Oh, it is a farmer's life

We were at our neighbour's 90th b.day party in the middle of January. Quite trad: the PP came to say mass and offer the sacrament. Two dozen, incl. PP, sat down to a long table with heaping plates of hot turkey&ham or salmon plus mash&roasters and mixed root veg. Followed by huge quarters of apple pie (or cheesecake for wimps) and then mugs of strong tea. I got talking to the oldest chap, now a father in his turn, from the family that bought the rest of 'our' farm in 1996. I complemented him on his two nieces, whom we see more often because the second son was doing most of the farming; the oldest having escaped to college and engineering. We were ould fellas on about the youth of today in surprisingly complementary terms. Those nieces were hard as nails, up for anything, alert, interested and beginning to be assets although neither has started primary school. Their cousins might do Scouts (on the weekend, like) learning about owls, but the nieces could be up to their knees in shite, facing down a skittish beast, any day of the week because that's what farmers do.

Not everyone wishes . . . to spend the majority of their life dressed in the kind of clothes designed to be hosed down. But those who do tend to be assets. That quote is from Field Work: What Land Does to People & What People Do to Land by Bella Bathurst; my latest dead-tree book. It is excellent. The first chapter describes her riding shotgun with The Fallen Animal Guy; who is licensed to haul away stock which have the misfortune to die before getting lurried to the abattoir and added to the food-chain. We have the equivalent here. Years ago, a friend from USA was visiting with his son. By coincidence we had a dead sheep in a wheelbarrow awaiting removal. Friend thought this was an excellent teaching moment for his city-boy teenager. When the ramp of the dump-truck came down there was a rolling waft of mammal guts from an enormous cow with legs pointing every which way. Our visitors took a step back and half raised their arms in futile defense. A teaching moment indeed . . . Bathurst's chapter is like that in sp♠des.

The rest of the book explores other aspects of the darker side of British farming. But it is also a rolling tribute to families who rise to the challenge of wresting a living from the land and the hoops [financial, ethical, bureaucratic, inter-personal] they must negotiate to do what they love - rain or shine, hail or heat-stroke, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, 70 years a lifetime. My second [that's 2/2] graduate student was a farmer from East Galway. Not a farmer's son, although he was that too, but a farmer and contractor in his own right although only 22. He'd put himself through college getting paid €€€s for driving machines during silage season and any time something big needed to be moved somewhere else. I guess he learned to reverse a tractor-and-trailer though a narrow gateway years before he was legally entitled to do that.  A tractor is essentially the same [because the design-of-things makes it intuitive] as a back-hoe - dumper-truck, - forklift - combine-harvester . . . and it's a transferable skill.

Perhaps more significantly, when you're at the end of the far-acre and your mower stops going it's not so easy to call for expert help and the help can't come till after the weekend and the hay must be knocked because a front is barrelling in from the Atlantic. Farmers don't give up then, they scratch the head, roll up the sleeves, find the lump-hammer in the toolbox and see if it can't be fixed, or bodged enough to finish this task before dark. Bathurst sums it up: [son of the soil] works at a recruitment agency in London who only employs people from an agricultural background. The thing about farmers, he says, is that they’re adaptable – the human multitools of the professional world. ‘You get someone off a farm and they can fix a car, fix a plug, fix a boiler, put their hand in a ewe and pull a lamb out – they’re so practically based that . . . they’re like twice three times better.  I feel the same about anyone [chapeaux! The Boy] who has successfully finished a degree at The Open University. Except that farmers have all the gumption, drive, stoicism and can-do of OU students and have a Masters in Vice-grips.