Technology and the Countryside

After a prolonged absence from blogging due to time pressure I have decided to start again. This is prompted particularly by a series of technology frustrations that began with a brave idea to upgrade my mobile phone.

It’s a long and boring story but in the saga of lost data, a lost password, a dud iPhone and a blame-shifting game between o2, Apple, Eclipse internet and our IT support company which continued until the phone was replaced I realised that the real frustration was not being able to speak to anyone to help sort the problem unless you can go into real live premises. With Eclipse I had to type my questions in a form of telephone tennis and wait for an answer so that something that could have taken 5 minutes took an hour. If you live in ‘deep country’ getting to live premises isn’t easy (if they will let you in at all) although I have to say that the Apple store in Exeter have been excellent.

Life has become more complicated since the recent storms brought down a beech tree and, with it, the telephone line which of course carries the internet connection. We run a holiday business as well as the farm at home and, gloriously peaceful as the radio silence is, I can’t help but think that we are losing business. We only just got the tax and VAT sorted out in time (sadly!) There must be others in the same boat. My replacement phone cannot be backed up now because we have no connection. Thus my last lifeline has been severed and the saga continues!

 Of course you can’t speak to anyone who can really help at BT.I am planning a gentle ambush of a telephone engineer to get his mobile number which I will auction for charity. You can get in a queue to speak to someone in Mumbai but then you get general answers not specific to your locality. I would just like to know when they are going to mend the line. Apparently someone has been out to look at it and has decided that a survey is needed. What rubbish! The tree broke the line. It needs to be mended. We could have told them that.

A privatised BT beholden to its shareholders may have saved the public purse lots of money and made its investors wealthier but there needs to be a balance. An effective monopoly providing basic infrastructure to rural businesses needs to provide a better and more accessible service and send its employees on the sort of customer service courses that tourism businesses use. It is the ‘old fashioned’ concept of personal communication using the spoken word that has been lost. Technology encourages this. On-line bookings dealt with remotely, reliance on texts, emails and social media, the lack of phone numbers displayed on websites- too much is for the convenience of the provider rather than the customer.

Better broadband speeds will be welcome in the countryside but not if it means that essential service providers forget that their customers can feel very cut off and their businesses vulnerable if there is no-one to talk to!

Bureaucrats rule

I was once a civil servant. I don't always admit it although actually I rather enjoyed it. I think that this helps me understand the mentality. In designing a process or a scheme you try and think through all the permutations: what could go wrong and then come up with a scheme that you hope doesn't land your Ministers in hot water. If you get it wrong it can lead to fines from Europe; political problems for your boss and a job move for you! Its rather like a game of chess. It seems very hard to design a simple scheme.
If you are running a business you are always short of time. You always seem to have too many jobs to do and you are responsible for them all! You are perpetually fire fighting. Interruptions happen all the time. The phone goes just when you are trying to do something else and you seldom have time to sit down to uninterrupted desk work. So what you want are simple schemes.
What really catches you out are the questions that you can't answer in the short period of uninterrupted time that you have allocated. Often this is on Sunday or late in the evening when you can't phone anyone.

Cadbury Castle-under an HLS agreement

We are in a Higher level Scheme- an environmental scheme. It is complicated. Tight deadlines are laid down (presumably so that Natural England can manage their budget). The prescription involves getting approval for certain capital works from the Natural England Adviser; English Heritage and Devon County Council. Is this really necessary? The cuts have meant that these advisers are very thin on the ground or have moved jobs although these days they are much more willing to help when you can get them. Getting everyone together however is nigh on impossible. Some jobs too have been delayed by the weather so that deadlines can't be met. The payments don't cover the costs, although they are better than they were.
Here I am now on a Sunday wanting to get a claim form as my cash flow is under pressure. I can't ring obviously so I try the Natural England website. I try the search function... "Capital works claim HLS" seems a good place to start. No trace. Tomorrow morning the phone will start ringing again. I think that I'll head-butt the wall.

Dilemma in a Parish Church

Cadbury is a hamlet of just over 50 houses in the rolling hills of Mid-Devon. It doesn't have a shop or a post office. It doesn't even have a proper village hall. It does have great views!
It does also have a church.

