Richard Fonge writes:

Whilst we are in lockdown, the land around and all it supports has to be cared for. The hundreds of ewes and lambs in the fields around Sulgrave are testament to many days and nights of dedicated stockmanship before they arrived in the fields, and will still need looking at every day. We as humans immunise our babies against various diseases that afflict us, and this is just the same with animals, but obviously difference diseases. Lambs need protecting from a clostridium group of soil found bacterial diseases, which include Pulpy Kidney and tetanus are fatal. This is done by giving the pregnant ewe an injection six to eight weeks before lambing, which then passes the immunisation onto the lamb through the milk. That first milk soon after birth is absolutely vital to its well being.

I said last month that it would be interesting to see what crops would be sown after the wet winter or indeed if some land would be left unsown. Well the fields up on the concrete road were planted into spring wheat, which is just emerging, and like our gardens are in need of rain. These fields were cultivated, drilled and then rolled. The rolling with ring rolls is done to firm the seeds in the ground to aid germination, and to break down any remaining lumps of soil. (On grass fields a flat roll is used to flatten out the tread marks of the stock.) Up the gated road, Spring barley has been planted on the right and beans at the top on the left before the Weston road. A different method of sowing here. They were drilled direct into the old crop residue. But as you walk from Barrow Hill back to the village these fields will remain unplanted until the Autumn, along with others in the parish.

I finished my notes last month with a reminder to look our for the returning swallows. Two appeared on the 8th April just outside the village for a few days but have now gone as I write on the 17th. I am sure more will appear soon.

In these challenging times, aren’t we so fortunate like all rural dwellers to have footpaths to walk for our recreation. These paths are rights of way, across privately owned land and they give us a great opportunity to observe what goes on in the countryside, and I hope these notes help to enlighten my readers on certain things they see from time to time. To the landowners who maintain these paths we should thank and respect their privacy.

Richard Fonge

Richard Fonge writes:

As I write these notes, Spring has finally sprung, after what has been a long and very wet winter, with February being the wettest on record. In the midst of this pandemic we certainly need some sun to make us feel better. How fortunate we are compared to so many that we live in a rural area, with its footpaths and countryside to enjoy and the most pleasing of those must be the arrival of lambs in the fields on the Weston side of the village, to see them and watch them as they have their races certainly lightens the gloom. When farming I used to lamb some 350 ewes every March and at its peak you often had thirty plus lambs in one day, but at the day’s end after some sixty odd lambs being born, there was still that sense of wonder at the arrival of the latest one.

The fields up the concrete road as far as the bridge were half prepared for sowing last October before it came too wet to plant. I suspect they will now go in spring barley, or oats, or even left fallow to be planted wheat in October. Economics obviously come into the equation, so when costed out, is it better to leave or to grow a crop. There is no point in growing a crop if you can’t make a return and late spring planting compromises yield. So I will wait with interest to see what happens with all those unplanted fields around the Parish.

This worldwide pandemic of the coronavirus has brought home I think the need to produce as much food from our own country as is possible and shop locally. The last crisis to hit the countryside was the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak which put great restrictions on our movements for a short time, but what was shown was the great resilience of those small communities, often very isolated whether up in the dales of Yorkshire or the Welsh mountains, or Exmoor they all recovered in the course of time. I was one of a group of farming volunteers dispensing grants through a charity and whilst we heard many distressing stories, there were always lighter memories to take away, with that countryman’s down to earth philosophy.

The Cumbrian farmer whom we had granted as much as we could in monetary terms, but knew it was not really enough, thanked us and said “Us’ll have to find another hole in the belt then”. The Dorset farmer who we refused as we felt he had some cattle he could sell to ease his situation, who succinctly replied “Well tell your panel to come down and help catch the B…..s”!

Here’s hoping that April will be kind to us, with some nice weather and whilst sadly the cuckoo no longer comes, watch out for the return of the swallows around the 10th of the month.

Richard Fonge.

PS. A Reminder.

