I guess I should start this by thanking the editor, as I am stretching editorial deadlines to the max, but I didn’t think it was right to write an article before election day. The fallout is still being digested by the media discussing those who have gained and those who have lost.
Whether your chosen candidate was successful or not I guess the results now show the path that we are going to be on, Boris has bashed it and as I listened to him on the radio this morning while taking the kids to school the roadblock has been smashed and Brexit is on, no ifs, no buts, or maybes.
Time will tell how the country will fair, it may well be years before there is any clarity as to whether this is going to be a good move for us as a nation, but that’s life, we all make daily decisions about our farms and businesses the outcomes of which may be different to those that were expected when those decisions were made. Reality is things change and the skill is going to be making the right calls along the way to steer a path through the changes that will inevitably come for our industry.
It came out in the press during the election or maybe just before that Boris sees himself akin to Winston Churchill, he certainly at this moment has the support of the people in a similar way, with people backing him who would not normally be traditional conservative voters. There is still lots to do, and I suspect the EU will not make the ride too easy, because if it’s easy there may be others who will want to leave and the EU certainly doesn’t want that. So, while many in the country think that it is now more straightforward my suspicions are that in the words of the great man himself “This is not the end, It is not even the beginning of the end but it is perhaps the end of the beginning”.
So while 12 December 2019 will go down in British history as the date that effectively ratified the decision to leave the EU, the same date also heralds an anniversary less widely known or discussed. While Greta and her gang are at the COP 25 conference in Madrid forecasting the end of the world as we know it, it was ten years ago to the day, 12 December 2009 at the then COP 15 conference as it was called that professor, prophet and soothsayer Al Gore, (yes he of the inconvenient truth et al), repeatedly referenced in his speech to the conference that state of the art computer modelling predicted that the north polar ice caps could be completely ice free within the next seven to ten years to 2019!… well spot on there Al.
If these are the computer modelling prediction accuracies that Greta and the gang are going on about I think we all have a right to be a little cynical, indeed as we head in to 2020 North America has been affected by one of the worst winters with record cold temperatures reached and the onset of winter much earlier than normal. Many crops in America and Canada remain unharvested, yet has there been reports of this in the press/BBC? It doesn’t really fit the warming agenda does it? It would be much easier to bang on about meat and planting trees at a rate of however many per second as set out in the political manifestos.
I accept that one bad winter does not make a climate, but neither does one drought, yet it appears to be heresy to be a sceptic or a non believer, yet hard as it is to believe it there are many scientists who don’t buy the Greta line, science does not work on a majority vote.
Which ever way you see things, there may be more heat and perhaps food shortages ahead or conversely we may be entering a period of colder weather along the lines of the maunder minimum. Whatever is predicted, what we do know is we just don’t know what lies ahead, whether climate or politically. Two things to bear in mind, the cold kills far more than ever the heat does, imagine if all this rain had fallen as snow where would we be then, and the planet has been warmer and with more CO2 in the atmosphere and life on the planet survived.
On a day to day level the weather dried up enough to allow the cattle yards to be cleared out, normally this is a monthly job but we had to stretch things round from September to end November, by no means ideal but done now, little else has been achieved on the land. The drill has not moved for over four weeks and the decision has now been made not to even try until the new year we have secured a tonnage of spring wheat seed so it will now be a direct swap what winter wheat remains to be drilled will now be spring wheat. We will see what the new year brings.
The only thing remaining now is to wish you all a very Happy New Year, let us hope it’s a prosperous one! The Christmas presents are all packed away or hopefully being well used, I always had a policy that we only have useful presents and no plastic rubbish. The tree has been taken down; I love to put all the decorations up, but equally love to have the house back to some sense of normality. I do love to declutter! I do believe that could be a contradiction in terms in the case of most farmers! The children are all back to Uni and schools respectively and the days are allegedly getting longer. Thank goodness. We can only hope the mud will begin to ease at some stage.
