The wet weather continues to cause problems but that's nothing compared to the consequences of the continuing Covid lockdown. Could it lead to better times for UK farming?
Hi Harry, the fact those stones appear is because the ground freezes an thaws. Rocks react to the temperatures change differently than the soil around it, which causes them to be pushed up from the ground. Thanks for the video, really enjoy them always!
I thought it was also a function of soil particles being smaller than stones and flowing downwards with moisture with less resistance than stones that have a larger surface area.
I live in Ireland and I have been throwing stones at England for years. I didn't realise they were landing in your back garden, sorry about that. Please feel free to throw them back at me
I am an automotive engineer, I only come on RU-vid for car content ... and now you’ve got me coming for farming content 🤣 thanks Harry keep them coming !
Found this on 'tinternet... Here's what makes these stones mysteriously appear. Stones are better conductors of heat than soil, so the stone conducts heat away from the warmer soil beneath it. That colder soil under the rock then freezes before other dirt at the same depth. Remember that when water freezes it expands. So, when the water in the soil under the rock freezes, it expands and pushes the rock up a little. When the ground thaws a space is left under the stone which fills with dirt, so the stone rests a little higher. Over a period of time this repeated freezing, expanding, upward push, and filling underneath eventually shoves the rock to the surface.
I've been a Greenkeeper for 18 years and we've had stones raising to the surface on golf courses... Essentially when the ground is sodden and then you get a hard freeze it basically raises the whole surface of the soil/field as water expands when it freezes... When the soil raises it pulls stones up with it, but then when it thaws it contracts again but the stones remain where they were... As Greenkeepers we welcome hard freezes/frosts as it puts structure back into compacted soil, it's a good form of aeration without us having to do anything! 😊👌🏻
Harry your car and farming channels are some of the best on RU-vid. Your vast experience and humbleness as well as the transparency you put forth in your videos is fantastic, and there's nothing else like it
Great video Harry. One comment I would make with regard to planting trees on permanent pasture, is that it actually can be done in tandem with beef/sheep production. We have recently planted over 2,000 trees across permanent pasture on our farm up in Cumbria's Lyvennet Valley. This is classed as woodland pasture and we've planted it on land like yours which is unsuited to forage. It also helps to add stability to some slopes which are prone to landslip. This seems like happy medium which I hope does gather wider uptake. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Keep up the good work.
I'm very interested in this Hugh, thanks for mentioning the classification. What species did you plant and was is in open spacing or coups? Is the plan to allow growth to maturity or to pollard for example?
Does it not still put the land out of use for a decade or so while the saplings take root and grow enough to not be destroyed by livestock pulling the leaves off them? We planted a few, although on a much smaller scale, over a decade ago now and in the first couple of years hares damaged about half of them beyond being able to grow anymore. They're completely separate from livestock in our case. I don't know what species they are either.
HEDGE SOLUTION - Avant loader on tracks with suitable hedge cutter attachment. Amazingly low impact solution, and will not get stuck, with a great finish on that nice hedge. Can be hired very reasonably. Always enjoy your videos on both channels. Robert.
Really enjoyed the video as you say buy local if possible, i am lucky enough to be able to buy our meat & eggs from a farm less than a mile from our house. The ground here is a lot wetter than last year. If you had a public path 20yds wide the crop would still be walked on Thanks Harry keep up the good work 👍🚜
Another great video, thank you. Sorry if someone else has made this comment, but life would be pretty good with you as a presenter on Countryfile and even better, as a presenter on Top Gear.
Absolutely fascinating to watch and listen. I agree entirely about the foot paths that either go wrong the side or through fields, it's annoying seeing people blatantly ignore the obvious!
Excellent content and a welcome reality check of the great homegrown foodstuffs that our farmers and fisherman produce that we ought to be consuming more of ourselves. I had no idea that quite so much of the excellent seafood I have enjoyed on my European holidays has probably come from the UK. It will be on my table at home now.
Grass fed beef has more amino acids in it which is more nutritious for us to eat then grain fed and we don't need the extra fat in grain fed. I would simply look for bare spots further up the hill where those stones came from. I'm sure the heavy rain washed them down. Good luck with the farm this year Harry!
Trees (quick timber ones) and pasture go like bread and butter. On our notherner land we have pastures with lumber and fruit trees (apple and cherry orchards). On the south ones, we do cork, holm oak for pig finish and cattle pasture. We rotate the lot for better use and to not over stress the pasture, but the only minus we had was on the cork because of a fly that likes to fck it up. Well we pushed the birds that side, put some weird geese going after, plus some berries bushes and some water points and birds cared for the flies. Bar that, no drawbacks.
great video, I think there are two approaches to footpaths. Those farmers who 'make' a footpath having ploughed and those who just plough the whole field. The latter are those who seem to have people wandering...
