Meldreth Matters, July 2020

Letter from Turkmenistan It is a long way from Meldreth to Ashkhabad: approximately 3,000 miles as the crow flies and more like 4,000 if you were crazy enough to try to make the journey by road. In fact, I’ll bet that many of you have no idea where it is, The view from my office window in Ashgabat or how to find it on a map. So, take down that old atlas, turn to the double page “The Near and Middle East”, find Iran, locate Tehran, then move north west into the Caspian Sea, then head east, into Turkmenistan, find the Koppeh Dagh and there you are in the capital, Ashkhabad, where I help run an EU-funded project designed to help the Turkmen government achieve goals in sustainable agriculture. It is 43 degrees Celsius outside and we’re four hours ahead of UK time, and sitting here in airconditioned comfort, a cold beer at hand, it strikes me that it has been a long journey for me to get here, too: all of 26 years, in fact, from the first time I went to work abroad in 1994.

Growing up as a farmer’s son in Meldreth in the 1960s, at the Turkmen tomatoes bottom end of Brewery Lane, there (which are very good) was never any doubt that I was going to follow in my father’s footsteps, those of his father before him and several generations of Peppers who had tilled the land at Brewery Farm, and become a farmer myself. So I took what seemed the obvious route, studied Agriculture at Reading University and went into the industry both in research and farm management. But, even by the early 1990s, it was becoming increasingly obvious that there was no longer big money to be made in agriculture in the UK, so, with a young family to feed and clothe, in 6