GOOD Evans ‘I don’t know if the chancellor intended to subsidise Christmas dinners, but he subsidised ours’ This month, Roger Evans discusses the perils of field margins in organic farming and gives his thoughts on footpaths and the importance of visitor experience when it comes to farm diversification success.
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make a conscious effort never to advocate anything in these columns. I tell you what I do and why I do it, but I never say you should do it as well. If what I do goes wrong you hear about that, particularly. We are organic. I’m not saying you should be too, but it suits us and we are glad we are organic. But there are two issues which don’t seem to go together and I don’t think they have been thought through. Firstly, people, so we are told, just love field margins. There are six-metre margins which are optional and the 2m margins which are compulsory. People don’t talk about margins, they talk about wildlife corridors, as if these area are full of all sorts of wildlife going about their business and they couldn’t do that if it was all left to farmers. Never mind that wildlife can and does cut across any field under the cover of darkness. We park that and turn to organic farming. People seem to like that as well. It ticks lots of boxes. It doesn’t use any chemicals, which are a bad thing. It’s sustainable, whatever that means. Fight against weeds I could go on and on, and some organic enthusiasts do. But I have learned that the only weapons we have in our fight against weeds is to chop them off before they go to seed. So what do you do if you have a margin which is full of weeds, and I’m thinking particularly of thistles and docks here. It’s a dilemma; it needs thinking through and to my mind someone needs to choose if you want wildlife corridors or organic farming. On our rented land there is a good stone track which gives you access to all the fields. The trouble is that at the start of the track there are two smallish fields. They are about five acres altogether and we always graze these. If you are on your own it is usually impossible to open the gates, drive
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through and shut the gate without the cattle getting out. So everyone drives up the silage fields and now there is a clear track up through the grass. But it isn’t as bad as it first looks. That is because there is a public footpath which runs about 500 yards up these fields. I have mixed feeling feelings about spraying off footpaths. I don’t mind so much if the footpath is used. This one is, but years ago there were people going about walking obscure footpaths just to make sure you had sprayed them. They don’t seem to do that anymore. I used to hate spraying off a good crop, especially if you had never seen anyone using it. Opportunity Anyway, we have these two tracks going about 500 yards up these fields. The one track follows the footpath exactly so we would have had to spray that off anyway. There is one wheel mark which obviously runs parallel which is not really needed. I explain that by saying that this gives walkers the opportunity to walk side-by-side and at the same time remain socially distanced. As far as I am concerned this puts me ahead of the game. I bet there aren’t many farmers offering that. If I could I’d close this particular footpath and charge people to look at the views; these are spectacular and worth anyone’s money. It would be a good diversification. We recently took another couple out for a meal in the pub. She is my good friend, the singing florist, and he is also a best friend. It is he who sources our turkey for us at Christmas. The trouble is that he will never tell you how much the turkey is. We take them out every year hoping that goes some way towards paying for it. It must do because the turkey keeps turning up. We had a really cheap turkey last year because when we took them out that subsidy of £10 a meal was on. I don’t know if the chancellor
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