Farming Friends

Pig owners and farmers can download the necessary documentation from the Food Standards Agency website or they can use the British Pig Executive online Food Chain Information service.

John Gossop is an East Yorkshire farmer with over 45 years experience, author of the blog Peakfood and avid researcher of threats to food production. I am pleased to say that he has written a thought provoking article for farmingfriends entitled Efficient Farming.

Modern farms, with their giant tractors and gleaming machinery give the impression of being highly efficient. And so they are in terms of output per man. Each man now produces many hundreds of tons of food, much more than at any time in the past.

However, we must remember what it is that farmers do. Our job is simply to convert the sun’s energy into food energy, something we are now doing very inefficiently and unsustainably.

Up until WWII, most of the energy used in farming was collected by plants that used solar energy through photosynthesis to provide food for the millions of horses and men doing the work. Since then we have increasingly used the solar energy from millions of years ago, stored as fossil fuels to increase our labour efficiency but decrease our energy efficiency.

Amazingly, on average it now needs about 10 calories of finite fossil energy to deliver 1 calorie of food energy. It should be obvious that such a system can only work while supplies of fossil energy in the form of oil and gas are reliable and while fossil calories are cheap compared to food calories.

If we don’t plan now for the inevitable day when oil and gas are neither cheap nor plentiful, we will face a disaster.

Efficient Farming By John Gossop, author of Famine in the West(£6.49) and Peak Food.

If you have a farming story, memory or farm visit that you would like to share or a farming issue that you would like to raise, then please send me your story or article and I will happily include it on a guest appearance post.

This week it is Farmhouse Breakfast Week.

“Farmhouse Breakfast Week is an annual campaign that emphasises the importance of eating a healthy breakfast every day.”

Breakfast cereals are made from cereal crops that are grown on farms as is bread which is another food eaten at breakfast. The bacon and sausages that are part of the cooked breakfast come from farm animals which have also been fed on cereal crops.

The Farmhouse Breakfast Week website has lots of breakfast facts & recipes.

The theme for this year’s Farmhouse Breakfast Week is “A Great Start.”

So how are you going to give you and your family a great start to the day?

Sunday 21st October (2007) was national Apple Day in the UK and I marked this occasion by picking apples from my orchard.

I also created this apple jigsaw puzzle.

I hope you had fun completing the jigsaw. How long did it take you?

This puzzle took me 3 minutes and 10 seconds - it’s harder than it looks!

Apples are very nutritious and Autumn is a great time to eat apples as this is their season.
How did you celebrate National Apple Day?

Although I missed the actual day I would like to celebrate world egg day now by giving a round up of egg facts from farmingfriends.

• Hatty, my white leghorn hen lays eggs with white shells and this year she has laid 101 eggs.
• The guinea fowl egg count between the end of February and the end of September is 725 eggs collected. Please note that this is the number of eggs I have collected and not the total number of eggs laid by the guinea hens.this is because the magpies circle the farm everyday and collect any guinea eggs I can not find. Eggs stolen by the magpies = +350 and 2 pot eggs!
• You can eat guinea fowl eggs.
• Avocado and Egg Mayonnaise is a fabulous starter if you have an abundance of eggs.
• Cooking with eggs is great as they are a very versatile ingredient which have many different uses and can be prepared in many different ways.
• Eggs contain many nutrients.
• Check out your knowledge of egg facts by having a go at the ‘eggcellent’ crossword all about eggs!
• Meet Emily Egg on the downloadable farm produce colouring sheet and learn about where eggs come from.

How did you celebrate world egg day?

Did you know it is British Sausage Week (15th - 21st October 2007), this week?

In fact, British Sausage week is celebrating it’s tenth birthday.

Not only is the British Sausage Week raising the profile of and paying homage to the sausage but events across the country are also helping to raise money for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust.

Click on this link if you would like to find out more about the British Sausage Week.

I’ll let you know what I’m doing to celebrate British Sausage Week in the next few days.

This is some what of a short title for a very large subject, and one which can only be touched upon in this article.

