Byretorial - Is the Kraken awakening?

[WaveJumper]

Interesting read on the BBC this morning on the pension subject:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58883053

 

[IanSuth]

They have already got a solution. They spray the wheat with round up and dry it on the stem. Round up is neutralised by contact with the soil but spraying the wheat means that active weedkiller is transferred into the bread we eat.

That is incorrect (grew up on an arable farm in sussex) Roundup kills green growth which allows you to harvest is faster (contractors are paid by the day so if you are suing them which we didnt you want them in and out asap), we sometimes used roundup but you can't use it on Oats as they are too closely related to weed grasses. Chemicals cost money, farmers only use them if and when they perceive they will save more than they cost. Roundup swears blind on the packaging that you can let foraging animals into the field within a week of spraying there are other far worse chemicals in use (my dad once sprayed a field for an aphid infestation and there was a flock of dead crows in it the next day)

When you harvest grain it has a moisture content - the more there is the heavier the grain is (greater bushel weight) so the more money you will make BUT also the more moisture the more likely it is to germinate or even spontaneously combust (particularly Barley). Seed merchants will not buy at over 14% moisture and under 9% is pretty pointless. Farmers are left doing the sums to look at how little water they can dare remove (our grain dryer did about 3tonne per hour removing 1-2% moisture and used 5 gallons of diesel in the burner to do that) to not have to re-dry the grain later as it started to spoil and to keep the weight as high as possible as you are paid per tonne. Add in the fact if you sell oats to Quaker or Barley for Beer their are min bushel weights specified in the contracts. When i was about 9 i was sat down with 6 guttering drain pipes and a 1/8" drill and told to drill 2 parallel lines of holes 2" apart down each pipe, they were then inserted horizontally 2 into each of our 3 grain bins and a car heater fan placed on the end connected to an old car battery. They ran constantly for the first 2 weeks after harvest to cool the grain down and mean we could do less expensive drying with diesel (and this was when pink diesel was about 14p a litre).

Farming is a hard hard job to make money in - you will likely harvest about 3T per acre and if you are not selling premium to Quaker etc you will only get less than £200 per tonne, that is your gross income £600 per acre before you take out any of the inputs. Average uk arable farm is still only about 200 acres (which is tiny when you think of those huge fenland farm distorting that figure) so that is a gross income of £120k which is less than the price of a new combine (all our machinery was cobbled together from stuff bought at farm sales which is how we survived) and by dad&uncle worked as car mechanics through the winter to financially cope as we only had 80 acres with 2 families

 

[Deleted member 59730]

Chemicals cost money, farmers only use them if and when they perceive they will save more than they cost.

Roundup is now out of patent and is dirt cheap. I was told about the abuse by someone who worked for Farmer's Weekly. He only used organic flour for his own bread.

 

[IanSuth]

Roundup is now out of patent and is dirt cheap. I was told about the abuse by someone who worked for Farmer's Weekly. He only used organic flour for his own bread.

Roundup is far less dangerous than many other chemicals on farms - i have come home covered in pink dust from us dosing our own seed corn with organo mercury dressing in a cement mixer (when you buy seed corn it is pretreated with it as it is the most efficient fungicide), i have had clumps of hair fall out after getting drips from a spray boom fall on my head whilst stowing it (that was a leatherjacket treatment being put on a neighbours horse paddock), and as for the physical risks, age 13 or 14 i was knocked form the top of a combine harvester when a main drive belt snapped and smacked me across the face (black eye/broken nose) and only was not run over as i lay winded as my uncle heard the machinery note change and stopped.

People in this country need to make a very very quick decisions as leaving the SM in not compatible with good food standards and affordable food as we have not been food self sufficient since napoleonic times.

I have an ex colleague living near Seattle - when you work through all the numbers the cost of her steak that she gets by buying a share in a cow on an organic grass fed farm over there is the same as the price of Aberdeen Angus from Waitrose - there is no way to cheaply produce quality food

PS if you want to read up more on RoundUp residues etc here is a good paper on the science behind how residues are tracked and measured and their effect - https://academic.oup.com/jas/article/97/11/4509/5565412

 

[The Byre]

Farming is a hard hard job to make money in - you will likely harvest about 3T per acre and if you are not selling premium to Quaker etc you will only get less than £200 per tonne, that is your gross income £600 per acre before you take out any of the inputs. Average uk arable farm is still only about 200 acres (which is tiny when you think of those huge fenland farm distorting that figure) so that is a gross income of £120k which is less than the price of a new combine

The truth is that nearly all farms in the UK are too small to be viable. We have just 20 acres and of that, I work half as grazing, the rest is woodland which we use for firewood, building materials and commercial wild mushrooms. Even if we had ten times as much, it still would be too small to buy the machinery required to make the place viable and there isn't a rental market to hire the machinery - with or without labour in the form of contractors, as that are all geared to supplying other small farms.

That is where the US Mid-West and Australia win out. Their farms are measured in square miles and often the convoys of contractors do not even know whose farm they are working. They just harvest giant swathes of land, starting in the lower Mid-West and working up into Canada. No UK farmer can fight the efficiencies that giant machines that can work six months of the year can bring.

We had friends who had a 'small' (2,000 acres) ranch in Indianna and apart from a hundred acres for the wife's hobby of breeding Tennessee Walking Horses, they didn't touch the rest. Ploughing and drilling, followed by harvesting were all done by contractors via an agency. Working the ranch meant that they got a cheque once a year.

And the UK has abhorrently unpredictable weather. My tractor and flail-mower are waiting to finish off a field full of rubbish gorse and shrubs, but it is always raining, even on days when the weather forecasts tell us that it will be dry for at least a week. Cutting that stuff when it's wet means the bits of gorse mix with the wet grass and clog the mower like cement! So every minute or so, one is out of the cab and trying to poke all that gunge out with a stick.

And then we come to the blizzard of pointless and destructive regulations that farmers have to endure! One tiny and brilliant example - my neighbour (also a small-holder) told me that the local council or some other interfering body has issued an edict that one now needs a license to cut down a tree. I kid you not!

Then an environmental officer has to visit and inspect the tree to see if a water vole or a newt has built a nest at the top of the tree and write a report on the environmental impact of cutting down that tree could have. And woe betides you if that bearded nincompoop in cord trousers and open-toed sandals finds bats up that tree!

The silly part of all that is that this area is mixed, natural woodland and lousy with bats - along with all kinds of other wildlife, such as pine martins, red squirrel, badgers, deer, all kinds of birds of prey and rare breeds. And I want to keep it that way and not have the place polluted with bird watchers and environmental officers carrying clipboards!

P.S. It's not raining - hope springs eternal!