If farms have been part of your life in even a minor way you will instantly connect with a description of a lobby where you kick off your wellies next to a washing machine milling away constantly, a farm kitchen where the dogs and the bits of straw creep in to create that farmy Rayburn fug, with cups of tea maybe and worn but comfy chairs and green boiler suits giving off a strangely reassuring smell of animal manure. Pictures maybe of Captain and Bess hauling in the last horse-drawn wagon-load of sheaves the year before grandad bought the Fordson tractor. You know the sort of thing? I spent a lot of time in a new farmhouse in Sweden once where the bidet that the farmer’s wife had thought was such a good idea was always full of smelly wellington socks. I’ve come in from tending the eel-trap in the pouring rain of Wales for a last cup of tea and a Welshcake before the family went to bed and l was back off out in the rain for the rest of the night. I’ve put the world to rights and played a tune or two in farmhouse kitchens in County Clare. I think of the Irish fiddle player Paddy Fahey, whose tunes were linked in his mind with places on his farm in East Galway. He would remember each of his own tunes by thinking of where he had been on the farm when the tune started to form in his musical mind. And I would venture that all these people felt a visceral connection and a love for the land they farmed, where they grew up, even as they were also doing what they were being told or paid to do by successive governments, paid to grub hedges out, encouraged to spray chemicals and fertilisers around, then suddenly being paid to put the hedges back again, or planting herbal leys where the old flower meadows had once been before ‘improvement’ had destroyed them. Good people mostly, but not entirely in control.
Farming Futures
Farming Futures
Farming Futures
If farms have been part of your life in even a minor way you will instantly connect with a description of a lobby where you kick off your wellies next to a washing machine milling away constantly, a farm kitchen where the dogs and the bits of straw creep in to create that farmy Rayburn fug, with cups of tea maybe and worn but comfy chairs and green boiler suits giving off a strangely reassuring smell of animal manure. Pictures maybe of Captain and Bess hauling in the last horse-drawn wagon-load of sheaves the year before grandad bought the Fordson tractor. You know the sort of thing? I spent a lot of time in a new farmhouse in Sweden once where the bidet that the farmer’s wife had thought was such a good idea was always full of smelly wellington socks. I’ve come in from tending the eel-trap in the pouring rain of Wales for a last cup of tea and a Welshcake before the family went to bed and l was back off out in the rain for the rest of the night. I’ve put the world to rights and played a tune or two in farmhouse kitchens in County Clare. I think of the Irish fiddle player Paddy Fahey, whose tunes were linked in his mind with places on his farm in East Galway. He would remember each of his own tunes by thinking of where he had been on the farm when the tune started to form in his musical mind. And I would venture that all these people felt a visceral connection and a love for the land they farmed, where they grew up, even as they were also doing what they were being told or paid to do by successive governments, paid to grub hedges out, encouraged to spray chemicals and fertilisers around, then suddenly being paid to put the hedges back again, or planting herbal leys where the old flower meadows had once been before ‘improvement’ had destroyed them. Good people mostly, but not entirely in control.