Farming Today airs at an undignified hour each morning on Radio 4. On the few occasions I’ve caught it live I have felt, first of all, relief that I am not a farmer; second, inadequacy; and finally, a surge of evangelism for the farmer’s way of life. I am now reaching the conclusion that getting up early enough to listen to Farming Today is the very least we can all do.
Listening to Farming Today helps dispel the romance of living off-grid
By no means will everything discussed on the programme hold relevance for your life. One feature last week was dedicated to a project to preserve ten acres of salt marsh downstream from Totnes. Another recent episode explored the Lakeland barns being saved for cultural heritage. And on Christmas Eve we visited a farm in the Upper Coquet valley of Northumberland as it received mains electricity for the first time. But such esoteric forays are often the most eye-opening – which, let’s face it, is all one can hope for at 5.45 a.m.
The Upper Coquet valley episode certainly dispelled the romance of the idea, cherished by so many of my urban friends, of living off-grid. The charm of casting your house in darkness just because you happen to put your kettle on at the same as your neighbour must quickly pall. Add to that the price of oil required to run a generator, as well as the cost of the batteries, and the dream of The Good Life disappears pretty quickly.
The fact that you’re listening to all this in a London bedroom makes it more, not less, interesting. Contrary to what most programmers believe, relevance isn’t why people tune into something, though Farming Today more than delivers on that front, too. There’s a good reason the programme has been running, in some form or other, since 1937. It is extremely helpful at filling in the blanks often skipped over by general news programmes.
Recently, for example, social media has been awash with footage of consumers pouring Arla milk down the sink. The company is feeding its cows a dietary supplement in a bid to reduce their methane emissions. A Farming Today feature on the trial, which currently involves about 30 farmers, could hardly have been more necessary. The same consumers would surely be interested in another recent segment on gene-edited tomatoes and the pending legislation surrounding their commercialisation. And we could all benefit from hearing why there are fewer holly berries around this year.
As valuable as it is to be reminded that farming affects us all, wherever we are, I am mostly tuning in for the quirky insights into rural life. There could be no better way of starting the day than by listening to the traditions of the Old Tup or the latest research into the social competence of pigs.
Pigs are, apparently, less poetic than other animals, to judge by their absence from Simon Armitage’s latest series, My Poetry and Other Animals, also on Radio 4. Among the ten episodes we encountered dogs, tigers, spiders, even unicorns, but no pigs, except in the context of the dodo (whose extinction they helped cause). It was a beautiful series. Poems, as Ted Hughes once said, are like animals in themselves, with minds of their own. Fittingly, Hughes’s poem ‘The Thought-Fox’ provided the inspiration for the start of the poet laureate’s adventures into the world of animal verse.
The first episode was bravely eccentric. One moment Armitage was in a room at Pembroke College, Cambridge, contemplating the fox’s visit to Hughes in a dream. The next, he was trailing fox urine beneath the Surrey Hills, eager to see one of these rare beasts in the wild. The hopes expressed at the beginning of the series that poetry might help preserve animals from extinction were less obviously applicable to foxes.
The episode on that other adversary of the farmer, the slug, was particularly well done. Few listeners could have been prepared for the American poet Sharon Olds to compare the antenna of the gelatinous creature to a man’s penis. It’s a far cry from William Blake’s ‘Tyger Tyger, burning bright’ – but memorable in its own way. Armitage’s thoughtful commentary on Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’, about a kestrel, was worthy of an episode of its own.
Across the series, Armitage attempts to write a poem on the animal kingdom. His struggles, false starts and thinking aloud was an interesting insight into his writing process. It was somehow sobering to hear the poet laureate expressing doubts over the convincingness of his similes. Is it okay to liken a fox to a skunk? A question, perhaps, for Farming Today.
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