Today is the first day of the first month of what we in the West call the Year of the Rabbit, but in Japan is the Year of the Metal Hare. I’m celebrating it with my daughter Jo as the guest of friends in their apartment in Fukuoka. None of the superstitions relating to the Asian zodiac are believed in by our hosts, but they enjoy performing the rituals which they have observed since childhood. The first is to scatter beans whilst chanting “Demons out”. The second (in which I participated with enthusiasm, as it involved eating) is to eat a long roll of sushi in one go, without pausing and, especially, without talking. If you do pause or talk you are condemned to a year of bad luck. All this must be done whilst facing south-east, as each of the animals in the zodiac has a direction, and the metal hare’s is south-east. According to our hosts I performed the task flawlessly, and so if I do happen to suffer from bad luck this year, I won’t be able to blame it on the metal hare.
Archive for the ‘Farm’ Category
Thursday, February 3rd, 2011
The Year of the Metal Hare
Thursday, January 27th, 2011
The farm is sold at auction
The farm has been hemorrhaging money. When I bought the farm five years ago my bank manager asked me whether it would “wash its face”. “Of course”, I replied “once I get the hang of things”. The truth must be that I never quite did get the hang of things because the more we did, the more money we lost. Here are two examples of the difference between the dream and reality.
The dream: To keep our pigs outdoors and never subject them to the indignity of being penned inside.
The reality: The pigs became wild. I sold some to a farmer who keeps wild boars and he said my Middle Whites were the wildest creatures he had ever encountered, perfectly capable of jumping a four foot fence.
The dream: To keep a herd of rare-breed Galloway cattle.
The reality: An official from Defra turns up to test the cattle for TB. Two of the cattle show a positive reaction. The official immediately condemns them to death. He ticks a wrong box on the form, so that when they arrive at the abattoir they have to be thrown in the bin. Tests later show that the cattle were perfectly healthy all along. The official is uninterested in offering either an apology or adequate compensation. This has happened twice.
It has been a pleasure working with farmers in the area who, over the generations, have developed a cynicism and resilience which suits them to this life. Today, Ian Walker of Harrison Coward very skillfully extracted a good price for the farm. In the end it has washed its face. I’m left with my Wagyu cattle and a few pigs- and a little more cynicism and realism than I had when I started.
Saturday, January 22nd, 2011
John Seymour- The Fat of the Land
Is it possible to give it all up and subsist on five acres? So many people, including me, longingly dream about it- but John Seymour did it. His book, The Fat of the Land begins with this paragraph:
“Here we all sit, Sally my wife, Jane who is five and a half, Ann who is two and a half, and Kate who is seven (days), a mile from a hard road, with no electricity, no gas, no deliveries of anything at all except coal, provided we take at least a ton, and mail, and the post woman gets specially paid for coming here. And we are self-supporting for every kind of food excepting tea, coffee, flour, sugar and salt. We have no car- we drive about with a pony and cart.”
He tells the story of how he rented an unused thatched cottage from a wealthy landowner in a remote part of Suffolk. His landlord said: “I’ll let you have the two cottages, the out-houses, the field, in all about five acres, for ten pounds a year- provided that you keep it in repair”.
The rent of ten pounds a year reveals that this wasn’t yesterday- in fact it was 1957. At that time there were lots of half abandoned houses all over the countryside which weren’t worth the cost of doing up. Everyone wanted to live in towns.
It’s all different now of course- cottages in the country can’t be had for £10 a year or at any price which anyone can afford. However, I was struck by the parallels between 1950’s England and present day Japan. In Japan the countryside is being abandoned for the towns and there are lots of remote houses, with land, that can be had for a song. This link is to a video, aptly entitled “The Slow Life in Japan” about an Australian man and his Japanese wife who were given a farmhouse and land rent-free in return for their cultivating the land- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaCyPHTLY_o So the dream may be possible after all, if not in rural Suffolk any more.
Sunday, January 16th, 2011
Countryfile
Countryfile got in touch with me after seeing this blog. They wanted to know if I could really survive without using a supermarket. Good God, is it really so outlandish? I’m sure that Grange isn’t the only small town with no supermarket, but lots of good independent small shops. Living in Grange makes it easy for me to keep my pledge and I was chuffed that Countryfile did some filming in Grange to prove the point.
After Grange we went with Adam Henson to the farm, where I introduced him to my Wagyu catle. It was perishingly cold, but in typical Countryfile fashion we did some cooking outdoors, on a barbeque. Adam tried some Wagyu steak and was suitably impressed – I only hope that mine will turn out to be as good.
After the screening tonight I got an email from Peter Gott, who is well known for teaching Jimmy Doherty to raise pigs- “having seen you on the telly I am reassured that like me you have a wonderful body for radio!”. Never a truer word.
Sunday, December 12th, 2010
Wagyus- Loving the Cumbrian Winter
When I did my research on the Wagyus in the province of Kobe in Japan I found them housed in barns in temperatures of more than 100 degrees fahrenheit. Each barn had three enormous fans whose purpose I thought was to cool down the animals until I was told by my Japanese hosts that they were there to blow away the stench of the ammonia, caused by the animal’s urine, which, were it not for the fans would be overpowering in the heat.
Conditions in Cumbria are completely different from those in Kobe. For a start, we have grass on which the cattle can feed- in Kobe they are given grain, which is imported from Canada or Australia (some carbon footprint!). In Kobe the cattle are kept in the barns year round, three to a stall, whereas ours have the freedom of the fells. They run free with the Highlanders, the Galloways and the Blue Greys, all of which are hardy and don’t need shelter whatever the weather. We didn’t know how the Wagyus would take to the great outdoors so I was pleased to see them thriving outside in the bleak midwinter. They have a barn in which they can shelter, but they seem happy to remain with their pals on the fells, whatever the weather.
