Dairy Farmers

An update on the dairy farmers protest; the Farmer's cynicism of yesterday (see yesterdays blog posting) may be proved misplaced as Morrisons & the Co-op have announced that they are increasing the price they pay to their suppliers. This is very good news & hopefully it will lead the way for other retailers to follow.
 The action taken by dairy farmers around the country has been peaceful & controlled though a few farmers still say they would dump their milk. I think that would be big mistake, apart from the waste it would not go down well with the public who would lose any sympathy for the farmers situation.
Farmers for Action is saying that the cuts in the milk price & the rising feed costs could force hundreds of dairy farms out of business which would result in the UK having to import much of its milk. Surely you would rather drink milk produced by British farmers?

Dairy Farmers Meet with Politicians

Last night the Farmer & Elder Son attended the Emergency Meeting for Dairy Farmers at Llandeilo organised by our local politicians Rhodri Glyn Thomas AM & Jonathan Edwards MP. It was organised as response to the concerns & challenges that are facing milk producers over receiving a fair price for milk. Farmers were able to put their concerns directly to the Welsh Government's  Deputy Minister for agriculture, Alun Davies AM.
In the last 13 years the number of dairy farmers in Wales has halved & there will be more losses to come if the problems are not dealt with.
Carmarthenshire is the highest milk producing region in the country (Wales) and the dairy industry employs many people not just farmers.
There has been a call by politicians for a milk & supermarket ombudsman to help ensure dairy farmers get a fair price for their milk.
The Farmer writes;
I have attended many crisis meetings over the years, opinions get aired & 'the top table' gives all the right responses; then we all go home & nothing happens.
Not until those in power, either elected by us, AMs, MPs etc. or corporate directors have their salaries linked to performance (like the self-employed) will we see constructive changes.
On todays news we see blockades of milk depots around the country, I am reminded of Wapping, coal mines & milk quotas - where did any of those actions get anyone? The Luddite spirit lives on but corporate greed prevails.

Yurt Holiday

This last week the Farmer & I had a night away staying in one the yurts owned by our good friends T. & F. who run Larkhill Tipis (http://www.larkhilltipis.co.uk/). This was an experience we had been promising ourselves for a long time & at last we were able to arrange it at a mutually convenient time, for just one night.

The four of us went out for a meal at the Railway Inn, Llanpumsaint (http://www.railwayinn.co.uk/), a local hostelry that runs n excellent restaurant. We had a superb meal ( the chocolate gateau was simply the best I've ever had!) and then returned to Larkhill & our yurt.

We were staying in the Bentwood yurt, pictured above, one of three different styles of yurt at Larkhill, (see the website for details) which is delightful. Yurts are lovely spaces to be in as are most round spaces, and with the rays of the wooden frame curving down to the trellis wall structure is very beautiful. It is set up on a small platform in a copse of trees and is quite private with stunning views through the trees over the Teifi Valley.

The other yurts & tipis on the site all have their own private areas though facilities are shared. There is shower block, a flush loo & a compost loo as well as a communal log cabin with cooking & washing-up facilities. Larkhill prides itself on being off-grid  and so the showers & log-cabin are all powered by wind turbines & solar panels. In the yurts light is provided by small battery powered lamps.

We had a lovely short, indeed positively miniscule break in lovely place that is to be recommended.

The weather has been dry for the last two day and so once again the Farmer & Sons are busy snatching another crop of silage from small acreages that we manage for various friends & neighbours. It is however supposed to be wet again ny tomorrow...ah well, c'est la vie!

Dairy Farmers Protest.