Where footpaths are maintained and clearly marked, they are the preferred line for walkers. Ploughing through footpaths reduces their usability, resulting in consequential damage. Respect by farmers for walkers earns respect for farmers by walkers.
Another great Video Harry. Although I have to say not strictly true on the Forestry , Sitka Spruce for instance has between a 30-40 year planting cycle (plant to harvest), but some higher value timber like Cricket Bat Willow only has a 15 year cycle. In the last 10 years commercial forestery has provided landowners on average a 10% return on investment. Its Tax efficient and sequests carbon. That being said once its planted it hard to get it back to arable again... Source - Farm Business Consultant.
love these videos. started watching because of Harrys love of cars and motorbikes. he did a video a while ago now on his new tractor unit. was as much a great watch as all the car vids and his mega collection of Paris Dakar race bikes, in fact his farming videos are brilliant. from driving a Rolls Royce to the arctic circle and riding the bikes around Morocco to shin high in water with his wellingtons on its just so good, keep the vids coming its miles better than live tv. Thanks, Vinny. :-)
Very interesting with the rocks and did not realise there was a time limit on cutting hedge rows, I have subscribed as find this educational and will use this knowledge findings on my channel. Somewhere down the wire as I am a builder that finds farm land sold off to developers. I am just a bricklayer but have my own channel .
I'm glad you touched on Oatley...that shite has started appearing in our brew kitchen at work. It's amazing how people fall for advertising...just because something claims to be health, doesn't mean it is. Look at margerine - turns out good butter from grass fed cows is far healthier like some of us always thought. Interesting video as always, thanks.
There's so much aggressive polemic n the British press - particularly since the Brexit debate, it's so good to hear Harry present his case for beef. I eat meat once a week and am more than willing to pay a premium price for quality.
Hi Harry... I wish you were a farmer here in Norfolk.. all they seem to do is drag tons of mud out on to the roads..a few clean it up.. most don't.. then drive 20 plus miles in zero tax tractors on red diesel smash down every verge and never pull over in that 20 miles... I know we need food and farmers provide the food we eat.. but some just beggar belief with the I'm a farmer routine... and I'm not a city boy ...lived out in the country all my life! Keep up the videos great to see a top bloke on the screen.
Great content, no hysterics, sensible and you show your research, good for those of us who want to understand more. You are very gracious on the footpath issue, its frustrating, but not worth a confrontation, which inevitably it would be. I would gladly eat UK shellfish, just tell me where i can get it. Same for grass fed beef. I just don’t trust the large grocery labelling. Where is the local chain of “Harrys” where you can purchase local, straight from the farm food. Enjoying both channels, great stuff
Think you've got stones? think yourself lucky you don't get the football sized flints you get in parts of Hampshire! Love this channel Harry and especially how you tell the truth unlike the Beeb ! Good luck with the shed.
Not having much money I eat veggie cheaply for a few days....then buy a lovely bit of British beef as a treat! yum yum!....My first job when I left school was on Abbey Farm at Snape in Suffolk.....it was the site of an old Abbey and every now and then we would find old bones and flint just laying on the top of fields, seemingly overnight??. Having been brought up in Orford which is a tourist village: yeah, please come and enjoy the land but YES, use common sense and walk up tram-lines if you need to. We all need to share this lovely country but visitors must realise that villages and farms aren't a playground or a museum, it is our future. Cheers Harry ! xx
Harry i really enjoy these videos. As an Irishman living in the UK I hope the EU can work out a deal for high quality english produce to end up in Irish delis and food shops and vice versa and of course all across the continent. Some common sense needs to be applied by EU but the UK have decided to have a very thin trade deal with EU which has consequences. Hopefully a lot of these terrible issues food exporters are experiencing will be overcome. I also hope within the UK they will not import more and more food from countries whose environmental standards are not as good as UK.
Visited Bekstone quarry earlier in the week and it looks very waterlogged in the valleys around the area. Hope it drains quickly with little damage. Enjoy the videos, many thanks
Frost heave causes stones to rise to surface (gradual slow process) but one thing that I notice here is you are on quite a steep slope, so stones, once pushed to surface, will slide easily on frost-covered grass. This will give the appearance of stones suddenly moving overnight. A gust of wind will certainly trigger a slide when gravity alone is insufficient, so on a windy day that also has some frost (probably rarer down south) keep an eye out for recent stone moves.
