A Year on the Marsh

David Cross, farming in partnership with his father John Cross (HND 76/79) as tenants of the Sedgeford Hall Estate, has become one of the new Monitor Farmers in the knowledge-sharing network run by the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board. They manage a closed flock of 900 ewes alongside an arable enterprise including barley, wheat, potatoes and sugar beet.

Kit Papworth (HND 89/92), whose father died in 2018, took part in an online mental health webinar aimed at preventing suicides in farming. 133 people in the farming community lost their lives to suicide in 2019. Another speaker was Emma Haley, charity manager for the mental health charity YANA.

The first grapes have been pressed at a new winery on the family farm of Robert Perowne (FC 74/75) near Burnham Market. Cobble Hill is a 9 acre vineyard growing Bacchus, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir grape varieties which were first planted in 2016, with the first wine produced in 2018. The 2020 Cobble Hill Bacchus wine won a Silver Medal at the Wines of Great Britain Awards.

The Lincolnshire Marsh is an area of land

running along the coast from Grimsby in the north to Skegness in the South. It is bounded in the east by the sea and in the west by the chalk escarpment of the Lincolnshire Wolds. People often consider The Marsh as part of the Lincolnshire Fen, but mention this to any true Marshman and they will soon put you right. The Soils on the Marsh are mainly heavy clay a world away from the silt or peaty Fen soils seen further south. This is ‘strong’ land by anybodies measure.

After moving up from Wiltshire in 1970 to Authorpe, halfway between Louth and Alford, the Marsh became my home. Dad was a Farm Manager on a large, very modern pig unit, and I, along with my sister went to school in Louth. I left school

in the summer of 1976, after completing my A levels and after a short break looked to start work at Glebe Farm and so begin

my pre-college practical year. I am not sure if it happens now but in those days we all had to work on a farm for a year prior to entering college. Dad was a member of a local farm discussion group and fixed an interview for me with a local mixed farmer

to see if it suited to go there as ‘the student’ for a year. So one Sunday morning in May of ’76 we went off to Glebe Farm, Great Carlton to meet and a chat with Roger Taylor. He said he would be pleased to have me work there for a year but he made no promises about the winter, it may get a bit quiet, he said.

So it was with bit of trepidation that at ten past six on the Monday morning in the third week of June 1976 I drove the route

that I would come to know so well. I

would need to know it well, there would be times over the coming year when I would be driving those narrow lanes and it could be very thick fog or, more likely, be terribly hungover, perhaps both!

We met in the workshop and Roger introduced me to the rest of the staff. That

didn’t take long as there were only two others; Pete the stockman/shepherd and Ron the tractor driver. The Farm was a

traditional mixed farm of some 400 acres.

Alongside the arable there was a herd of Lincoln Red sucklers and a small mixed

flock of Cluns with a few Lincoln

Longwools. My first job was to blow down the grain bins. The long hot summer of ’76 had ushered in an early harvest and the field of Mazurka barley opposite the store was ripening by the minute. That job seemed to go fine and it soon came to ‘lunch time’. Now in that part of the world you start at 6.30 and work till you stop for ‘lunch’ at 9. The day begins again at 9.30 until 12.30 when you stop for ‘dinner’. The afternoon starts at 1.30 until 5 when

either the day finishes or, in busy times you have ‘tea’, and then go on working. All meal breaks were taken in the Lunch

shed. Ron and Pete, as befitting their senior status had old armchairs but as an

example of their welcoming nature I was quickly provided with an upturned 5 gallon drum complete with a hessian sack full of straw to act as a cushion.

Comfortable as my old drum was, when Pete went home at dinner time I was soon

into his chair.

The afternoon of that first day brought about some stock work and I was

instructed to go to the workshop to pick out a cattle stick from the collection by the door. Pick one that you like and that will be your stick for your time here they said. I selected a lovely ash stem about 5 foot long. The hedge it had been cut from must have been ‘layed’ at some stage as the pole had grown vertically from a horizontal stem giving it a wonderful handle. These are not to beat the cattle with said Pete, we don’t do that. Use it as an extension of you arm that’s all you need to do. It was one of the many excellent pieces of advice given to me in that year. They have stayed with me ever since.

That first week ended and it was payday. There was nothing fancy like a pay packet. We were paid to the nearest pound upwards and the notes came along with a till roll from the desk calculator, held together with an elastic band. I took the cash into Louth the next day and invested some of it in a set of tungsten darts, which I still have.

The hot summer persisted and harvest was quick and easy. Ron drove the combine, Roger was grain cart man and Pete did the baling. The bale sledge was a simple accumulator which would only empty when the rope was pulled, leaving the bales in a disorganised jumble. As the ‘boy’ my job was follow the baler and put the bales in flat eights ready for the loader. One dinner time Pete suggested that I had a go with the baler while he was away. I jumped on the little Massy 135 and off I went. All of a sudden there was a load

‘BANG’ and the baler stopped! Oh my goodness what have I done. I was in a panic, Roger certainly hadn’t sanctioned me to go baling and now it’s obviously ‘buggered’. I looked and checked and looked a bit more but couldn’t work it out.

I sat down on a bale, somewhat dejected, and waited for Pete’s return to report the disaster. He had a grin on his face a mile wide when I told him what had happened. ‘Loud bang was it?’ he asked.

‘Yes, very loud, then everything just stopped’, I said.

After several shakes of the head and

sucking of air through his teeth he delighted in telling me that it was only the shear bolt that had broken. Within a few

minutes it was fixed and off I went again with Pete sorting the bales. The shear bolt is a small bolt that holds to halves of the

drive mechanism together. Designed to ‘shear’ off at times when the load on the

drive becomes too great, when a student drives too fast into a large lump of straw for example, the bolt acts as a safety device. It is designed to break and stop all drive into the baler from the PTO shaft. I

know that now!