At this time of year we are surrounded by flocks of sheep either with lambs at foot or expecting very soon. The gate into Castle Mound was left open a few nights ago, allowing the young Rams to escape, reminding me of the need to be vigilant at all times when walking through sheep especially with dogs. Signs are up so please respect them and the sheep they are there to protect. 

Market Day in Banbury. c 1890

Richard Fonge writes:

February continues to follow the pattern of this winter’s continual wet weather, with only hedge trimming being carried out in the fields around Sulgrave. As I have noted before the lack of crops sown is now becoming serious and could have consequences in the price of bread and breakfast cereals later in the year.

The field off the Helmdon Road on the Stuchbury footpath is stocked with some of last years female lambs (ewe lambs), these will be put to the ram next autumn to have their first lambs in the spring of 2021. With them are a few older sheep all with a purple mark on their shoulder. This denotes they were not pregnant when scanned for whatever reason. As a farmer and running a business, a decision has to be made to either give them a chance to breed again or sell for meat. Hard choices but sometimes sentiment has to be avoided.

Last month I looked back to the hard winter of 1963, and parking my car near to the Mill Arts Centre the other day reminded me of the many journeys in the early sixties of taking oats and barley by tractor and trailer in hessian bags to Lampreys still as it was then to be ground for animal feed and then returning with the previous consignment. It was a very busy mill supplying farmers in a wide radius of Banbury.

Banbury back then was a market town and remained so until the M40 came in the late eighties. It had the largest stock market in the country, with sales of stock on three or four days a week. It is amazing to think now that cattle would be driven through the streets of Grimsby to the fields up Overthorpe hill and back for sale at a later date. Steers of eighteen months or so of age arrived from Ireland on a monthly basis by ferry and train from Holyhead to Banbury and then sold on to be fattened on the good pastures of the area.

With all the many farmers coming to the market, there were five agricultural engineers and four corn merchants as I can remember, plus many other businesses catering for the agriculture industry.

So like Banbury the population of Sulgrave has changed, reflecting the change in the modernisation of the industry, with fewer needed to work the land.

The challenge to farmers and land managers today is to balance the environmental needs with food production whilst keeping a low carbon footprint.

Richard Fonge

Snow clearing on the road to Helmdon. 1962/3 Winter.
Photo: Colin Wootton

Richard Fonge writes:

We are experiencing the wettest Autumn and Winter that I can remember, with the land at saturation point. Those of us who walk the footpaths will know how sodden the ground is, making walking that much harder. The consequences of all this rain has already had a serious impact on the sowing of crops nationwide as well as the lifting and picking of our horticulture crops.

The lambing season will start next month around our parish, and here again the land needs to dry up for the ewes and their lambs to be turned out to pasture, to prevent the land being churned up and muddied by their feet.

In the grass field behind Wemyss Farm, many molehills have appeared recently, showing a lovely fertile medium loam soil. This field with its ridge and furrow has been grass for centuries and has a great inherent fertility, as it has been stocked latterly with sheep, but for many years before that with dairy cows, both returning fertility to the soil with their dung.

I have been looking back at a diary I had to keep before going to Agricultural College, which covers the period from October 1962 to September 1963. What a contrast between the weather of that winter and this one. The first snow fell a week before Christmas, with hard frosts nightly, culminating in a tremendous blizzard on January the 19th which totally isolated our farm at Stuchbury for many weeks and cut off Sulgrave and most villages for a few days until they were dug out by hand, by teams of volunteers.

The drifts in some places were up to ten feet in height, but because of the severe frosts you could walk on the snow and not sink in. It was late February before it thawed, and it caused great difficulties. Groceries were fetched from Geatworth shop by tractor or by walking the footpath to Sulgrave Stores, who at that time used to deliver a fortnightly order to the farm. The milk from the dairy cows was sold in churns and it was two days before the Buckingham Co-op, our local dairy could collect by lorry. It really was an exceptionally hard winter to live through, with many indelible memories not least of which was to wake up every morning and go out to milk with the bedroom windows frosted up inside.

Enough of nostalgia, and let us look forward to a Spring that will hopefully redress the excesses of this winter.

Richard Fonge.

See here for more images of the aftermath of the 1963 blizzard.

