Farm Diary

We have drilled another 180 acres of maize this weekend, and work is almost completed on the next area to be drilled. Young stock at Tillington have been wormed, and we are planning to turn out the in-calf heifers this week if the weather is suitable.

I also hope that the first group of cows will be out by the time you read this column. They are rattling the gates on a daily basis as they smell the fresh grass and are keen to go out.

We have commissioned our slurry separators over the weekend, with great success. 'Martha' and 'Arthur' are now running all day, firmly bolted to a magnificent structure fabricated by local ace engineer Neil Harrison.

They take it in turns to be the one also running all night, as the pressure is on to separate all the slurry in the tower in order to get the solid muck out to the remaining maize ground.

The liquid part is returned to the tower, where it will be pumped out on the silage ground after first-cut silage.

This means that in future no slurry will be pumped on our land in the winter. The solids will be taken to the maize fields, where it will be spread and ploughed in, and the liquid will be stored in a lagoon and applied to the grassland in the summer, after silage cuts and grazing.

However, the task of separating half a million gallons of slurry is under way, and it is going to be a challenge to run it all through in time.

Much is made of the food shortages around the world and the increased cost of food generally.

Many blame bio-fuels as contributing to this problem, and suddenly bio-fuel is seen as a problem rather than the production of fuel from a renewable, sustainable source.

I think some facts are needed here, and also context. Before we all drove around in cars and oil was in its infancy, a draft horse needed four acres of cereal 'fuel' per year. This was the same food as consumed by humans, but no-one resented the horse its feed, as it was in fair exchange for the power unleashed.

We read that rice has gone up hugely in price; there is certainly no rice being used for energy production.

The USA does indeed use a great deal of maize for fuel but last year the USA exported more maize than ever. Brazil uses vast quantities of sugar for bio-ethanol production and has done so for years; sugar is in surplus.

In the UK, only one per cent of wheat goes into bio-fuel production, and for every tonne put into the plant the by-product is 750kg of moist high- protein animal feed. Before the bio-fuel plants were built, this surplus wheat was exported.

Compare that with the insistence by the RSPB that five per cent of arable land should stay in set-aside, and the lunacy of Natural England in proposing to flood 25 square miles of East Anglia, with more land needed to re-create the fresh water wetlands destroyed by such a scheme.

Animal feed in the EU could go up by 600 per cent because of zero tolerance on GM feed, potentially cutting imports by 30 per cent, which is crazy when one considers the fact that there might not be any GM-'free' protein available in a few years' time.

South America is no longer worried about exporting feed to the EU, as China and India are growing so fast, and if EU agriculture shrinks rapidly in the face of such a crisis in feed prices they could add value and export the finished product here.

We would bring it in, because we seem happy to import food that has been produced in a way that is not allowed in this country, exporting our animal welfare, environmental concerns, minimum wage, health and safety at work and so on with impunity.

Our double standards and hysteria are breathtaking. Did you know that the Daily Mail opposed the pasteurisation of milk in the 1930s? Enough said.

With food riots in Africa and Haiti, the EU is opting out of maximising production from the land.

Food security is now on the agenda in Brussels for the first time since the 1970s. Gordon Brown is mentioning food supply and food security more and more often, when it was only 20 months ago this Government said food security was not an issue, stating that 'we can always buy it in from somewhere else'.

A brave statement to make at the time; a very foolish statement with hindsight.

This feature first appeared in the West Sussex Gazette April 30. To read it first buy the West Sussex Gazette every Wednesday.