This month, Roger Evans ponders the decline in veganism, discusses the ploughing of steep land and reminisces about headage payments and scams.
I have no figures to back this up, but I have a clear impression that veganism is in decline.
A few months ago, I used to look at recipes and cooking programmes just to see what they were recommending and it was mostly vegan. It was almost as if they didnt want to offend anyone. But now its all changed vegan is in decline and meat is making a comeback.
Minority
Vegans are in a minority. They are a very noisy minority, but their biggest mistake is trying to tell everyone else what to eat. As a late friend of mine used to say: 4% of bugger all is still bugger all.
Recently I saw a news report on the famine in Somalia. If you couple that with all the grain held up in Ukraine, you get to a very real food issue which is so critical compared with the fad that is to do with being a vegan.
They try to link meat eating and farming to climate change, but something tells me ruminants will be eating very different diets in a few years time.
Drive
Last week I had to drive through mid-Wales with some other farmers. There is always something of interest on these sort of journeys.
Firstly, we see someone ploughing a steep hill next to the road. It was so steep that my companions made me find somewhere to turn and go back so they could watch him.
It was so steep that the man on his tractor did one run down with his plough in the ground and then he had to drive across the bottom of the hill and climb up to the top of the hill on a less steep bit. It all sounds a bit complicated, but Im sure those of you who are interested will have worked it out.
Ploughing steep land is interesting in that its possible to plough it because you have the plough in the ground to act as an anchor and your tractor can grip on the bare soil.
Ploughing steep land was never for me, I hasten to add. But when the subsequent crop was sown, probably rape and grass, it was not safe to go on to the steep bit unless your tractor had metal wheels and they were fitted with lugs which would ding in.
We watched the man for 20 minutes and wondered about the future of the hill. The consensus was that it wouldnt be safe until it was ploughed again.
I can remember a TV programme which was to commemorate an anniversary of the grey Fergie tractor.
Compared with the tractors which had gone before, the grey Fergie was as agile as a mountain goat.
Tractors
The interviewer was talking to a man who had sold hundreds of these tractors and he was asked if he had any conscience about the steep land these tractors would plough.
He said he couldnt believe how dangerous it was when he would see these tractors working. The trouble was, he said, that drivers would get up, eat their breakfasts and leave their empty plate on the table and next to it they would leave their brains and common sense and drive up to the steepest ground you can imagine.
Somewhere in my memory, Im sure I can remember a man who had a little grey tractor and for some reason he wanted to work it across a steep slope. So he chained a telegraph pole under its belly so when it tried to turn over, which it did frequently, it could only go as far as the pole would allow. Makes my blood run cold just thinking about it.
I know a bit about the farm we are passing now. Years ago I knew the lads who did the searing there. When they started they were told there were 3,000 sheep to sear. And there were, but about 1,000 of them were wethers. It was at the time when sheep farmers received a headage payment for every ewe they had.
Its true there were audits, but a wether running down a race to be counted looks very much like a ewe. The only way to find any difference is to catch it, turn it over and see where it pees from, and what auditor is going to do that?
A wether is a very resourceful animal. You could turn it on a hill in winter and it would look after itself and then this cheque would turn up and nearly all of it would be profit. It was a scam.
There were lots of scams, the most common was to borrow your neighbours sheep when the man came around to count them. It was sort of okay, because you were cheating Brussels and that was probably the least
of their problems.
One year I sought to amend my flock numbers after the closing date and the man from the Ministry gave me a serious talking to and fined me 1,000. If I hadnt told him he wouldnt have known. Years later he asked me to speak at a dinner. Big mistake.
