Farming

I’m sufficiently nostalgic for the British supermarkets I left behind in 2023 that on visits to the UK I run a small-scale import business between London and Lisbon. I restock: Tesco Dijon mustard (top-drawer and a bargain), rice bran oil (unavailable in Portugal) and (do not tell Portuguese customs) blocks of extra-sharp British cheddar along with bags of slender fine green beans, tails all lined up marvellously on the same side. Thus I was put out by the new Chancellor’s warning earlier this month that the government will be ‘watching closely for any suggestions that customers are being taken for a ride’ in supermarkets. John Healey’s keeping an eye out for ‘price-gouging’, assuring the public that ‘our regulators have the powers to clamp down on it’.

When Juliet said of Romeo that ‘a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’, she spoke a common truth. We identify and love flowers by and for their scent. But you will struggle to find many scented flowers for sale in Britain. This is largely because in the 1950s, the UK’s home-grown flower business was flattened by the Dutch government. Huge investment in its domestic flower industry saw the first air-freighted blooms arrive in this country, followed by the ‘Flying Dutchman’ lorries in the 1980s. Today the average Briton spends £28 a year on flowers, up from £8 in 1984, yet 86 per cent of these are imported, most via the Netherlands from Ecuador, Kenya and Ethiopia.

It has been calving time in Devon and I arrive from London ready to work hard. The day starts at 6.30 a.m., when we check the field to see if any cows have calved. We check the ‘springer’ herd every two hours until 10 p.m. and intervene if a cow is in difficulty. Newborn calves are fed colostrum and taken down to the shed with their mothers. The farm I am working on keeps its cows outside all year round – not for this herd that little patch of blue some call the sky. But what the cattle gain in freedom, the farm labourers lose in comfort. The last time I was here for calving, in the spring of 2018, the weather was biblical: it was still snowing in April. Thankfully, the weather has held, but I’m not sure the same can be said of my body.

Can there be any thinking person who has passed a lorry filled with live animals peering out through the slats on their way to slaughter, without a momentary shudder? How many of us would take an opportunity to inspect what happens there? Be honest: you recoil from the thought. ‘Slaughterhouse’. So unpleasant we frenchify it as ‘abattoir’. Hunting leaves me cold yet has an honesty about it: you see and choose your prey, and kill it yourself: morally a million miles from the systematic industrial slaughter of creatures we never look in the eye, couldn’t bear to see killed, and so turn away, pay others to do the killing, and deny our own agency. There are things we’d rather not think about. Take note of them. They’re the first signs of rejection.

Kenya When a mob of Somali cattle I bought in Kenya’s far north arrived on the farm in February, we quarantined them in a remote corner. To protect them against lions they slept in a boma with high drystone walls topped with treacherous thorns, guarded by a fierce police-licenced guard named Joseph. The Somalis are great stockmen, though these beautiful beasts, known as Awai, are more long-legged and rangy than our traditional ranch Borans. My lorryload of cattle had survived a two-year drought on rocks and dust and they could walk hundreds of miles to water, yet they were randy and highly fertile. These are ancient cattle, of the sort that you see in petroglyphs and ochre painted on rock faces across Africa. I have fallen in love with them.

Crude estimates Why is crude oil measured in barrels?  — From medieval times onwards, all sorts of commodities were measured in barrels for convenience, from wine to eels to whale oil. However, standardisation only arrived in fits and starts. Since Richard III’s time, a barrel of wine was defined as 42 ‘wine gallons’, but this wasn’t the same as 42 gallons of water. When the US oil industry started in the mid 19th century, traders adopted the same measure as was used for selling wine. However, in 1824, Britain had standardised a gallon as 20 per cent larger than a wine gallon, the latter of which was renamed a ‘US gallon’. Hence a barrel of oil is only 35 imperial gallons.

Kenya While we were loading two stud bulls and eight hoggets onto a lorry in my ranch’s yard in the African dawn this morning, the farmer buying them saw my bandaged right hand and asked with great concern: ‘Ooh my brother! Did you injure yourself handling your cattle?’ Kenyans are by nature warm and kind. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said standing in an honest expanse of cow shit. ‘It was no accident. Just an operation to straighten out my fingers.’ ‘Do you find it tiresome to drive?’ asked a ranching neighbour at an ebullient lunch overlooking the wilderness towards Mount Kenya this afternoon. ‘No, but it’s tricky if I try to shoot in the general direction of a monkey raiding the garden.

Tall order Two naval cadets were killed and 19 injured when a Mexican sail training vessel, the Cuauhtemoc, crashed into Brooklyn Bridge. How many fully-rigged sailing vessels are there in the world? — Sail Training International lists 383 such ships which have taken part in races and regattas in recent years. — The oldest still in use, Constitution, was built in 1797. It is moored in Boston as a museum ship but still undertakes voyages. — The Australian navy trains sailors on the STS Young Endeavour, a gift from the UK government to mark the 200th anniversary of European settlement in 1988. Other countries which still train naval recruits on tall ships include India, Poland, Germany and Spain. China launched its first naval training tall ship, the Po Lang, last year.