Thetownend.com

Spent the last two days delivering corn seed to farmers,picked up from Grimsby then 6 deliveries to various farms around England finishing in Aldbourne(Manor Farm) earlier today.
Got to say the majority work darned hard and i am always amazed at the wonders they do with there land,and in many cases land that is not there's but local lanes etc.
Of course there is always the debate on how well they are payed but the six i have met the last few days were hardworking folk up at the crack of dawn every day of the year,thats not to say there are farmers who have managers who do that.
Was a pleasure to be at the farm in Aldbourne earlier,lovely morning with the crows scrapping and the sheep being fed,even got a nice mug of coffee from the farmers wife ;D
Busy time of year for them and when driving around the patterns they make in the land are incredible...like giant patchwork earth blankets in all different colours................here,here to our farmers.

Manor Farm, Aldbourne......have known it and its inhabitants all my life!!  Was brought up in the village.  Can tell you, the farmers up here are tearing their hair out with the weather just now, as they try to get the harvest in - the barley is rotting in the ground,  Doesn't bode too well for the single malts this year.

My dads side were all agricultural until the 1980's. My first home was Kettle Lane Farm in West Ashton.

Once upon a time the family had a fair bit of land in Chippenham which is now all built on (sadly not sold off by my family!). Afterwards my grandad worked on a farm in Lacock until the 90's.

Although I'm not a farmer nor have much experience, I have a lot of time for the industry.

Fucking hell, I thought this thread would be an Alan Partridge style rant about lazy farmers, tongue sandwiches, infected spinal cords in a bap and the big eared boys in the farm yard, but instead the TEF has gone all John Craven! This is not the place for reasoned debate. :no:

What's not to say that it won't go that way?

Plus my dad always told me that you could make pigs smoke and feeding beef burgers to swans was okay.

I'd quite like to be a farmer

EU money grabbing, work shy bastards the lot of em.
Alway's pleading poverty, but a bit like dentist's, never met a poor one yet.

All joking aside, you can't beat british beef, fresh free range eggs, fresh english fruit and veg and fresh milk, butter, cheese etc....

British farmers and their produce knock the tyre burning frogs and the rest of europe into a tin hat.

get orfff my laaand!

You go around the country and see pubs and shops boarded up, don't see many famhouses boarded up though!!!  Although I do think it is a bit sad when you drive past a farm and it is obvious there are very few or no animals in residence, all turned over to arable.  Went to my old home - Hankerton - the other day, now it was all milking and hay/sileage when I was there, Christ it's all sheep now it seems!!!  How times have changed!!!!

I'm currently living on a massive pig farm in Austria. All the land around here is owned by farmers that mostly grow sweetcorn. The place is overrun by deer and earlier this year i hit a baby deer with my car as it ran out of the cornfields. Little cunt smashed my bumper in and ran off.

Farming is more or less the only industry, which still continues to be bailed out by the tax payer. Only something like 1% of the workforce are directly engaged in farming....sheep are quite profitable, they end up in elephant legs, the length and breadth of the country.

Farming is a curious thing...as it is largely responsible for the destruction of our natural environment, whereas many see it as its custodian.

Amazing what people consider to be 'nature' - many seem not to realise just how much of an impact man has had on the British landscape over the years. Not necessarily a negative though - we all need food!

Too true...reminds me of a cartoon of a vicar looking over a garden wall at a well-tended garden, saying to the gardener, patronisingly, "Isn't God's creation wonderful", and the curmudgeonly old guy responding "Don't know about that, you should have seen it when he had it to himself."

Well the people at Manor have had a good summer crop...they managed to get it all in before the wetter weather arrived.

You killed Bambi - cunt.

We have lost loads of industy in the uk : shipbuilding, steel, mining, engineering, car manufacture etc etc....

Always amazed me, peoples attitude to farmers, feeling sorry for them...

The ship builders and engineers can fuck off and do somethIng else (that's life) but we have to rally round farmers and bail them out when the going gets tough??

That's from me.....country boy.

Interesting point.....could be a prompt to a TEF debate on the socio-historical/political culture of UK.  All the propaganda we have been fed for generations is that Britain is essentially a green and pleasant land made up of cricket on village greens, thatched cottages and docile peasants tilling the land for the Country Landowners Association.  (I like the green and pleasant bit, and am glad to have had this time living in the most beautiful part - but talk to real highlanders about what is happening to their land now, and what happened to it 200 years ago, and you get a different picture.)  At the same time, even though the Industrial Revolution brought huge wealth and power to (parts of) the UK, we are still fed the notion that, deep down, it was a bad thing, and poverty and unemployment in the outer estates of our cities, brought on by the demise of the industrial base, is something that should be hidden and forgotten about.  Then when order breaks down, we are all conditioned to believe that it is some sort of feral underclass which is responsible.....

Rant over.

When did you live in Aldbourne HR?

Its a good point but when was the last time you ate a boat or munched on a piece of coal,or nibbled on a bit of steel,farmers feed the nation more than ever now,in older times many people produced there own food,that is not the case now so farmers are important to us all.
And lets be clear...any farmer who gets into a financial mess does not get any help from the government and never has done unlike many other industries....they do get compensated when the government/EU in there wisdom decide that they are farming to much and basicly they are paid not to produce :hmmm:

Common Agricultural Policy, much like the Common Fisheries Policy have contributed significantly to to destroying the farming and fishing industries in the UK while giving a handy leg-up to our European competitors.

I grew up on a farm down Forest Lane Pewsham. Where were you?

You are quite wrong in that assertion Reg. Ask any farmer who recives less for his produce than it costs to produce.
As for the CAP, most of it goes to fictitious tobacco farmers in Italy, or the gentleman landowners for growing nought. Meanwhile we go to Sainsburies & find it hard to get British meat it's all dutch or danish

I like what you did there

My mum still does.  We moved there in 1956, when I was but a babe, and finally flew the nest in 1973....but still visit, and will no doubt do so a lot more now we are moving back to Wiltshire.  Do you have links there too???