Footpath along the southernmost Parish Boundary near Stuchbury

Richard Fonge writes:

December has continued the wet weather of the past two months, bringing the land to saturation point. This continual wet weather has resulted in very little winter corn being planted in this parish and indeed nationwide. It is estimated that only 40% has been planted. As most wheat is Autumn planted and that is divided between feed and milling varieties, it points to a shortage of bread wheat next winter. So look out for bread price rises.

Up to the late 1970’s all bread making wheat was imported mainly from Canada, but then our agricultural botanists at the time produced wheat plant varieties that were commercial here. So today we are normally self sufficient in milling wheat.

The ewes have gone from the field off the Stuchbury footpath, and will return with their lambs in March. They have returned to the home farm at Greatworth where they will have been scanned for pregnancy. This is a vital management tool for the shepherd, as it tells him the numbers of lambs each ewe is carrying or if they are empty. He can then feed the ewe accordingly, and especially in the last six weeks of pregnancy. So the one having triplets is put on a higher plain of nutrition to the one having a single for example with those having twins (the majority) in the middle. By dividing them up accordingly the shepherd has much better control of their welfare during this critical period.

The field where the sheep graze is permanent pasture, but next year they will be grazing a section of the field above. The bottom third has now got a food plant of grass sown last August with the remainder of the field to be sown an arable crop in the spring.

So we end the year with a totally sodden countryside that does not bode well for a good harvest, which should be a concern for us all, as we rely on the land to feed us, something we take for granted perhaps more than we did.

A Happy New Year.

Richard Fonge

PS: By way of compensation for the awful walk along the footpath shown in the picture above, the last Sunday of 2019 ended in this wonderful sunset as seen from the Helmdon Road near Stuchbury:

CW

Cattle cudding in the shade on a hot afternoon

Richard Fonge writes:

November has been so far very wet, following on from an abnormally wet October. The result of which is that a lot of land has not been planted. Most winter wheat varieties can be planted up to February, as long as the plant has a period of vernalisation. Vernalisation is when plants are subjected to some frosts, without which they would not flower and therefore produce fruit.

The countryside that surrounds us may not be spectacular, but it has a natural beauty and serenity of its own, which can be appreciated so much more as you walk the many footpaths that radiate from the village. The countryside is in the main formed by those that farm it, which in turn is defined by Government policy, and at present we are having to balance the need to produce high quality food and environmental concerns.

Here in Sulgrave we have wild flower meadows on the Barrow Hill footpath. Grass margins around arable fields, a disused railway and plenty of permanent pasture, especially on the walk down the bridle lane to Weston. All these features encourage wildlife diversity. Grants are given to landowners to take land out of production and put it into an environmental scheme, which will have its own rules and monitoring from inspectors.

This balance between the two elements is vital for our well being. Indeed one of the best ways to reduce our carbon footprint is to eat locally produced food, and reduce the food miles where it is at all possible.

An interesting fact. In 1946 there were 41 million dairy cows producing milk for 150 million plus Americans. Today 9 million cows do the same thing for 350 million and the ratio is much the same for the U.K.

Cattle with their four stomachs have the ability to re-gurgitate their food and chew it again, an action known as cudding, which produces gases proven to be detrimental to the environment to a greater or lesser degree, but the numbers above show who has done more damage, I would suggest.

There is nothing more pleasing and satisfying for a farmer, when looking round his animals, whether that be cattle or sheep, than to see them lying down cudding. Their contentment tells  all is well with their world.

Richard Fonge.

Click here to see an updated map from the “Village Walks” page on this website showing the footpaths and bridleways referred to in Richard’s article. A further click on the map will show a bigger version.

Monthly notes on farming activities in and around Sulgrave have now been appearing on this website for two years. The author of these fascinating and informative notes is Richard Fonge, seen above in his role as commentator at Kenilworth Agricultural Show. From 1947 until 1975, Richard farmed with his father at Stuchbury Manor Farm. He then embarked on a long and varied career as a Farm Manager, the last 25 years of which was spent managing a farm at Kenilworth. He retired in 2010 and returned to live in Sulgrave. Richard was recently elected Chairman of Sulgrave Parish Council.