Today dairy farmers took to the streets of London to protest at the drop in milk price from the retailers to the producers. We have watched the days events unfold with interest.On the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2 today the question was asked 'What is the price of a litre of milk?' The programme ran this question from the point of view of the consumer whereas it should have been asking who is making money on milk? The answer is the processor & the retailer, not the producer.
There is such a widening gap between farmers & the consumers that there is little understanding of what is involved in producing the 'daily pinta'. The costs of animal feed, bedding & keeping up with latest legislation are going up all the time when the price for the end product is dropping. It is insane.
The dire warnings of numbers of dairy farmers being forced out of business are very worrying. Once the expertise & skill of dairying is lost it will take a long time to come back & the capital cost of entering dairy production will be so high as to be prohibitive. To say that the loss of the British dairy industry will not matter because we can always import milk from the continent is facile and short-sighted, are we to go the way of the coalmining & engineering industries of this country?

Local Food; The First Completely Welsh Organic Loaf of Bread

Yesterday to cheer us all up in this continuing depressing weather, our good friend
Rick the Bread  (http://www.mairsbakehouse.co.uk/) arrived brandishing a Very Important Loaf of Bread.
This loaf was one of the very first batch of entirely Welsh loaves baked using Welsh grown organic wheat. The wheat was grown in Ceredigion, milled in the water mill Felin Ganol in Llanrhystud (http://www.felinganol.co.uk/), then the wholewheat flour made into a dough using the sourdough method & baked in Rick's wonderful wood fired bread oven. This has never been done before, a truly Welsh loaf (or at least not for for many hundreds of years!).  Rick & the millers at Felin Ganol have been working towards this product for along while and can now say with confidence that bread wheat can be grown in Wales & that it produces a very good loaf.  It was delicious with a lovely texture and a beautiful nutty flavour...perfect with Welsh organic butter &  local cheese! A meal fit for a king or at least a Prince as the bread is to be offered to the Prince of Wales tomorrow when he visits Felin Ganol mill.
 As I said, this humble loaf is the culmination of several years work with the help of Aberystwyth University in finding the right strain of wheat & growing enough of it for  milling. I have been using Ceredigion flour in baking for a good while now, it makes excellent pastry. The flour is available from Felin Ganol & some wholefood & organic retailers in the area.

Rain, Rain & More Rain

                                                                                               
A reminder of summers past when the sun shone & the garden did not just drip and lie flattened by rain!
The rain continues and we are beginning to work out the various types of rain that we are currently enduring...there is just damp air which becomes fine drizzle, then heavy drizzle, thick drizzle, dripping rain , real rain, stair-rods & torrential rain, all of it summed up as the rain that never ceases. I don't think we have had more than 10  minutes without wetness of some sort for what seems like weeks.
 Here on the farm it is just a squelch and a muddy slide to get from one place to another. Elder Son has manged to get some hedge-trimming done but only along road sides but the fields are too wet and soggy for any muck-spreading to be done. The Farmer & Younger Son have been doing indoor jobs such as rendering walls on a current big project and tinkering in the workshop on machinery or wood-working. Everyone is just so fed-up with this weather!!!!! We should be making hay now or at least silage & sitting in fields of mown grass eating tomato sandwiches & drinking lemonade, it's July for heaven's sake!
I do feel sorry for holiday makers when it rains so incessantly. People always joke about  'well, if you come to Wales you must expect rain'  but his year it is well past a joke. I just hope it clears up for the school holidays...on holiday with children when it rains every day must be misery...there are only so many museums and indoor attractions to visit here, after all beaches are the main reason visitors come to west Wales & beaches in the rain are really not such fun. Still it must be bonanza year for the umbrella manufacturers.
Despite the weather the holiday cottage is fully booked now well into September which is marvellous and means I will have a very busy summer & not least of the busy-ness will be getting bed-linen dry to keep up with the changeovers if the weather does not improve (everything comes back to the weather!). Draping damp laundry on an airer in  the kitchen is such a pain when it should be outside blowing on the washing line in a summer breeze.
This is all bit of  a moan but that what happens when the rain it raineth every day'

Inflatable Stonehenge for a Wet Solstice, Huge Bracket Fungi, Silage In & More Rain

