I’m just back from the dairy farm up the hill. Unfailingly helpful, John has agreed to collect a 10ft roller we’ve bought from another neighbouring farm which is on the market, with equipment being sold separately. I’ll repay him with sausages, our customary form of exchange. Commercial feed rearing the latest porkers has cost double what it did last year. It’s a familiar story. Furthermore, the drought has meant lower forage yields but also limited grazing – many cattle farmers have been feeding precious rations for weeks. There’s a long, expensive winter ahead.
The roller is needed for our soft river meadow where hooves compress the soil, leaving it dented and uneven. Access from either end is practically laborious, so to keep one permanently in the field is ideal. The solution, however, is bittersweet.
The farm for sale is known locally not by its name, but by that of the family who have farmed it for decades – the people, with time, having become synonymous with the place. They were of a different generation, but nonetheless forward-thinking in their equality. His pride was the tractors, hers the livestock, and their stories endure: the way he would tuck their baby under the hedge while he ploughed; the farrowing sow that went for her (“because I was in my nightdress, see”); the favourite cow that leant out of its stall at market to lick her as she passed.
They now lie buried together in a field opposite the house, and various factors have forced a sale. We won’t see their like again – and it is also possible we won’t see their farm worked again either. Such is the premium on land in this part of the country, it will command a price well beyond the affordability of anyone who wants to run, as they did, a modest family enterprise.
Like a local estate recently divided following a death, land here increasingly is passing out of agricultural use and becoming an “amenity”, or merely a tax-benefiting investment. So much is impoverished by this, not least the core identity and cohesion of the traditional rural community.
Someone expressed concern to the farmer at the idea of a tractor passing over his grave, which he quickly dismissed. It would be a far greater sadness if one didn’t.
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