Latest Moan From You and Me 2024

@Jiffy our farmer neighbours have retired and moved to a nearby village. They have leased their land to two brothers in their 30s. They are not very friendly. This morning one of them roared up the road next to us in a big tractor at 4am. Presumably he paused at the farmyard just long enough to attach a harrowing machine cos at 4:30 he was working the rest of the huge field just across the road from us.

I'm a bit tired today.

 

I am with Scottish Power, Everytime OFGEN reduces the cap, SP increase the standing charge :-(

 

I apologise ... what is it please?

 

i expect he is too if he was up in time to start work at 4:00 am poor chap. Farmers have to work from sun up to sun down at this time of year … seven days a week.

 

@Dovefromabove I'm not stupid. I know farmers work long hours and have every sympathy fo rthem but farmer Luc was always more considerate. He never worked fields next to houses before 7am and heaven knows, there are enough of them not next to neighbours.

These chaps have 300 head of cattle to see to and plenty of other pastures worked on rotation as arable fields. If they'd carried on and ploughhed the field or sown it or even spread muck I'd have understood but to charge around harrowing at 4:30am and then do nothing else there all day is just plain rude.

 

Oh, a total R S!

 

5% VAT on domestic heating fuel.
Petrol/diesel/bioethanol/biodiesel (and blends) for vehicles is 52.9p per litre excise duty (except red diesel for agricultural/horticultural/forestry use and some other industries) then 20% VAT on both the price of the fuel and the excise duty. So on a litre of petrol costing £1.50, 30p is VAT and 52.95p duty - I make that 55.3% of the pump price taxes so not that much far shot of France, and because the duty is a flat rate, the % total tax gets higher if/when the fuel price drops. Similarly with alcohol (for drinking not fuel) - we pay VAT on the duty as well as on the product itself.

 

I don’t know a single farmer (and I know a lot) who could be bothered to do things in order to annoy the neighbours, or who gets up and works earlier than he needs to (unless of course the neighbours have pee’d him off something rotten )

If he was harrowing his field that early it was probably to get it done before he had to see to the cattle … does he have a milking herd? If so what time in the morning do they have to be milked?
Maybe the weather today was going to be perfect to help prepare a seedbed (after what has been the most damnably difficult spring) if only he could get the surface harrowed and clods broken up so that the sun and wind could do their work and break down the surface into a fine tilth for a late sowing.

The surfaces of many fields, particularly those with clay soil, have been battered by so much rain this spring that it’s like an impermeable hard covering over the soil … I posted just a few days ago about how, even in the Fens, the farmers are having to cultivate more than usual to break up the surface and allow it to dry out a bit.

You wouldn’t plough after harrowing, (or spread muck) and instead of ploughing most farmers nowadays practise ‘min till’ which is the farming equivalent of ‘no dig’ and many have sold their ploughs.

Is it possible that the ‘harrow machine’
was actually a cultivator-drill which sows the seed direct into the ground … and what the farmer was actually doing was drilling his field at the earliest opportunity given the recent weather?
Combination drill buyer's guide - Farmers Weekly

 

These guys would start at 23:00 at time and work through the night because of the day heat. It was kind of relaxing to go to sleep and wake up to x3 tractors across the way from our bedroom. Note the bottom of the field where these guys were working was a shear drop-off - admiration is a mild way of putting it.

 

Most folk in rural communities in East Anglia understand that sometimes the work has to be done when it has to be done … whether it keeps folk awake at night or not … the farmer has no choice for some operations. Harvest teams race against the clock in 24/7 rush to gather Norfolk's peas
The above happens all over East Anglia from June to mid August, not just in the fields but convoys of the the machinery have to travel many miles in country roads in order that each field can be harvested and frozen at the optimal moment … remember the slogan “sweet as the moment when the pod went pop”?
If you live near a field of peas you know that for one or two nights there’s going to be heavy machinery, lights and noise so that we can go to the supermarket and get some frozen peas to enjoy all year round.

 

With pea vining the farmer may not know until just before it happens … these things are decided by agronomists with testing equipment who test the crops in their area on a daily basis and contact the vining team to say that Hall Farm in North Suffolk needs to he harvested when they’ve finished at Church Farm on the North Norfolk coast and then the team will travel the length of the county to arrive asap and start the next job.

Or if a farmer wakes up at sun up and discovers that the threatened overnight rain didn’t happen and if he gets a move on he can get the crop drilled before it’s time to milk the cows, and by then the dew will have lifted off the meadow and he can get out there and cut the hay, because now there’s a week of dry weather ahead, I really don’t think his neighbours would relish a 4am phone call to say there’s going to be some noise in half an hour …

Farming jobs aren’t always that predictable as to timing … I would have thought that gardeners would understand that. Not doing the job at the right time can result in huge financial losses … many farmers across the UK and Europe are already facing bankruptcy this year if the unseasonal weather continues this year.

The reason a lot of spraying is done early in the morning is because often the air is quite still at that time and spray drift can be minimised.