 A recent village survey showed 95% of the high proportion who responded thought it was important to keep a functioning church and while over 100 attended the carol service last year; regular attendees have dwindled and income has dropped so that the available funds for maintenance and repair are very thin. It is a challenge for the PCC to know whether it is better to spend their limited funds on the roof and the walls or loos and heating. Added comfort would undoubtedly make it easier to widen the use for the building and bring in more people. A listed building has to have a viable use if it is to survive.

Different tastes and styles over the last 800 years have left their mark on the church. A 12th century font; a 13th century tower; a 15th century stained glass window; a 16th century north aisle and porch and lots of 19th century restoration and addition including by the gothic revival architect William White. In 1842 George Wightwick designed  a reredos to which marble work was added in 1890 by R.M.Fulford.

The reredos was funded by one of my ancestors. The work added to it in 1890 was funded by another of my ancestors. The trouble is that the reredos blocks out the east window behind the altar and it has always looked awkward.

 It has now started to deteriorate. The ironwork holding the stone together has started to fail probably due to damp.Segments of stone are starting to come loose.

 We now have a health and safety problem. Another of my ancestors- in this case my uncle who died last year-left a little money (£50!) in his will towards the removal of the reredos. Would removal and the consequent saving of money on repairs not be a sensible course of action? Would it not leave money for other investments to help the future of the church?It is after all a lack of heat and ventilation that has caused its deterioration. Could the reredos be useful somewhere else where there is the money to restore it properly and a better location for it?

These are typical of the sort of dilemmas faced by those responsible for looking after historic buildings.The question will be- how will the faculty procedure of the Church of England deal with this one?

Rural Representation- Have we got it right?

It has become fashionable over the last thirty years to claim that the Government is 'out of touch' with rural communities and businesses. Although the Tories and perhaps the Lib Dems were seen to be the parties of the Shires with a natural understanding of rural issues, nevertheless there was a feeling that farmers, in particular, had done better under Labour perhaps because the concept of taxpayer support to subsidise production was perceived by some to keep food prices lower.
I remember being one of the after dinner speakers at the first Labour rural conference at Harper Adams College in July 2002 orgained by Peter Bradley. It was well supported by a range of senior Ministers and it represented a proper attempt to get to grips with a range of rural issues. This meant looking not only at the expected subjects of rural deprivation, housing, transport, education and health issues but also the need for profitability and re-investment.
Yet shortly after this the 'Liberty and Livlihood' march took place in London in September 2002 bringing 400,000 onto the streets. This was ostensibly about supporting the right to hunt with hounds yet presumably in an attempt to ensure high numbers the organisers invites all those with any rural grievance from farming to post offices. This led to confused messages providing the Government with the opportunity to sidestep any particular rural issue that was difficult or uncomfortable.
The organisers of the march- the Countryside Alliance-illustrate the difficulty that any one organisation has in representing rural views accurately.Their membership is largely comprised of those interested in field sports and their attempt to portray themselves as something more than this has not been taken seriously. They have not succeeded for example in gaining a seat at the National Trust Council despite a recent application. Their executive Chairman has recently issued a plea for rural organisations to combine so as to improve their lobbying effectiveness yet this ignores the fact that rural issues are more complicated than that.

