Farming surveys produce an awful lot of dung
NOW while the national census, which usually takes place once every 10 years, always attracts a fair bit of media coverage, far less newsprint or airtime is devoted to the constant round of surveys and censuses which farmers have to tackle.
There tends to be at least two of these every single year – and this year there was a third one thrown in for good luck.
While they’re a bit of a bind to fill in, just like the national ones there’s a huge amount of information gathered during each of these censuses.
However, a good deal of this often remains hidden – and while the general picture painted is meant to be used to guide government policy, very few people actually get to see the details.
But while the national census might be great for anyone trying to track down their family trees or the history of the house they live in, you’ve got to wonder what some of the details gathered in the farming ones are used for.
Through the wonders of the internet I managed to find some of the results from one of the most recent farming information gathering exercises, which took place only a few months ago and which gathered even more obscure details than the routine ones.
For instance – and avert your eyes at this point if you are of a sensitive disposition – did you know (or indeed care) that more than 12 million tonnes of dung were spread on Scottish farms over the course of the past year? And I was going to say on top of that – but I assume it was in different fields – 5 million tonnes of slurry were band spread on land, with a further 600,000 tonnes being injected into the soil.
The survey also showed more than a quarter of all farms now look to work outside normal farming enterprises to make cash. Tourism – such as a farmhouse bed and breakfast – was the most popular additional source of income, while contract working on other people’s farms was only slightly behind this.
But one statistic which has been following the same path for years is the growing age of the people in charge of our farms.
For while most folk are either retired or at least thinking of winding down a bit by the time they reach the age of 65, around one-third of the country’s farm are run by people over the official retirement age.
And, while this statistic might do little to dispel the image of the grumpy old farmer, as Jack and Victor might say it does at least prove that farmers are “Still Game”.