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Farming Today

A lamb
  • Posted at 12:34pm
  • 26 October 2007
  • by SarahDempster-RT

This week's Radio Ga Ga is brought to you by the letter R, the number four and the stench of bucolic woe. Following last week's peek at On Your Farm, I was inundated* with messages suggesting I might like to plunge deeper into the steaming silo of intrigue that is BBC Radio 4's agricultural output, on the basis that a) there's quite a lot of it, and b) it's bonkers.

Not being one to ignore public demand**, I thought this sounded a grand idea. After all, farms are generally fun places to be, what with their amusing animal noises and unusual smells, and I've been neglecting R4's factual stuff, which is awfully nice but so burblingly ubiquitous I never normally pay much (ie any) attention to it.

So, in the spirit of civic service/feeling a bit guilty, I tuned in to Farming Today (Mon-Fri, 5:45am, BBC Radio 4), R4's flagship agrarian fact bee. I wish I hadn't. It's a shocking programme. Not because it's badly made or its presenters are stupid (they're actually all lovely, particularly Anna Hill, who is fantastically Horse & Hound-y) but because it exposed the true extent of my ignorance of modern farming.

Reader, I knew bugger all. Zilch. Diddly. In fact, prior to Monday, all I knew about farms was that they had something to do with straw and farmers wanted you to get off them. I thought the worst that could happen to a farmer was a bit too much weather, or Countryfile spelling his name wrong during a report on maize.

But I was wrong. Farming is a horrible business. A broiling trough of frustration and disappointment, it's a world stuffed not just with sickly cows and immovable lambs but also with quotas, remits, frequent financial upsets and reams and reams of paperwork peppered with impenetrable farmy phrases like "traceability documents", "infection reports" and "Brazilian beef".

On Farming Today, the facts come in thick and fast. Did you know, for example, that farmers only receive around 30 per cent of the retail price of meat sold in supermarkets? Or that "movement restrictions" on animals following the recent foot and mouth hoo-hah have left hundreds of lambs "stranded in the uplands" so farmers are subsequently being forced to cull the poor sods? I didn't.

I thought lambs were kept in mahogany barns and that farmers came in every couple of hours to plump up their pillows and top up their cocoa. But they're not. They're out in the hills, starving and freezing their fleeces off, (un)safe in the knowledge that it's only a matter of time before a farmer creeps up behind them and, weeping profusely, smashes their tiny ovine skulls with a mallet.

It's an absolute warzone out there. As a result, Farming Today is a profoundly bleak listening experience; a grim carousel of death and statistics soundtracked by angry farmers, harried government ministers and the plaintive cries of doomed livestock.

Having been inducted into this fraught, exhausting world, I'm imbued with a new sense of respect for those who have chosen a life of mud and grain. They're a brilliantly resilient bunch: wrestling daily with disaster and injustice while the rest of us sit around laughing at their tweed waistcoats and eating their cut-price produce. If nothing else, it's something to think about when you next tuck into a packet of Tesco's Finest Redcurrant Lamb with Maple-Roasted Vegetables.

*Well, there was just the one, actually, but I got quite excited because no-one ever sends me emails, apart from my brother, who's mad, so I exaggerated a bit. Sorry. **Said email was from my brother. He told me he'd "quite like" to see me review Farming Today because he thinks sheep are "funny". Sorry.

Farming Today is on Monday-Friday, 5:45am, BBC Radio 4. The omnibus - Farming Today This Week - is on Saturdays at 6:35am.

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