“You cannot be serious!” Not all of the time, right?

The Blogger.com site has been down for the last few days which is why this post is a bit late..that and my ineptitude at uploading videos onto Youtube, so apologies for the delay.

As promised, I conducted Operation Pig in front of a camera. So the not so sweet little pig 2 has an earring. I would like to be clear that I make no apology for what you see and that by wishing to view such video content you should be aware in advance that you may find certain aspects of this footage quite distressing, as despite my explicit directions to the cameraman to carefully train his view on the pig at all times he seemed to do the best he could to aim the camera at my bum-crack whenever possible. Canny he is indeed, as he managed to get the entire tagging process on film whilst switching from “pig” to “crack” at every available opportunity (despite insisting that this was merely accidental and hinting that were my behind not so large it would have gone unnoticed). He is, quite simply, an unprintable word which rhymes with flosser or with dossier if you are French or posh. Now, before any of you get upset at the lack of decorum here, I would like to point out the following:

1. All humans have bum-cracks
2. Mine is quite nice, actually
3. I have seen worse...on women
4. My attention was fully focussed on the job at hand in order to cause as little pain and distress as possible to pig 2, and anyway, its nothing like a real builder’s one, so just watch the little piggy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3NYP79lc2s

On a serious note, in my last post I mentioned the farmers’ preoccupation with the weather, since which we have had no further rain and the grass continues to be nibbled by our ever hungry cattle.  There are all sorts of considerations here beyond the length of the grass today as you have to be able to anticipate how much further it will deplete before we have any rain – then, how much rain we get will dictate the growth we can expect - and then, when will it rain again etc? And so the whole thing perpetuates depending on rainfall, and the outlook isn’t great. Suffice to say, that despite our ability to open a few gates here and there into currently untouched fields I have put a silage bale in a feeding rack for one of the three herds where the grass just isn’t there. Tomorrow another one will go in amongst 11 heifers I have in a separate field – not good at all.

This may sound innocuous enough, and true, we have 15 or so spare bales to hand from last year but it is an indication of how bad the situation is in general; everything growing outside in large parts of the southeast of England is being affected. For farmers this is a major concern, for the rest of you this could ultimately lead to a price increases across many sectors beyond the obvious commodities including milk, bread and beer. Worst case scenario as far as we and other livestock farmers are concerned would be the forced sale of animals due to insufficient grass and having run out of silage and hay, (possibly obtainable at massively inflated prices) which if you combine with many others in the same boat, equals rock-bottom sale prices at market and a financial squeeze and inevitable insolvency for some. Moreover, as with any adversity in the agricultural sector this tends to strengthen the supermarkets’ already unfair position as they will further benefit from buying their already low grade meat at lower prices.

There is, as you can see, more to the weather than the opportunity to have another barbeque or join most of south London on Camber Sands.  So in this glorious sunshine, forget the tan, whether or not its Pimms O’clock and go into your garden at dusk and rain-dance like you never have before!

Finally, keep the pig names coming in. We have had some good (and some not so good, Dave!) suggestions already.