Flooding in the SW needs a co-ordinated response

 People get involved only if they feel strongly about issues. A consensus often means, as with the recent revised framework for National Planning Policy, that people interpret something in the way that they want to! Within the rural lobbying fraternity there are those who want to preserve the countryside in aspic and those that see it needing to change as the source of development and jobs; those who are landlords and those that are tenants; those who farm conventionally and those who farm organically; those who believe that shooting promotes conservation and those who oppose shooting on principle; those who believe bus routes should be subsidised and those who don't and those who believe that nature should be free to take its course free from any interference from man and those who believe the opposite.Most of these opinions are represented by some form of organisation or body!
I was invited to spend a couple of years as a Board member of the South West Regional Development Agency as it was being wound up.There were positives and negatives about the RDAs but I was horrified about the duplication that took place over rural representation. In addition to the meetings organised by the main rural lobby organisations there was the Rural Affairs Forum; the SWRDA Rural Group ; the Rural group of GOSW (Government Office SW) and the SW Chamber of Rural Enterprise to name but four, all requiring the attendance of the same busy people. What they all did was reflect the views of a diverse range of people and then pass them up the line to Government without any imperative to resolve them themselves.
What the Government has introduced to replace these groups is a network of Rural and Farming Networks around the Country. We have designed ours in this part of the world on the model of the three legged 'sustainability' stool. The commercial business of farming and rural business is represented by the SW Chamber of Rural Enterprise and this body is joined by the SW Environment Network and the SW Rural Community Councils thus representing economic, environmental and community strands of opinion.The main lobby organisations (e.g NFU;CLA; FSB; RSPB) work through the most appropriate sector. We recognise that funding is very tight and we therefore concentrate on the issues that really matter. We try and reach some consensus ourselves rather than expecting Goverment to arbitrate (or perhaps divide and rule!).
Whether or not this is localism in action I am not sure but the system is not yet perfect in my view. Having a direct link to Ministers and Government is helpful but in order to act in this way some basic administrative capacity is needed. Ours is provided by SWCoRE which is a membership organisation yet this administration takes valuable resource which could otherwise be used on problem gathering. We could be more effective with a tiny bit of help.  Others have no finance at all so inevitably have to find a funding source- a source that may well want influence over results. Ours attempts to balance the three 'legs' yet others have no such balance. Some, as we do, attempt to reflect common views over a wider area- such as the livestock interests of the SW Uplands for example while others are very confined geographically.
Duplication has not entirely disappeared either. We will have Nature Improvement Areas; Local Enterprise Partnerships, Local Nature Partnerships, Rural and Farming Networks all feeding into DEFRA and probably into different parts of it!
Government has a financial challenge- we all recognise that. The question is how to organise structures that work effectively in this brave new world and how to provide at least a modicum of resource so that they can operate dispassionately. We will not end up with one body representing rural views- they are too diverse. What we need is a properly designed model that facilitates debate at a local, and not too local, level so that the issues, when they reach Government, have been discussed and hopefully moderated making it easier to provide appropriate solutions. 

Ash to Ashes

The news about the spread of ash dieback disease is depressing. I have heard today that a case has been confirmed in Devon. It is almost certain that a 'cure' will not be found before the majority of our trees are lost.
Here in this part of  Devon we have had a long standing relationship with Ash.
It is one of the fastest growing trees so there has been a chance of seeing ash trees grow nearly to maturity within your lifetime. It results in a less dense canopy in summer with its delicate feathery pinnate leaves than some others allowing more undergrowth and variety of flora at ground level. It doesn't seem to attract grey squirrels and thus remains undamaged in young plantations while the squirrels wreck the beech, hornbeam, oak and sycamore. The grey bark and recognisable buds are a feature of so many of our copses and hedgerows as well as woods.
Its wood is prized for some specialised uses such as handles and hockey sticks but of course it is the best of all timber for logs; burning well when still fresh.Our family has a tradition of burning the ashen faggot at Christmas. The bundle of ash sticks are wrapped with three withy (willow) bands and if you guess the first one to burst when they are heated you will have luck in the following year.
Walter Pitts who used to work on the farm was fond of the saying 'oak before ash we shall have splash; ash before oak we shall have soak'. This year the ash trees came out before the oaks and the rain has never stopped.Mind you Walter was never wrong so he was always able to adapt the facts to fit reality!

young Ash tree

My Morris Traveller; companion in my youth; stalwart mode of transport, overnight accommodation and store for my cricket kit and appropriately named 'Ken Barrington' (because it was steady, dependable and accumulated miles slowly as he did his runs) was a car with an ash back.

Yet in truth the ash is a boring tree in some ways too. It's fast growing, invasive nature makes it a competitor for other trees.This is fine when you need pioneer trees on poor soil- less good when it prevents other trees having the space to develop. We have a self seeded ash playing havoc with a wisaria plant that we cannot defeat and loads of self seeded ash in amongst a mixed broadleaf copse. While its winged 'helicopter' seeds help it to spread easily its autumnal display is dull and not a patch on the beeches that are in full display at the moment.

