A hard living on the land
by Peter Mullen, The Conservative Woman:
SEXAGESIMA, you may be disappointed to learn, has nothing to do with sex. It is The Book of Common Prayer’s name for the Sunday which is roughly sixty days before Easter.
As a country parson for thirteen years, I got to know farmers well. Very down-to-earth they are too. I recall a rather delicate metropolitan type complaining to a farmer’s wife after the annual agricultural show dinner that in his speech her husband had made too many earthy references: ‘For goodness’ sake, instead of manure, can’t you get him to say fertiliser?’ The farmer’s wife replied, ‘I’ve only just got him to say manure!’ Whatever tales people like to tell of rich farmers, it’s a hard life. As one farmer said, ‘Perennials are crops that grow like weeds; biennials are the crops that die this year rather than next; and hardy annuals are those that don’t come up at all.’
Now farmers are having the worst time since the great famines and depressions of the 18th and 19th centuries. Nowadays the sower is hard-pressed to go out to sow because he is buried under a mountain of paperwork and tied to his office chair with red tape. British farming standards are among the highest in the world, yet there come still more calls for animal welfare improvements. Our fine butcher here in Eastbourne told me a particularly nasty tale – nasty for our lambs, that is. The French said they will buy British lambs only if we agree to ship them live across the Channel where they will be slaughtered, purely so that a French label can be stuck on them. But French abattoirs and their practices are squalid compared with ours. So it is the animals that suffer.
A particularly ripe piece of idiocy and injustice happened recently when the Advertising Standards Authority banned the promotion of top-quality British pork because the advertisements offended vegetarians and animal welfare campaigners and were deemed to be unfair to foreign competitors, who in any case produce sub-standard meat. What is this blend of bureaucracy, sentimentality and foolishness except national suicide? – a subject to which I shall return.
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