Richard’s Notes for October:

October has been so far a wet month, with showers and heavy rain. This has resulted in no wheat or indeed any other crop being planted. Wheat can be sown if conditions are right throughout the winter, but for barley and oats it is now too late and fields to be sown with these crops will have to wait until spring. The fields up the concrete road have been cultivated, this is when a set of tines and discs have been drawn through the ground, thereby disturbing the soil and breaking up the stubble residue from the previous crop, and in this particular case incorporating the lime that has been applied.

Lime as you will perhaps remember from my first notes is needed to keep the P.H. of the soil at the correct level. With G.P.S. being a part of all tractors, and the soil being tested for its nutrient values regularly it means that the lime in this case is applied at the correct rate to all parts of the field. It may be at two tonnes per acre down to zero. Therefore our satellite has a saving on inputs in many situations and the soil gets the required amount.

On the Stuchbury footpath in the field above the grass, different cultivations have taken place. The first third of the field has been planted grass, then we have a rough cultivated piece followed by our strip of wheat and then finally a strip of sanfoin. These two strips and the grass are part of an environmental scheme.

Up Barrow Hill the new crops will be drilled directly into the bean stubble, an alternative way of establishing a crop. The barrow at the top is now covered with grass and general vegetation after the eviction of the Badgers a few years ago. Badgers are much more prolific than they used to be partly due to the amount of maize being grown in and around the parish, with most of it being grown to create energy through anaerobic digesters. There is also the definite connection between tuberculosis in cattle and the badger, a contentious and sometimes emotive debate that has raged for many years. This year there have been two outbreaks in cattle in the area, resulting in the immediate slaughter of those infected animals. Regulations dictate that fields have to be empty for sixty days before restocking, so that is the reason for the absence of cattle in the usual fields. I hope and pray that these herds go clear at their next test for T.B. These are very worrying and stressful times for all concerned.

Finally I had the pleasure of judging a Farm Environmental Competition in the north Banbury area recently, and it is very encouraging to see the unheralded environmental work that is being done.

Richard Fonge

Colin Russell with his 1939 Fordson Standard

Richard Fonge writes:

We are experiencing some wonderfully warm September weather after what has been in general a good harvest. The yields of wheat have been exceptional, with the wet of June coming at the right time to fill the grain as it was forming. Farming is so weather dependent to produce the food we need to live, and in this country we have a climate that allows us to produce such a wide variety of meats, vegetables and grain to satisfy our appetites.

In our parish of Sulgrave we have the soil type to grow the grains and the pastures to rear the beef and lamb and for dairying. Whilst we can grow vegetables in our gardens the land is totally unsuitable for vegetables and soft fruit production on a commercial scale.

At present there is a strong debate within society around the eating of meat, but what we must remember that to treasure our countryside as we see it now, is that we must strike a sensible balance. An eminent academic recently stated that we should plough up the pastures used for beef and lamb production and use them for vegetable growing. By doing so he showed his ignorance and lack of research into soil types.

The many walks we can take around the village pass through fields with a variety of crops and whilst we all have the right to choose our diet, please remember that farmers would not graze cattle and sheep for the fun of it.

The blackberries are abundant this year and I have noticed that the chestnuts have plenty of conkers. On the Stuchbury footpath a strip of wheat has been left unharvested, which is a bit of a mystery why, but I will find the reason for the October notes. The ewes have returned onto the grass field on that path ready to receive the rams.

Earlier this month an annual vintage ploughing match took place in the field on your way to the Magpie. Some two dozen ploughmen took part, keeping an old tradition alive. Their dedication to maintaining these old tractors and ploughs in working order has to be admired. It makes you realise how far we have come in the mechanisation of agriculture when you see today’s machines working the land or passing through the village.

Finally a friend of mine the Rev Dr Gatward is preaching at our Harvest Festival, he is a countryman as well as a priest, and definitely well worth a listen. The service will be held in the church on Sunday 6th October at 6.00 pm.

