Phew!

Farmers round these parts heave a sigh of relief as a spot of late warm, sunny weather helps to get the wheat harvested properly at last!

This is the view from the far paddocks and even I felt relieved for my boss, or rather her husband, that that job was finally done. Over winter I’ll be carting barrow loads of that straw in and out of the stables. Eventually, after being left to rot down a while, it will be ploughed back into the land.

There’s something very satisfying about country life.

On my reading list is a new release called ‘English Pastoral’ by a Lake District sheep farmer called James Rebanks. An excerpt from a review - “ It’s vehement, powerful, even aggressive. It’s a call for change. It’s political and urgent. It’s hellishly ambitious. Some of the statistics and practises are shocking. As consumers, society makes it hard for us to expect anything less than absolute convenience and rock bottom prices when out comes to food. It protects us from seeing the true cost of such systems. But coronavirus has shaken things up. We keep thinking about our communities and how we live. Let’s extend that to thinking about how we eat. James book is a great place to start. “

It’s saddens me that country life always seems to be under attack from one thing or another. No wonder dairy farms are disappearing in their hundreds. God only knows what coronavirus and Brexit will leave us with.