A very small cog in this world of ours
It’s amazing to realise after all these years what a very small cog we are in this world of ours. It’s only this last few years that we have had a computer and the World Wide Web, with all the information that it contains, and how you can speak to the other side of the world speaking face to face on the screen.
Kids
brought up with all the technology have no problem getting the yeds round it,
but as an oldun, it takes some time for it to all sink in. Take re-setting the digital clocks about the
house, including the one in the car and on the weather station and such like,
all have a different sequence of pushing buttons and flashing numbers to be
re-set with an OK button of one sort or another. Doing the job every day it
would be okay, but only twice a year ya forget the sequence of buttons to
press.
Back
seventy odd years ago there was the wireless, and I mean wireless, although it
did have a an aerial wire draped around the house to the shed down the garden or the pear tree,
it was powered by a battery, a glass accumulator with two terminals on top and
two loops with a short cord for carrying it when it had to be taken down the
local filling station/ garage, to be re-charged. When the commentary of a big
boxing match was to be broadcast, there would be a mad rush of everyone who
needed the accumulator to be re-charged in readiness for that night. Then it
progressed to a mains radio with its three buttons on the front and a dome
speaker all built into a cabinet almost as big as a refrigerator.
Then
in the early 1950’s we had our first television, in black and white, with its
screen rolling up and blinking until father got it tuned in properly, there was
only the BBC to watch and that had a test card on in between the odd program
they put on in about three periods of the day, one of which was a kids program
at tea time, and the others were mainly news programs.
The
early telephones were wired via telephone poles and strung across into the
houses that needed a phone, the school the shop, the estate and most of the
farms, the rest of the village folk had a public telephone kiosk. Some phone
lines were party lines that were shared with another house in the village, they
had the same number, and had to listen to the pattern of ring tone to know if
it was intended for them, if the other person was nosey, they could pick up and
listen in to your conversation. Back then they were all just a two digit
numbers and you could call anyone in the village without an operator that was
marvellous, to ring outside the village you had to ring the operator who would
plug you into the number you required, and further afield you may go through a
number of operators into the region you required. As more folk wanted a
telephone so the numbers were up graded to three digits, then as the exchanges
became automated we were six digit numbers, and on again to the familiar ten
digit numbers only to be eclipsed by the up and coming mobile phones of which
were the size of a house brick.
.
I
saw the first sugar beet harvesters come in, the first combines, the first
round the cowshed milk pipe lines into churns in the dairy then eventually into
bulk milk tanks, first bulk milk collections, the first cow cubicles invented
1960, and first milking parlours. On
tractors, the first with a cabs, just enough to shelter you from the weather,
the first Land Rovers were immediately preceded by the American army Jeep, the
Land Rovers were demonstrated ploughing harrowing sowing and with a power take
off drive, sawing wood on a saw bench. Not many machines were PTO driven back
then. I saw the first drum/disc mowers
that rapidly took over from the finger bar mowers, the Ferguson tractors were
first with the hydraulic ploughs and implements to go with it, then all makes
of tractor followed that same idea.
Father
was well up to date when he was the first in the local area to have a milking
machine, three unit buckets and a spare to change to when one was full, this
was 1938. He had broken his arm, so he was a one handed milker, and the local
farm merchant’s sales man came calling wanting someone in their area to buy a
milking machine, to get the ball rolling, and that was what he did. They
installed it and fitted an airline right through the cowsheds, and stayed for
the first few milking’s to ensure it all worked at the right vacuum pressure,
and soon got others around the local area to purchase one.
We
were always brought up to be self-sufficient, in our farming, our repairs and
improvements, in our replacement for the milking herd, in hay for the work
horses and cows, though when tractors came along he had to buy the fuel. He
always commented that when the tractors were resting in the shed, they were not
burning/eating fuel like the horses always did, but then again the horses did
not use fuel when they were working.
It
was drilled into us that you cannot farm without common sense, look at thing
how they are, not how you would like them to be, work with the weather it no
use going against it and it impossible to get a good seed be when the ground is
sad and cold and end up as it dries with large clods of soil that when they dry
out are as solid as bricks
Educations What You Want
Educations what you want, or that is what I’m told,
Get on in life and see the world, seek your pot of gold.
More to life than toil and sweat, let others soil their
hands,
Let education guide the way, nine till five, five days a
week demand.
Over the years most folk done this, for better jobs they
travelled,
Men they left the land in droves, off into town they
pedalled.
With better money they bought a car, get about much
quicker,
Then travelled even further afield, became the city
slicker.
Owd Fred
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| This is the picture I woke up to first thing one morning, with cattle grazing in the orchard and eating the wind fall apples ya wouldna do that in the city |
 |
| This was taken of the cows and calves down the lane looking through the lower branches of a chestnut tree. you may recognise the Seighford Millenium Walk above the backs of the cattle |
So,
no I did not leave the land and did not become a city slicker, I followed the
family’s tradition of farming, and who knows where the next fifty years will
take us with the ones who now have custardy of the land. Twenty cows were the
norm in the 1930’s when father started farming and when he retired 1975 it was
sixty, then for my generation in the 1990’s a hundred cows was a very large herd.
Now
I have just retired 2014 three farms in the village have been amalgamated to
form a new herd in two units of three hundred and fifty cows and four hundred
and fifty cows all out wintered and all dry over Christmas to calve in
February, also rearing all their own replacements.
Almost
would have been un-believable just a year or so ago, the same goes with the
technology and gadgets such as sat nav’s on tractors that monitor seed and
fertilizer according to the strength of the land to obtain the optimum yields.
I
am way out of my depth and rapidly becoming out of date, it’s a younger mon’s
job (below 60) and it still only works properly with common sense, and the most
common sense thing fa me to have done is to retire, should have done it five
years ago. While the mind and body are both willing and you are happy to carry
on. So now it has happened and I feel happy to sit back and just watch how the
modern younger farmers cope, and look closely for how much common sense they
use.
One pound of learning
requires ten pounds of common sense to apply it.
Persian Proverb
A handful of
common sense is worth a bushel of learning.
Author Unknown
