Anton Coaker farms 1,500 acres of tenanted peat on Dartmoor, lying roughly between 900ft and 1300ft, enjoying just under 100inches of rain. he is also an active grazier on the adjoining common, the Forest of Dartmoor. He also writes a monthly column for the south west edition of British Farmer and Grower magazine.
I expect many of you have your own tales of frustration with the on-going lack of paperwork to fill out the SFP. Lack of forms, lack of re-mapped maps, lack of will to do any more paperwork at a very busy time of year.
Our household is, at time of typing, rueing the continuing lack of maps, which then seriously affects our ability to safely make a SFP claim. The clock is ticking ominously. Alison had, when I got back in the house t’other night, had to top her afternoon coffee mug up with a generous slosh of Stag's Breath single malt. We both recognise that this isn’t going to get the forms filled in, but I was sympathetic.
I seem to recall the big RPA boss promised faithfully that all the new maps would be on farm by the end of April. It would appear he wasn’t being absolutely truthful in this statement, and that his pants may very well be on fire. Wouldn’t it be nice if the man who promised us the paperwork in time for his own deadline now faced the same penalties that we do?
Ah! Now, these here electronic ear tags fer to stick in the yows. (or yaws as we sometimes call them in the westcountry. I will have to do a bit of a piece on these nuances of farming dialect one day. The origins of some terms are deeper than you’re expecting, and very interesting, if you’re of that bent).
Anyway, it occurs to me, how long before some enterprising shepherd starts peeling away the plastic, so he can insert the chips under the skin of his breeding ewes. When a mob then disappear off the hill - for such thievery is rife in some parts I hear - he might then let it be known that they have gone and advise that there’s cash rewards for information leading to the identification of the perpetrator.
The chip is, as I understand, a positive individual ID, and once hidden under the skin, it would likely be very hard for a ‘tea leaf’ to find and remove- unlike the stupid tag of course. Run through the scanner at a market or abattoir though, it could still be read – in fact, wouldn’t it be obvious something was up, as the tea leaf would’ve put his own tag in, so a scanner would pick up two readings on one sheep.
And now there would then be a financial paper trail back to a very worried man indeed, for you and I both know some hill farmers take a very grave view of such thievery and some are wont to overreact. (one of us might even very well be such a man).
Now the NFU and your humble diarist must condemn such improper use of the chips and whatever sanctions the owner of the flock might impose. Nonetheless, we’re watching with interest.
Sorry, back to the niceties of dialect. I love the variety of dialect, and communities, still hidden in the UK's backwoods. There is no doubt that there are millennia of heritage visible, just beneath the veneer of wealthy blow ins and urban migrants. Deep amongst the Welsh hills, you’ll find families that have been farming those slopes since, well since before the Romans I would guess.
Across the Downlands in the South, there are some extraordinarily deeprooted folk. (wasn’t it in Wilts or Dorset that some ancient DNA recovered from archaeological site was matched almost exactly- improbably exactly even - to a local bloke, propping up the public bar just down the road, clutching a mug of cider and wondering what all the fuss was about.
Out on the Scottish Isles, the last millennia of sea borne movements are still etched clearly across the population and their dialect. Even among urban Scotland’s abrasive drawl, there is a distinct linguistic trail tiptoeing across a thousand years and a sea crossing.
Vernacular Cornish farming terms have a clear affinity with those across the Irish Sea, although the terms have been assimilated into an Anglo Saxon tongue. It’s a precious thing, and all the more so since it’s almost invisible to urban British academia. It continues quite happily to organically evolve, as all things must.
With this in mind, I was intrigued by a report a week or two back, from some worthy body, desperately concerned about racism in rural communities. Apparently, having a lack of ethnic diversity in our communities makes us all terribly racist. Oh! said I, and where exactly are the BNP councillors all voted into office? In the event of parliamentary fudge leading to proportional representation, which communities are going to responsible for the first BNP MPs? Is it in these leafy bucolic beds of rural fascism, where the ‘white only’ population must be driving newcomers out with pitchforks? Strangely no, it isn’t. Anyway, I find their conclusions regarding rural Britain not a little insulting, on several levels.
I’m off , Anton
Anton Coaker, NFU blogger