So where do we start. Obviously farmers and the agricultural industry work with nature and natural processes; the farmer’s ‘factory’ is not in an enclosed environment such as a glass bottle factory contained within a building on an industrial estate, but in fact is in the open landscape and everything the farmer does has an effect on the ecosystem. Clearly in the heavily populated world in which we now live there must be agricultural production in order to sustain the supply of food. In fact the European Union have recently announced that set-aside (land left by farmers which must not be used to grow a crop) will be suspended in 2008. This is because world food reserves have been depleting as a result of a growing population, changes in diet, loss of land to biofuel production and poor harvests across the world. This leaves us in no doubt that agricultural production must be at least maintained at current levels, if not increased.

Society does however have a responsibility to the environment and farmers in the EU must comply with a long list of environmental rules and regulations. There are limits to how much nitrogen fertiliser or animal manure can be applied to the land and at what time of year this can be applied. Pesticides are heavily regulated and there are strict limits on their application. Farmers are given regular spot checks to make sure that they are complying with these regulations.

It is probably true to say the majority of farmers are content with striking a balance between efficiency of production and ensuring that wildlife habitats are maintained. In fact in recent years there has been a greater number of farms converting to organic production. These are probably individuals who prefer to farm organically and without chemicals, but also they are fulfiling a demand which has been created by consumers who are either buying organic produce because they feel the food is safer, because they perceive the production system to be more environmentally friendly or a combination of both. It is certainly true to say that most organically grown crops will have more weed or wild flowers growing within the crop which is beneficial to insects and insect eating birds. Furthermore, organic production necessitates a rotation consisting of a wider variety of crops and thus creating diversity of habitat.

On the other hand yields from organic crops are typically 1/3rd of conventionally grown crops - this would mean that more than three times the amount of diesel will be consumed by the tractors to produce a tonne of grain (for example) in comparison with a conventional farming system which uses pesticides and artificial fertilisers. So if we had one acre of conventionally farmed land then two more acres could be left as wildlife habitat compared to 3 acres which would be needed for organic production. It is for the consumer to decide which system is the most appropriate and gives the greatest environmental benefit.

What farmers must be aware of is that they work in the countryside. If the glass bottle manufacturer drops a bottle in his factory then it is contained in the factory and can be easily swept up. Conversely, if a farmer accidentally spills some pesticide then it is immediately released into the environment and could quickly enter a water course and cause untold damage. There have been many incidents in the past with pesticides, fertilisers, fuel, silage effluent or slurry where these pollutants have escaped into water courses. No doubt accidents will continue to occur in the future and it is always the case that although most individuals are very conscious of their responsibilities, there will always be a minority who do not give such issues the priority that they deserve.

Farmers continue to look more closely at their inputs from a business perspective. This can result in finding more efficient cultivation methods which results in a reduction in fuel usage. Scientists produce thresholds for crop disease and insect infestations to reach before it is economic to use pesticides - all valuable information which can reduce the unecessary use of pesticides.

The fact remains that consumers have the overiding power to manipulate what happens in the countryside by their choice of foodstuffs. If there is demand for a product that is produced to certain environmental standards then this demand will shape the management of the countryside - a model which has already increased the area of farmland that is managed organically.

Policy that clearly doesn’t work is where a government enforces environmental compliance in their own country but does not specify that imported food is produced to the same standards. All that happens in this case is that imported food is cheaper (due to the lower environmental standards of production) and also has to be transported around the globe adding further to the environmental footprint of that product.

It is clear that environmental performance has improved on UK farms over the past few decades. This is partly because of education and awareness and partly through more stringent legislation and the policing of these laws. The challenge is to maintain a continuation of this trend whilst also ensuring that food production keeps pace with demand. If the whole of agricultural production were to convert to organic methods then there would only be enough food to sustain approximately 1/3rd of the world population, so clearly this is not an option.

As I become older and wiser I realise that the land will be there long after I am gone. As a farmer I am only a custodian of the land and it is my responsibility to ensure that it is cared for in an appropriate way. This concept of custodian (as opposed to owner) is always highlighted to me when I visit a livestock sale in the uplands of Britain. If you read the catologue the name of the farmer is not listed alongside the animals, but rather the animals are catalogued with the name of the farm from where they were reared - i.e. it is the farm which is of importance and not the farmer who happens to be farming that land at that moment in history.

What are your thoughts about the countryside and how we treat it?