New Zealand has signed an upgrade to the China free trade agreement, offering some New Zealand goods faster access to Chinese markets and a reduction in tariffs. New Zealand was the first developed country to sign a free trade agreement with China, in 2008. This modernise the free trade agreement that was signed in 2008, brings it up to date. www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/124058012/new-zealand-signs-upgraded-free-trade-agreement-with-china New Zealand will already have 98 per cent free trade with China, its largest trading partner, once the existing free trade agreement comes fully into force. The upgrade has primarily focused on reducing compliance costs for New Zealand exporters, and other measures which ease access to China’s markets.
@@mtl-ss1538 New Zealand is selling itself down the river - the levers being pulled to access the Chinese market have been disastrous. It's a little known fact that the immigration system in NZ favours Chinese nationals over almost anyone else. Your getting swamped. No wonder the Maori are pushing to get more recognition, their culture will disappear and you'll be left with paper dragons and wontons.
Yes! Us Kiwi's love the Chinese so much we give away our bottled spring water for nothing! Hey and guess what the biggest city in NZ has a water shortage! 😂😂
The Farm pushed The Garage to 2nd place this week. I was born and grew up in the Cotswolds during 70s and 80s with much time on farms. It’s fascinating to return to that land through this channel and understand how they work.
Either the EU have been extremely busy making and passing new rules/laws in the past month or they are now enacting rules and laws for 3rd countries that we've spent the last 40 old years influencing.
Great video. Concerning the unexplained stones, I would like to say that a stone fairy deposits them, but it is not a mystery at all. The gradient of the pasture where this is happening is very steep and grazing livestock dislodge the stones as their feet find purchase in the soft wet soil. Some of the stones may roll down the slope or get kicked away by other livestock, heavy winter rain then washes the stones clean where they came to rest with the fresh grass beneath them.
I enjoy your videos and gain more understanding from them. I understand your frustration with the paths widening across your crops, we have the same situation in my area (Suffolk). However, if you choose to plough the path up, of course walkers are going to make their own way. If you leave the path unploughed (is that a word?) then people will have a path to follow. Even better, mark the path in some way, perhaps with a hedge line. As we have seen, paths such as this have become more important recently.
Stones are better conductors of heat than soil, so the stone conducts heat away from the warmer soil beneath it. ... So, when the water in the soil under the rock freezes, it expands and pushes the rock up a little. The stones were under the grass:)
Harry, you might have a Roman villa on top of that slope. Have you contacted Time Team yet? haha. Also, walkers trampling crops is quite unfortunate. As an avid walker myself (have done many of the English national trails) I always make sure I respect the fields I'm walking across. Next point: local produce. This is the perfect time for the British to discover what wonderful produce is being grown/reared close to home. A sad loss for me, being a continental. The best people all over the world can do, buy less factory meat or vegetables from Peru or something and more grass fed local!
Pity the UK doesn't eat pumpkins any more. If that slope is south-facing they could do quite well there given some compost addition and the freedom to spread out. Such a delicious vegetable roasted or mashed with salt, pepper and butter. Good luck!
They find loads at north and South pole, big expances of open land. Deserts too. They easily find them on 5000 square miles of white ground (snow and sand )
I didn’t vote for Brexit but now we are here, I will now actively seek out uk farmers and buy from them. And I guess that cuts down on transport co2. Good luck to them all.
I am a Harrys Garage fan for a couple of years, I am quickly becoming a big fan here too. In Ireland we are big grass fed beef people too which flavour wise can't be underestimated as a worthwhile cost as a premium product. Keep beef green Harry, its all in the grass and all in the husbandry . Stay well from your subs in Ireland 🇮🇪
Another point regarding tree planting: it'd be all well and good to re-wild land if beef consumption was decreasing. However, if it isn't, planting trees here will just mean that instead of using our pre-existing pasture, someone else will go and cut down more of the Amazon Rainforest or Paraguayan Chaco and produce beef there instead, before shipping it over the ocean to our shelves.
I have a field called "stone field" and it grows stones! it's only 4 acres but I remember as a kid picking a few tonne a year off it! It's just to do with being on a slope and ground temp.
Have you considered Fruit Trees for your Steep Hill ? Good for soaking up that Water & Carbon, good for Pollinators & Birds, and if you Planted 'British' varieties, a way of tapping into the interest in local food ? You could also seed the ground between them with Wildflowers, too ?