In keeping with tradition today being the Summer Solstice the Farmer & I paid a visit to Stonehenge...however this was Stonehenge as we had never seen it before. It was an inflatable bouncy castle full scale replica of the great stones complete with trilithons and sarsen stones and, quite the maddest, most bonkers thing I have seen a long time!
This extraordinary object was having its first & only appearance in Wales today at the National Botanic Gardens of Wales near Carmarthen at the start of its tour around Britain before reaching London for the Olympics.
When we arrived at the Botanic Gardens there were several coach loads of schoolchildren brought to see the amazing sight and to bounce merrily but the unfortunately the rain had also arrived and so the bouncing was brought to an end which must have very disappointing for the children. We viewed the very realistic rubber titans through a veil of heavy rain and it really was very surreal with the great glass dome of  the  Botanic Gardens in the background.

While the Famer was mowing grass for silage on some fields we rent about a mile away he spyed these amazing fungi growing on a tree. They are  huge fan shaped bracket fungi which were identified as Dryad's Saddle, a rather wonderful name. They are certainly some of the biggest and most impressive fungi that I have ever seen, they must have measured a good 12-14 " across at their widest point.
With the heavy & persisitent rain back with us we are congratulating ourselves on having been able to get our first cut silage crop in & sheeted up before the low pressure arrived yesterday evening. The Farmer & the Sons have worked long hours this week, with the Sons working away from home getting in other peoples silage as well as our own often not finishing until well after dark.
The three days of good weather were just lovely and now we are back to wind & rain & squelching across our shaven fields and rushing waters in our streams again.
I think solstice fires may well struggle tonight.

Tan ar y Comin, Dry Weather at Last, Welsh Game Fair

Last evening on S4C (the Welsh tv channel) the film 'Tan ar y Comin' was shown again . This was the film about a gypsy boy & his horses starring Edward Woodward & directed by David Hemmings, that was made here at Penyrallt nearly 20 years ago. Watching it again was great fun as it brought back lots of memories of a very hectic summer.
A daily invasion of about 60 people and all the film equipment plus wardrobe buses,  props vans, caterers & all and sundry needed to make a film would turn up usually about 7 o'clock to get everything ready to start shooting at 9-ish. We were involved too, not just as the owners of the location but as extras, props suppliers, animal handlers & general farm advisers. I have clear memories of David Hemmings turning up very early one morning ahead of the rest of the crew and sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee with me while waiting for his assistant directors to appear. For some reason the conversation was about breeding poodles!! Very odd as neither of us had poodles.
 It was fascinating watching DH direct his cast and how he prepared every shot and worked through exactly what he wanted with the actors and the camera-man.
 Both the Farmer & Elder Son had several opportunities to be in the film and can be seen briefly appearing in the scenes shot in Newcastle Emlyn at the fair. Elder Son is the naughty little boy who gets scolded for throwing mud at the gypsy boy, the hero of the story.
The farm has changed very little since the film was made, though the house is now yellow not white, thanks to another film project that took place some years later.
'Tan ar y Comin' was shown ahead of a new series being shown on S4C starting next week about the gypsies in Wales,
 'Y Sipswn' in one episode of which Carol Byrne-Jones the director of the Welsh version of the film, is interviewed here on the farm.

After days & days of torrential rain, we have had a day of sunshine which has meant that the men are flat out cutting silage for ourselves and others. It is going to be a very long night for them I suspect. The crop is very heavy  and thick which is good but makes for long hours of tractor driving.

Yesterday the Farmer & I went to the Welsh Game Fair which was held for the first time at the Three Counties Showground near Carmarthen. It opened on Saturday which was so very wet but yesterday the weather improved and we had only a couple of showers. We had a lovely time watching terrieres & lurchers & talking to various people we had not seen for a while. I dearly wanted to bring home some Muscovy ducks but this was not encouraged...the reason given being that they would just be expensive fox food! It is true of course but we had Muscovies years ago who survived many years and were such fun to see around the yard and flying up onto the roof ridges to survey activities. They are real characters & very good mothers unlike many other ducks. Maybe when the Farmer gets himself a new pea-hen I shall mention the Muscovy duck question again.