Fire and Rage

(No Rain Was Available)

with help from the unfashionable and probably inappropriate words of Rudyard Kipling

Fire

,

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

The heat has been brutal. The ground is dry and cracked. There is no grass, only dust.

My first job every morning is to cart out precious hay to the ewes and lambs, an unthinkable task in August. There is nothing else for them to eat. They cling to the fence-line in the morning while it still gives a little shade, then they seek out tall thistles or sit in the ditch.

The ram and wethers do what rams do, they sleep, resentful of the heat, but unprepared to make a fuss about it. The pony sulks in her shelter. The alpine goats crawl under the hedgerow. The boer types are out sunbathing. If they could talk they would tell you this is called spring in South Africa.

What work I can do in the garden is largely done before ten or eleven, and then I have to come and hide in the shade. Rebuild the broken website. Sort out the admin (of which more later.) Then we have to go back as late as possible to put birds to bed and bring in goats, waiting for the temperature to drop again to bearable, often in vain.

This morning, the westerly wind brought smoke from the wildfires in South Wales across the vale, and for the first hour or two the sun lost the battle, and it felt like farming after war. The splits and craters of the drought, the lingering smoke, the coughing animals.

We vaccinated against blue tongue, a virulent and devastating virus which is rife just to the south of us, and on its way, and pray we weren’t too late. That’s a level of despair I’ll save for another time, I think there’s enough doom in this update.

It’s exhausting.

Rage 1

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

We have battled on, the little permaculture farm, the smallholding, the butt of everyone’s jokes, ignored and mocked by all the big farmers, for twenty five years.

Just lately, they’ve all caught up. Chemical Andy, the arable guy from the village suddenly popped up on a little film. One of the seemingly endless three letter organisations coordinated a ‘cluster’ of local farmers and now, out of a blue sky (or actually a grey, smoke leaden sky, mostly thanks to their collective centuries of extractive abuse of the land) they are plump with new members, who are suddenly the experts on agroecology and re-gen-er-a-tive agriculture. You can see their minds trying to remember the right word as they speak.

These organisations, supposedly administering the wellbeing of our countryside, with less of a clue even than the government, often herd their virtue signalling volunteers around, arming them with strimmers and mowers, destroying deep swards and verges which might have had a hope of surviving this incinerating summer, but are now scalped, in the name of tidying up.

They mess with things they don’t understand, and they become involved in big money by becoming DELIVERY PARTNERS (which already has a horrible, Orwellian ring to it).

I wonder why? Well, The Farmer Collaboration Fund application window is open.

Sounds good, right? Let’s see what it gets spent on.

7. What you can use the grant for

We expect you’ll spend most of the fund on facilitators and group collaboration. You should always consider value for money when making decisions about what to spend.

The FCF can include irrecoverable VAT.

7.1 Paying facilitators

7.2 Paying for group advice and activities

7.3 Events, hospitality and travel costs

7.4 Paying the delivery partner

7.5 Administration costs

7.6 Paying for other activities

(Full Text Here)

And here was me just improving my soil, creating wildlife habitat and growing good food.

I have contacted the founders of this ‘cluster’ - it includes every large farmer around us who laughed at us for two decades for our ‘muck and magic’ - most of whom have the same landlord as us, and asked why, for pity’s sake, we weren’t included, since we were doing this stuff before the rest of them had been handed the glossary for homework.

“Oh do get in touch” they said.

I did.

Tumbleweeds.

Rage 2

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

I am angry enough about all of this, without being hit by a drought so severe that my previously very, very resilient fields would have struggled BEFORE the brain dead behemoth that was the ‘conservation’ squad arrived to install fencing and brutally murdered my soil structure.

The huge, compressed, gaping trenches they left, further enhancing the post-war apocalyptic landscape effect, have been set quite possibly for eternity by forty five days without rain, and none forecast. Angry doesn’t cover it.

We Ride At Dawn

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

I am old and I am tired. I am a lot of deeply unfashionable and undesirable things. Rather like old Rudyard’s poem.

But I am not a quitter.

The two of us talked the other day about Gen X v1.0 women like ourselves, conditioned by a childhood which was characterised by total parental indifference. They could have been said, I suppose, to have personified treating [our] success and failure just the same, because they absolutely did not give a damn, one way or the other.

Picking ourselves up, dusting ourselves down, and starting over is in our DNA.

So, I signed off on the application for our very, very tiny grant, mostly for things which we already do, but significantly to put us into organic conversion, and at the ripe old age of 66, I will rebuild this farm if it kills me. If it does, I’ll go doing God’s work because here we are called, and here we will succeed.

Food shortages are already predicted, indeed, I think they’re part of the plan. Speaking of plans, I don’t really have one. I will get up and I will bust a gut growing food somehow - there will be ways we can work.

I’ll see you on the other side.

and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry

and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,

then your light will rise in the darkness,

and your night will become like the noonday.

Isaiah 58:10

The Rest of ‘If’ for Reference

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

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