Farming blog

The Practical Farm Ideas blog is updated with the latest news and useful information regularly, allowing industry professionals to stay on top of developments occurring throughout the farming world.

The Farm Ideas blog has been published for 15 years or more but was largely invisible.

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Editor's notes

Mike Donovan comments on diverse issues which affect farmers. Recent issues have criticised the warnings about machinery firesThese messages concentrate on telling us about fires and how dangerous they are, how much they cost the country and how many people get hurt. Then follows a brief mention of blowing chaff and dust off and following manufacturer’s recommendations - which are necessarily bland as every combine on fire requires replacing. So they faill to mention fitting automatic extinguishers, or smoke alarms. They fail to recommend having a water tank, pump and hose fitted to the chassis of one or more grain trailers, providing a source of water and a means of delivery which is on the spot. Every large fire starts as something small and an agreed procedure as what to do can snuff it out before it takes hold.

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Flooding is another pet topic for Editor’s Notes. Spiking (called aerating) grassland is something I know works, because I made a spiker in 1988 and found it was amazing at increasing the porosity of grass swards. (and increasing grass yields) It was one of the reasons I set up this magazine, and is featured, with construction details in PFI Vol 1-1. For more than 30 years I have been trying to get authorities to take notice of a way to reduce the rainfall run-off from land which provides a watershed to our waterways that flood. For 30 years I have had “oh yes, very interesting, I will pass it on”. In that time countless homes have been flooded by water which could have been absorbed in the place it landed if there was a slit in the surface through which it could flow.

Editor’s Notes will sometimes look at the absurdity of subsidies. What is the energy ‘price lock’ than a means of keeping gas and electricity at the top of their price spike. We are subsidising farmers to retire as they are all so old, and then subsidising young people to take up farming, and wonder why starter farms are so expensive.

The farming industry needs the support of the general public, and this has been broadly achieved in recent years. Yet public sentiment can change rapidly. Pleading poverty when the the farm gate price is rising parallel to other input commodities seems like asking for trouble when there are people in other sectors who are genuinely on the breadline.

Editor’s Notes looks at aspects of today’s farming which are drawn to our attention by farmers and others who want to stay anonymous but often have hugely valid points to make, and we ask and encourage people to get in touch.

The pic shows your editor at the European Paliament chamber. While we have left the EU there’s a real need to keep close and cooperative with each other. Our departure does not means getting further apart, as the Ukraine war illustrates.

Best wishes and I hope to welcome you on board this novel form of agri journalism, funded entirely by readers rather than suppliers.

Mike Donovan
editor and publisher
editor@farmideas.co.uk

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