Richard Fonge

The Village Pound

Richard Fonge writes:

August is the main harvesting month and most of the crops are now safely in store. The one crop that we may see less of being grown is oil seed rape. This is a crop first grown in the early 1970s, that soon became an integral part of the corn growers rotation, as it made an ideal break crop from wheat and barley and the oil crushed from the seeds is widely used in numerous everyday products so making it a profitable crop to grow. But unfortunately it has a deadly enemy in the cabbage stem flea beetle, which attacks the plant at germination and the larvae are to be found in the growing plants stem, so restricting the uptake of nutrients to the flowers and therefore the yield. Nieonectonoid insecticides used as a spray used to be an effective control method against the beetle but have been banned due to the potential harm to the bee population. The beetle has the upper hand over the alternative insecticides, so many farmers are looking at alternative crops.

I was asked last month about the cacophony of noise coming from the lambs bleating in the field by the bridle path to Weston. This was due to the lambs being weaned from their mothers. At about eighteen weeks of age they are ready to be weaned and it only takes three days or so for both parties to forget each other. All animals are weaned or indeed wean themselves at a certain age from their mothers.

Field sizes are measured in acres and are still sold in acres despite the introduction of hectares with metrication all those years ago. 2.47 acres equals one hectare.

Two small areas of ground are worth mentioning in the Parish. Firstly the village pound, which is now a small patch of grass with a Silver Birch tree planted on it in memory of Mr Bill Henn a lifetime farmer in the village and Parish Council Chairman for many years. This area is found on your left as you leave on the gated road just before Manor View. Villages had a pound where stray stock was impounded and released back to the rightful owner on suffrance of a fine.

The second small field is the triangular one at the Magpie junction. This would have been used by the drovers for their stock to rest up whilst they themselves rested at the Magpie Inn, as it was in those days when the Welsh Lane was a great droving road from Wales to London. There are, or indeed were many of these small fields along that route where the stock were rested. Another point of interest is that along the Welsh Lane you will find farmers with Welsh names from time to time. Not all the drovers returned home for whatever reason.

The second droving road was from Banbury to Northampton market, with the stock being driven along from Thorpe Mandeville, to Culworth and onto Weston and Northampton. Therefore Culworth was a crossroads and that is why the road to Weston from Culworth is called Banbury Lane.

Richard Fonge

Red Clover

Richard Fonge writes:

Firstly congratulations to our World Cup winning cricket team. Cricket is a sport very much associated with the greensward whether that be the hallowed turf of Lords or the village green. In Sulgrave Madam’s Close the field above the Manor and between Manor Rd and Little Street was where the Sulgrave cricket team played until about 1960. This field of grass as are many around the village are what are called permanent pasture fields, where the grasses are made up of many species, including perennial ryegrass, fescues, cocksfoot, Timothy and white clover, an interesting plant which is a member of the pea family and therefore a legume. White clover is a source of protein among the grasses and thrives on fairly tight grazing and not too much artificial nitrogen fertiliser, as it is like the alfalfa plant in that it has its own nodules that can fix nitrogen in the soil. A good example of a field sown to a mixture of perennial grasses and clover is on the footpath from Wemyss farm to the Stuchbury boundary. Sown last year it can be seen how the clover is increasing after some tight grazing by sheep. It appears that very little nitrogen has been applied.

Red clover another legume can be seen growing on our roadside verges, most notably up the gated road. Once used in grass mixtures for hay to help provide bulk and as a legume, protein, it has come back in favour especially for organic farmers. Both these clovers have medicinal properties. The white as a blood purifier, eyewash and the red for its estrogen. 

Roadside verges are corridors where wild flowers and insects can thrive without due disturbance, so need to be left unmown if possible. Two fields on the footpath to Barrow hill are wildflower meadows, sown to a mixtures some years ago as part of an environmental scheme, providing a diverse wildlife habitat. They are mown in late July, early August for hay after all the flowers have dropped their seeds. 

Finally the hedgerow briars are out in flower. So we hope for a bumper blackberry harvest, to go along with a good harvest of all the crops in our parish.

Richard Fonge