Nevertheless the potential loss of so many trees must be viewed with trepidation. We will recover of course- as we did from Dutch Elm disease and from the great storms of 1987 and 1990. The prospect of more disruption to our native trees- the fantastic architectural backdrop to our landscape- must be a real concern however. The degree to which we appear to be under threat now as a result of climate change and the free movement of products around the world suggests to me that, in addition to improving our defences and our vigilance, we need to be ensuring that our research and development is properly resourced. The general public seem to take trees for granted. Perhaps chalara fraxinea will change that. I hope too that the scientists will be able to learn from those ash trees that have survived in Denmark and help us to develop varieties that are resistant so that once again people will learn that
'ash wood green and ash wood brown
are fit for a Queen with a golden crown'

 

An apple a day

One of the consequences of the reduction in casual labour on farms is that many of the smaller jobs and, in particular, the manual jobs don't get done. This is partly the result of the intensification of agriculture and the need to justify all labour costs in a manner that satisfies the adviser, the accountant and the bank manager, but it is also the result of the reluctance of many of those who work on farms to do the manual jobs such as cleaning out the drain that cannot be reached by the swing shovel. Part of the excitement for young employees is the opportunity to drive 'boys toys' which they do largely pretty efficiently, if too fast, on country lanes. It is hard enough to sell the idea of an agricultural career to schoolchildren. It won't be made easier by telling them that they will be cleaning out the pig sheds by hand.
One of the jobs that used to be done on a mixed Devon farm was pruning the apple trees in the orchards. In recent years it isn't only this job that hasn't been done, it is even the picking or collecting of the apples themselves that has been ignored as the apples fall and the ground around the trees seethes in a wasp frenzy. Collecting apples has either not proved profitable enough or, because picking in orchards is increasingly mechanised, the appropriate machinery has not been available at the right price for the small scale producer to make it worth their while.

One of few blossoms this year

Last year, unable to bear the waste, I borrowed some big bags that my neighbour uses to collect his apples. He is a man in his 70s, used to hard work and to making the most of his resources and not afraid of a bit of hard work himself. He takes his apples in by the trailer load and is fortunate to have an outlet locally where he sells them by the tonne.
 I filled the bags and took them to our local town where we didn't just sell the apples, we had some of them them (the cider apples!) made into cider, others into fruit juice and some went into the freezer.The cider's good and we will be drinking it at my son's wedding in a few weeks time.
This year however the trees are bare. Very few of them, in the atrocious weather conditions, have produced fruit at all and those apples that have appeared look more like green maltesers they are so small.

Cider orchard in winter

One or two trees are doing well however.This is the advantage of having an orchard with a mixture of varieties to deal with the vicissitudes of the seasons; of temperature, rainfall, flowering and pollination. Modern commercial growers, faced with the stringent demands of the supermarkets and their buying public who they don't bother to educate about varieties or blemishes and needing to mechanise and standardise don't have this option. A rise in price won't help them if they don't have any and in a world market there are plenty that will have them. Buy British will sound a bit hollow.
Our orchards are not going to be much of a commercial asset this year but they are an environmental oasis. Whether it is lichen, butterflies, birds, flowers or bees; they play an important role in this special part of Devon

Best of Britain

This has been a summer of extremes. Extremes of weather have ranged from drought threats in the spring to deluges in the summer. There have been extremes of emotion too ranging from the celebrations around the Diamond Jubilee to the roller coaster of joy and despair for competitors and audiences involved in the 2012 Games.

These extremes have had an impact on rural businesses and the environment and it has all been played out against the backdrop of an uncertain economy.

Wildlife has suffered. Farming has suffered. Tourism has suffered. The extreme weather conditions both here and in the US have brought home the realities of a changing climate and have perhaps re-inforced the need for a greater degree of self-sufficiency. Nowhere has this battle been fought more publicly than on the dairy farmers' blockades of the milk processing and distribution hubs. The fragility of our ecosystems are illustrated by the concern for the plight of the bee; at risk yet vital for the pollination of so many plants and crops.



 Yet when Communities have needed to come together more than ever to a large extent this has happened. Britain has also been showcased in an unprecedented way. Our landscapes, our history and our welcome- surprising to some- have all sown the seeds of potential business in the future. How do you measure the value of sheer joy and enthusiasm and the release of endorphins that has accompanied so many aspects of the Games and with the paralympics still to come? In amongst the rain and the wind we have been able to feel proud of our country; of our blend of culture,creed and colour; of our sense of humour and of fair play; of our creativeness; of our efficiency; of our modernity. Let us hope that this bodes well for our future and for our rural businesses.