Friday, December 10th, 2010
The Bee’s Weather Forecast
Which makes the better weather forecaster- a bee or the Met Office? Last year Gloria Havenband, an amateur beekeeper from Derbyshire, noticed that the entrances to her bee hives had been blocked with very dense beeswax, much thicker than is normal. Her bees, she said, had prepared impregnable defences against wind rain and snow- an unusually harsh winter must be on its way. Not at all, said the Met Office, we can expect a mild winter. We all know who was right.
This year, Mrs Havenband noticed that her bees had once again protected their hives with thick layers of beeswax. Once again, their powers of forecasting have proved to be much more reliable than the Met Office’s £30 million computer. Perhaps they should but a few bee hives on the roof of their computer room.
Thursday, December 9th, 2010
Bond’s Ford Thunderbird
My Ford Thunderbird is lying there wrapped up for the winter, forlornly waiting for me to get round to restoring her. I will do so one day, when my life slows down sufficiently. In the meantime I was intrigued to learn that Ian Fleming was an enthusiastic Ford Thunderbird owner. Here’s what he wrote about his Thunderbird for the Spectator:
“True, it isn’t a precision instrument like English sports cars but that I count a virtue. The mechanical margin of error in its construction is wider. Everything has a solid feel. The engine, a huge, adapted low-revving Mercury V8 of 5-litre capacity, never gives the impression of stress or strain. When, on occasion, you can do a hundred without danger of going off the edge of this small island, you have not only the knowledge that you have 20mph in reserve, but the feel of it. As for acceleration, when the two extra barrels of the 4-barrel carburettor come in, at around 3000 revs, it is a real thump in the back.”
According to Alan Judd, who now writes about motoring in the Spectator, Ian Fleming’s wife, Ann, complained to Evelyn Waugh that the car’s acceleration was so fierce that it gave her “Thunderbird Neck”. No doubt she emerged from the ride shaken, not stirred.
Wednesday, December 8th, 2010
The Evil that Supermarkets Do
One of the reasons I started to rear my own meat is that I wanted to be sure what I was eating. Not only that, I wanted to be sure that the animal had been well looked after and that it met a decent end to its life. Last winter I had the rather gruesome experience of following one of my bullocks through the abattoir (see 30th December 2009 for a video of the event – http://www.slow-life.co.uk/2009/12/30/a-kiss-before-dying/) but by the end of it I was reasonably happy that the animal had not suffered unduly. The key to a peaceful end is the fact that the animal is stunned in advance of its being killed- in this way the animal will not suffer any pain. For this reason pre-stunning is a legal requirement in British abattoirs. Unless, that is, you say that God told you to do otherwise. In that case you can get away with slitting the animal’s throat, after which it will remain conscious, screaming, until it drowns in its own blood up to six minutes later. According to the Farm Animal Welfare Council “slaughter without pre-stunning causes very significant pain and distress”.
Woody Allen said that religious rules which govern eating weren’t so much commandments as “advice on how to eat safely in Jerusalem” and its no real business of ours if those who are daft enough to adhere to the dietary requirements of a primitive society keep their habits to themselves. But it’s very much our business if the meat from animals which are killed in this way are routinely supplied to our supermarkets without being labelled as such and without the customer being told. Tesco and others supply this meat as a matter of course and never let on to their customers when they do. They are guilty of many other shameful practices, but this is one of the worst.
Friday, December 3rd, 2010
Plat de Fruits de Mer
When, in 1993, Terence Conran opened his first restaurant, Quaglinos, he almost re-invented modern dining in London. He created a sensation with his show-stopping crustacea altar, which took up one whole wall of the restaurant. The piece de resistance on the menu was the plat de fruits de mer, which was based on the famous dish served in the French Riviera and served two at a minimum. But I always found that Conran’s offering, which gave as much emphasis to profit as to style, contained too many fillers, such as winkles and mussels and not enough of the luxury items. If you want the genuine article in London, the place to go is La Poissonnerie de L’Avenue, which was founded in 1962, and has been the best fish restaurant ever since. There, the plat de fruit de mer contains a whole lobster, lots of oysters and best of all, enormous Norfolk crab claws. The price (for two) is £76, which is no more than you’d pay at a Conran restaurant but is twice the quality.
Tuesday, November 30th, 2010
The Law of Unintended Consequences- Killing our bat population
Well meaning laws sometimes have unintended consequences, which entirely defeat their intended purpose. We had a splendid example of this this week when 25 pensioners, some in their 80’s, lost their jobs at Longleat because their employers were worried that they would lose the right to dismiss them when a new law comes into force next year.
The Wildlife Act, which is intended to protect bat roosts, has a similar effect. Nowadays, you can only get planning permission for alterations to a listed building if the application is accompanied by a Bat Survey and a Mitigation Strategy Report, which determines whether bats will be disturbed by the building work. The financial consequences of the survey have been described by Mr John Orchard, who played the game and paid for a survey. The survey found that no bats roosted in his house, but a single pipistrelle was seen to enter the building during the survey. The sight of that solitary visitor necessitated further work and supervision resulting a in a total bill of more than £5,000.
This is idiocy in anyone’s book. The consequence is that the Wildlife Act guarantees the destruction of many of the roosts which it is designed to protect. Many people, frightened by the lunatic expense which may be involved, make sure that all evidence of bats is removed before any survey is undertaken.