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November 2024, on local farming

TALES FROM THE HILLS

(Ashmansworth and Crux Easton)

It would be nice to know whether schoolchildren are still being taught about farming, and about Jethro Tull and ‘Turnip’ Townshend whose innovations helped farmers to feed the nation as well as themselves.

Cobbett said Ashmansworth had the finest meadows; but what have we actually done to improve the techniques of farming over the years? We cannot claim Jethro and Turnip – they lived elsewhere – and history suggests we’ve done rather more for the aircraft industry (De Havilland) and classical music (Finzi).

However, we can certainly claim Edward Lisle, a contemporary of Jethro and Turnip. In 1700, he was busy recording, fairly scientifically, his own farming techniques at Crux Easton. This useful work was published after his death as ‘Observations in Husbandry.’

More recently, in his orchard at Ashmansworth, Gerald Finzi, with the help of Jack Thayer, grew as many of the old English apple varieties as he could find. He was sure that the tastes, textures and adaptability of the less common varieties would come into their own one day, and should not be lost. His biographer says Finzi’s orchard contained 300-400 trees at its height, most of them a single representative of a variety, and made a valuable contribution to the national apple collections.

Finzi and Lisle could afford to experiment with their land. They had other incomes, as indeed had Turnip Townshend: besides being a Norfolk farmer, he was also the Foreign Secretary.

Our farmers still help with scientific research, though nowadays it’s probably funded by the taxpayer. For example, at Crux Easton in the 1970s, you could have seen students from Reading, or perhaps they were from Sparsholt, weighing and recording the wheat, year after year, as it came off certain measured plots on the farm. It was part of some long-term research into crop yields.

Even so, it was still laborious work for the farm, with lots of ‘short-working.’ It also monopolised the combine during the busiest days of the harvest, so you might well have detected impatience in Geoff, the farmer, who had hundreds of other acres waiting to be cut.

For all that, it was good to see, alongside this ritual of weighing of the wheat, and the best of the straw being shipped off to our local racehorses. Nothing but the best for them!

 

Agricola, November 2024