The wrapping paper having been used on the fire and the last of the Christmas cake devoured, we return to some normality on the farm. Christmas clay and pheasant shoots punctuate days spent unblocking drains, loading grain and sugar beet, and repairing the loader.
The weather had been mild so far this winter, but finally we’ve got some proper frost and cold weather. This usually means turning the outside water off and covering things up from the frost. And then finding out the next day that the battery on the tractor parked in front of the piece of machinery you need to get out of the shed has gone flat overnight. Drinkers have to be checked and de-iced and sheds and crops condition checked for damage. On this occasion, a ball valve on a water pipe that we’d covered up froze up and split open, which meant enlisting the help of Norfolk’s worst plumber (me).
One of the most enjoyable but also the most frustrating things about farming is that you have to know a little about a lot of subjects. You have the rudiments of the sciences, you know enough about financial markets to talk to your grain trader and fuel rep, you learn a little bit about all of the trades, but you never do anything often enough to become more than barely proficient at them. So it is with plumbing, the job gets done, but it takes about twice as long and it looks rough. The enjoyment comes from having something different to tackle each day, whilst knowing that if a job comes up beyond your capabilities, there is a book of proper tradesmen in the farm office to call upon. (Although, we have scared a succession of tradies off in the past with jobs that were too dirty, dangerous or awkward for them to take on. This is how you find yourself stuck up in a dusty void between two sheds trying to get some signal to watch a YouTube video on how to safely mount a junction box to an asbestos sheet wall).
At time of writing, we’ve just sent the last of our harvested sugar beet to the factory whilst the harvesting contractors rush to lift the last cropped fields in the surrounding area. Sugar beet keep fresh in the ground over winter, but start to rot as soon as they are harvested, so you aim to lift them in two or three visits from your harvesting contractor over the sugar beet “campaign” – which is the season that British Sugar operate their factories – usually from September to January or February. One of their four factories will typically wash, slice and boil 16,000 tonnes of sugar beet a day, which is enough to fill 2.4 million 1kg bags of Silver Spoon sugar on 3,300 pallets. That’s an impressively large amount of sugar for a day’s work, but the UK still imports the equivalent of 6 billion bags of (mostly cane) sugar each year to meet demand. Not all of our sugar ends up in bags for retail sale: the bakeries, mills, breweries, soft drinks companies, sauce factories and confectioners usually order their syrups and liquid sugar ingredients by the tanker load direct from the factory.
British Sugar are a monopoly supplier and customer of sugar beet, so farmers and their National Farmers Union (NFU) reps must buy their seed from them, negotiate a sale price and the agreed contract tonnage, and sell it to them. As you might expect, that doesn’t tend to favour good outcomes for the farmer. The NFU and British Sugar have had a number of noisy (well, noisy in our space) arguments over recent years about contract prices. We only really grow sugar beet as a “break crop” to help prevent the build up of pests and weeds in the wheat crops, and to spread some of the work out from harvest time into the winter. It’s otherwise a difficult crop to grow well. It damages the soil structure of the fields (which requires time and many earthworms). It causes expensive damage to gateways and tracks. It’s hard on men and machinery because you’re working in dark, muddy, cold conditions and, as I expect you’ll have noticed, it puts a lot of mud on the road. Which can be a PR headache - another subject in farming at which I'm barely proficient.
