Dear Editor,
The harvest is mostly gathered in. Regionalised May ground and air frosts threatened the fruit that had enjoyed outstanding bud and blossom. Results were better than expected. Bramleys are now in store, Conference pears have been sold, Braeburn will soon be picked.
Two Cinderellas of the apple and pear world seem surprisingly unwanted. The Russet has lost favour with the supermarkets if not the general public and the glorious Rolls Royce of fruit, the Doyenne du Comice, a French named pear but deliciously English, stays ignored upon the trees.
Hops still grow in Kent. They are our county’s iconic crop despite the frantic rush to cast the Kentish fields in vineyards. Here the weather affected productivity but wise and careful attention saw healthy hops find their way into the new pockets, rather smaller than in the past and a necessity through an EU directive and hence an expensive new bailer.
Our local Ploughing Match has been and gone, attracting an ever substantial number of lovers of the land mingling with trippers, machines, traders and the business community.
We now await the National Fruit Show on Detling Hill. I shall be looking out for that 3lb Howgate Wonder and the rather flash New Holland T4 FNV.
We saw a reliable dozen and a half Czech workers leave us recently. Most are returning to university. Strange to think that in my student days, I would provide labour for the hop-picking from my school and college friends. They came partly to help pay for the next year of study and student living. They weren’t too proud to pick up the farm wage, get up early, load trailers, drive tractors and hump hop pokes for a few weeks. They have become lawyers and diplomats, accountants, sports agents, teachers, probation officers, all grateful and full of fun memories of those times on the land. Why don’t British students want to earn money in a similar way these days?
Neither student nor farmer can afford the massive asking price for our local farmland. A 70 acre field fetched over £8,000 an acre recently. No house, no buildings, no building potential, merely land. We rent out the adjoining field to an enterprising lettuce grower for £200 an acre. Had we decided to buy those 70 acres, the sums become mind boggling in the search for a return on capital.
It seems extraordinary that so many farmers voted for Brexit; a touch of turkeys voting for Christmas! I can see why they did so. Faceless, clipboard wielding bureaucrats in Brussels peddling pointless legislative demands have frustrated farmers once too often. Alas they won’t go away, DEFRA is riddled with them. My past life involved schools and the magistracy. Michael Gove seems to have followed me around. He made no friends in his former posts; I fear his stay with agriculture, probably short, will follow the same pattern. He refuses to explain his policy on migrant workers. He wants a ‘Green Brexit’, a beautiful countryside and yet the government says ‘grow more, sell more and export more’. The ‘Gove’ parts of ‘gove-rnment’ are surely acres apart!