From what I've read and understand, so probably wrong/oversimplified, the UK doesn't have many shellfish purifiers. This was mainly because the shellfish expires quickly once purified, thus it used to make sense to purify near to consumption. Now, even if they could be purified here it's not much point exporting.
Great insight as usual Harry. We need to push home grown British produce, grown to high sustainable standards. Ignorant people trampling on the crops, probably just think it’s grass!
Interesting as always, thanks. With regard to footpaths, there's one between what used to be two large fields near me, which was raised by several inches above the crop level. A few years back, they grubbed it out and made one *huge* field (obviously easier to work), then ran a tractor down it after planting. Unsurprisingly, it's now a *lot* wider than it used to be. So, some people really don't help themselves.
It's understandable that some farmers want to squeeze the most value out of every square meter of their land, leading them to plough up footpaths. Walkers, in turn, appreciate those farmers who mark the footpath line by rolling it after ploughing to compact the ground and reinstate the walking surface. When this happens both parties are clear about what is both intended and expected.
I am actually beginning to understand a little about farming. Sadly the farmers locally in Herts plough up the cross-field paths, and don't seem to reinstate them. The result is as you have shown. I think it works both way. A number of the footpath signs have disappeared too. Understandable, but we are all in this together and perhaps some polite signage would create better understanding for all. Local farm produce could be advertised along the way even. Thanks for taking the time to produce these which I found by accident looking for your Garage.
Farmers are fully in their rights to plough up footpaths when cultivating their fields (it's their land after all) and have 14 days to reinstate it. Do you really mean ploughing, rather than cultivating, though, as ploughing is pretty rare these days. Local councils can supply new footpath signs but rarely send them out to farmers to put up. Thanks for watching.
Thanks Harry, as mentioned recently on Harry’s Garage, I trust and value your opinion. I would be really interested in your view of what/how we should incentivise land owners/farmers to help the environment and food supply in the Uk. Plainly you have a vested interest but I feel you will be honest in what would work in your opinion.
Foxes or Badgers scrabbling around for earthworms, they dislodge stones just under the grass because there's likely an earthworm or frog underneath... maybe
I buy direct from growers like Riverford and farm shops.These will thrive.Tinned tomato and coconut milk and rice have to come from supermarkets but most of food can be local ish.
I'm sure we would eat tons of shellfish but as usual the supermarkets want to pay peanuts to the suppliers yet rip the backside out of the consumers pants to buy it the price of beef and lamb is shocking in relation to what they are paying the farmers
Regarding footpaths, I've had this discussion with my neighbouring farmer. We're low lying here, and the bogginess is exacerbated by the ground being cultivated up in early autumn. Obviously he has to plant his crops, but leaving a strip along the footpath of well established mixed grasses or something with strong roots would surely help keep the group integral? Even if it didn't, the clay soul that is pulled up by cultivating is far harder to walk on than boggy topsoil - boots end up twice as big! I'm a country boy so I know never to walk on crops, but I can see why some people do, given the alternative.
Regarding planting trees on the slope completely understand. We have a 1 mile access road to our farm house but we thought about planting a row of trees both sides of the road but the loss in cropping either side taken because of the trees would amount to thousands of dollars in losses annually.
Hi Harry, didn’t realise you had this channel too, great stuff and agree with you . I have to say that M&S do a Somerset Brie, it is far superior to anything coming out of France and tastes delicious. I think we need to let the dust settle after Brexit and then British producers will see a massive upturn in business especially shellfish
What you may find is that if you have the cows come in and eat the old die off and keep them moving the soil may come back in a big way on it's won,, stopping the need for more fertilizer and aeration. This was an older practice that could make a good comeback.
Hi Harry can you comment and please raise awareness on the INDIAN FARMERS. Their are 3 bills in which support farmers that are being removed with big corporate companies taking over in buying grain. Would be great if you could raise awareness
Another great video Harry. I think what people like is that the videos take time to come out and when they do, they're high quality and informative. Please keep doing this!
Hi Harry, I'm glad I found Harry's Farm it's a great RU-vid channel, I'm a typical townie and know sod all about farming it's good to have someone like yourself giving an accurate state of play then the glammed up rubbish on the telly, just wondering is growing commercial hemp a good cash crop and would it be any good in the crop circle. Thanks for the video looking forward to the next one.
A masterclass in explaining the realities and responsibilities of modern farming and the community. Harry, PLEASE get a contract with the BBC to substitute that biased politically correct Countryfile, where none of the realities of farming, economics and other factors come out. Do a 15min slot on that show once a week and educate ALL the people on the realities of what is grown and how and why. Contratulations on an excellent video.
