I even tried my hand at farming once. Because of this I am not afraid of all things countryside. I do not hold my nose overtly as the bus drives past a field in which the muck has just been spread. They all hold their noses as if to say, ‘It wasn’t me!’. I’m sure this leaves me as the culprit every time.
I gained a lot of first-hand knowledge from my love of the countryside. I can tell you that there is no point in campaigning about banning hunting. They will continue to do it anyway and if you are not careful they will bring all their animals to London and start chasing you too.
I’m also privileged to know that milk comes from the udder of a cow, not actually from a bottle in Tesco. You wouldn’t believe how many youngsters I have come across that have never stopped to question the origin of many of their foods. I doubt they’d ever eat an egg again if they discovered that it came out of a chicken’s backside. I have to admit, I found it difficult to eat chicken or eggs again after I actually observed a couple of these pre-historic creatures in the field, and witnessed them digging up and consuming the guts of their acquaintances and swallowing their own feathers.
Anyone who has worked on a sheep farm will know that where there’s a sheep, there’s a way to kill yourself. They seem to instinctively know when the hay stack is about to collapse, and go and stand under it. I don’t think I could record the potential hazards within my lifetime. Luckily we do not have to fill in health and safety files for sheep.
I remember witnessing one ewe give birth to her lambs on the edge of a cliff face. After she had plopped them out and straight over the edge, she looked around in confusion, wondering if she was having what us humans call a ‘senior moment’. The fact that she had 35 acres to choose from didn’t seem to make a blind bit of difference to her choice of birthing location. Don’t worry, the lambs were okay.
Despite that the industry is the industry, there is not a person I know of who is not softened to the dearness of a newly born lamb. It is hard to imagine the little blighter on your dinner plate six months later. However, by the third week of lambing it is very easy to imagine them on your dinner plate and almost impossible to see them in any other light.
It is not just livestock farming I have encountered. I spent hours trailing around oat fields in the scorching midday sunshine, my task being to pull wild oats. Yes that’s right, to pick out wild oats, from a field full of oats. Because of this, I am not stuck-up toffee nose. I know what hardship is. I should have been on the burger bap section of the televised series, ‘Blood, Sweat, and Takeaways’.
I don’t know if any of you have ever heard a crow scarer. These are the modern version of the good old fashioned scarecrow. The crows soon worked out that the man in the field, as scary as he may have looked wearing his straw filled pellet sack, couldn’t move, and even the ones who did move never seemed to fly after them. The sound of a gunshot going off at three minute intervals is much more intimidating. And I know, because I have been wild oat picking, unaware that one was in the row next to me. I can tell you that my reaction to that as I momentarily thought that I’d been directed to the wrong field and someone was taking a pot shot at me was enough to keep the crows away for 2 months.
Geogger 