the other interested parties to discuss how we can offer some real benefits to our surrounding environment, before a final action plan is put in place to start working on. The result I am hoping to achieve, is both a more sustainable farming output, combined with a more sustainable environmental and conservation output. The paperwork and negotiations aside, this is truly modern agriculture at its best. I have a good idea of the integrated whole farm approach I would like to achieve, but to get there takes time in pulling all the different aspects together. However some cynics may say this is just the sort of thing Government ministers are again talking about, of trying to increase food production, whilst lowering environmental impact. It seems like the usual New Year resolution speeches are coming out to get everyone feeling good, before the reality of a general election hits everyone later in the spring, and the inevitable belt tightening that will affect us all afterwards for some time to come.
