Millennium Diary revisited – a farming life
By Chris Ruttle and Colin Sully

In the year 2000 – before the birth of the Newsletter – a group of residents collected reports on people, events and activities each month, and produced The Lee Millennium Diary. In the first of a series of articles, we revisit a story from that year and provide an update.

A life in farming
Chris Ruttle manages nearly 500 acres of farmland in The Lee and provided a monthly contribution to the Diary. Here are some brief extracts:

January: “…separate cattle for sale. They must be under 30 months old and have two ear tags each with the same unique number. Each animal has its own passport containing details of the animal’s mother, date and place of birth and movements since birth.”

March: “Cultivated the fields at Kings Ash ready for spring barley… David followed behind with the seed drill… a long day in the tractor but I have my Jack Russell ‘Tim’ for company.”

April: “Spraying crops; everything must be recorded – rates of use, wind speed, weather conditions, growth stage of crop and time of day we spray. Evening spent starting to fill in forms for IACS (Integrated Administration and Control System) to claim for EEC payments. It takes two whole days to complete these forms.”

October: “The weather is wet, making harvesting extremely difficult. Moisture content of the grain today is 19%. For safe storage the grain must be dried to below 15%... This means the dryer running late into the night and through the weekend.”

“Well the last eight years have certainly been a difficult time for farming with not one, but two outbreaks of Foot and Mouth disease. Luckily the second outbreak was contained to only a few cases, but ironically its source seems to have been the very place that was supposed to be producing vaccines to protect animals from this horrendous disease.

Now attention is being placed on the threat from the continent, Blue Tongue Disease. Again ironically the only outbreaks in 2008 were from animals which were imported into the UK from diseased areas in Europe! What happened to quarantine, and why allow imports from infected areas? Beats me!

New systems…
Another introduction of a different kind during this period was the SPS (Single Payment Scheme) to replace the IACS. What a wonderfully complicated and expensive piece of administration this turned out to be, dreamt up by Margaret Beckett and her cohorts, requiring re-mapping and re-assessing field sizes. I actually had three sets of maps produced for this farm before they got it right and they already had accurate maps from IACS.

Not only is this new system very complicated (it has got better over the years) but it has opened up a whole new wave of people able to claim payments for what might best be termed ‘pony paddocks’. According to a report in the agricultural press, it costs £60,000 to calculate and check each of these small claims. There is talk of a minimum claim amount being set to rule some of them out.

Changes in farm practice
Probably the biggest change that has happened to this farm is that we are now employing contractors for a lot of the arable work.

David my old colleague left in May 2007 to pursue a different career and it would have been very difficult to replace him. With machinery also being more and more costly to justify on a farm this size, we made the decision to give contracting a try.

It has had its advantages, but also lots of disadvantages and frustrations, especially in a year like last year when I was waiting for the combine to turn up on a sunny day instead of getting out there and doing it myself.

When combining, David and I used to cut about 25 acres per day but with the bigger machinery they can do 100 plus. The machinery is also full of modern technology. At the end of harvest our contractor presented me with colourful yield maps of each field – the combine has a GPS system and knows exactly where it is and maps the yield as it goes!

Would I change my life?
When I think how lucky I am to be doing the job I do in this beautiful area and when I see people rushing for their trains in the morning with no time to enjoy what’s around them, it puts it all into perspective. Yes, farming is difficult and can be frustrating, but I don’t think there is any other job that can give you the same satisfaction.

While people need food, I still see a great future for farming, especially with more and more interest in where that food has come from and with food security also increasingly an issue.

As an old farmer once said to me “you will never get a better job”. How right he was… and there’s always next year!”