Ringing endorsement for farming - not
ISELDOM start a column with a quote from an Adge Cutler song, but today we shall. He sang, all those years ago… “I never bin to school, I never bin to college. Sooner be dead than stuff me ’ead with a load of useless knowledge”.
And indeed that’s my default position… I’ve seen scant indication that I would’ve made a better fist of things should I have gone off to college. Looking around me, I wouldn’t say that a college education makes many farmers much better at their trade. Indeed, sometimes you need to identify what is ‘good farming’, and what makes money – because they ain’t always the same thing, Maister – and teaching how to tell the difference can’t be easy.
Of course, some jobs demand a degree. Sometimes to furnish the incumbent with the knowledge they’ll need, but more often as an indication that they’ve a given level of intelligence and application. And from what I’ve seen, this is seldom any guarantee of wit enough to know how many beans makes five.
As far as I can see, as much use comes from students being sent off out from under mothers’ skirts, as the education itself. For the less academic, this used to be part of a trade apprenticeship. When the ‘master’ had trained the lad to the best of his ability, the lad had to go on his journey… to become a ‘Journeyman’, forced to leave his hometown and see something of the world. I absolutely get that, and regret that I didn’t travel more, sooner.
There were apparently moves afoot when I was in my teens to send me off to some agricultural college somewhere, although no-one saw fit to ask me what I thought. Anyway, the old man wouldn’t have it, never told me… and here you find me. Afterwards, I understood it was to the one English agricultural college running courses in hill farming to which the great and the good thought I should be sent… a Cumbrian outfit called Newton Rigg.
From everything I’ve subsequently heard, it’s stood head and shoulders above the rest, teaching real world livestock skills to real-world livestock farmers, alongside well-regarded forestry courses for would-be foresters. While the rest of the country’s ag colleges set students up for a career buying ever bigger tractors, and truck loads of agro-chemical inputs, Newton Rigg apparently never wholly lost touch with ‘dog and stick’ farming.
Obviously, being a pre-emptive drop-out, I’m not best placed to comment on the few leftover colleges down here, although someone very near to me went to ‘Duchy’ for a term or two when he was 17, before being shown the door.
He’s a lad brought up under a pretty stark regime of said dog and stick hill farming, on land where poor decisions show up very quickly indeed, and the chaff is soon blown from the grist.
Arriving at Duchy, he found himself being taught by some lecturers who knew less about livestock than he considered he’d known since he could walk. Worse, because his Dad didn’t have great big shiny tractors, acres of corn, and 600 Holsteins, he and his upland travelling companions became the butt of jibes by some lecturers. I did ask whether it wasn’t just a bit of good-natured ribbing? Some healthy leg-pulling? But he and his pals were pretty clear… ‘Sir’ thought they were lesser students because they came off the hills. Unsurprisingly, discipline suffered, with a growing lack of mutual respect, and he was soon out on his ear. It’s a shame, as there are aspects of what they could’ve taught him that could’ve been useful – if only to see what wouldn’t work up here, if nothing else.
One tale which never surfaced was when he had to do the milking for a few days. I asked him how it went, and he proudly told me he’d had to calve a cow. “Oh?” I said “Did they let you do one under supervision?” “Oh no,” came the reply, “I saw she was stuck, so I hopped in and pulled it off, sprayed ’er navel, and went on again”. “What did they say?” I asked. “Dunno. Never told em”.
Obviously, there’s been an embargo on these details, but he’s overseas shearing at the minute, so I can share them.
Anyway, nothing I heard impressed me, unlike what I’ve oft heard about Newton Rigg in Cumbria. Then, last week, I heard the latter – the only college in the England to teach hill farming at any formal level – is to close. Government are apparently consummately disinterested, focused instead on ensuring we can import any dodgy cheap food from any other country.
What a ringing endorsement for how my profession is regarded.
They’re focused on ensuring we can import dodgy cheap food from any other country