SheepChaser

Genuine question this, not being smart. . . . . . but what happens if you dont have many mates, or a very big circle, and dont have many family members etc. I keep my self very much to my self and if I had to home 9 pups with folk I know into dogs and the same type as me, I think id really struggle. But id also really struggle to put any down. Ive never bred a litter.

Get the dog so its your mate and has manners and take it lamping if you want a lamp dog. Personally I like to start its work at night, if thats its intended game. Tug train as a pup, get it retrieving and good recall, and then get it out catching stuff and the rest will mostly follow. Don't go lighting stupid stuff up, dont keep light on if its missed or pissing about, and dont lose your cool!

Someone smart once said, "the greatest trick they ever played was to convince you that you are powerless to make change". Someone else smart once said "It just IS bro, you just got to get on with shit". I think I kind of agree with both, but as I've got older I've come to realise that to be angry all of the time and continually rage against the machine, is fairly tiring and gets in the way of life. All you can really do is day to day do your part to try to make the world a little bit better and less f****d up in your immediate life surroundings. Look after yourself and those you love, and if you have a bit of left over energy, try to be nice to other folk, being nice doesn't cost much. Educate your children to understand the world we live in and appreciate the important things. Thats pretty much all you can do, because I dont think we are going to win this fight! We live in scary world. Things are changing fast, like BH has said it isn't an equal fight any more, we are essentially fuked. Im sure it will be tough for our kids. However, good food, drink, beautiful countryside, half decent dogs and enough game and good folk will probably still be about that it wont all be bad for them.

Nice low lines! Good money to be had for breeding stock to!

We hang up a good few two year olds, big chops, lots of flavour etc

Yer I totally get that! What I meant is if you take a normal commercial tex x lamb and grass really it, kill it right and hang it right it tastes awesome, a lot better than same lamb from supermarket. Same with chooks, mixed diet and great air and those cobs taste banging! Om a side note, the two best steaks in an international taste test were an intensive reared continental beast and an old dairy cow so what do we know ?

I honestly think breeds mean less than how it’s reared!

Beagle x teckle works

It’s not as hard as you think, deffo worth looking into mate - lots of folk sell pork, lamb etc and all that. How many folk sell locally reared, home produced salami / chorizo etc etc. Lots of pubs and restaurants use it also and very few folk produce it etc. Heritige salad crops is another - perpetual cropping, sell small salad bags and also supply a restaurant etc. Look at the price per kilo for some nice rocket etc! Easy to grow in a poly tunnel! There are quite a few little things you can do.

Adding value is a hell of a way to go ...... For example ..... Pork ...... 5/10 quid a K Salami - keeps for ages ..... 60 quid a kilo! Thats how I’m heading I think - Home made chorizo Muntjac Jerky Rabbit and pigeon salami etc Theres some serious money to be made there from a small ish turnover. Just something for you to think about while eating your bacon!

I’ve over charged one and it caught fire and blew up!

I can see you’ve obviously read up on it. What gets me is that although much of what you say above is true to a certain extent, there are just as many folk not doing the above at all! At the end of the day, farmers are out to make money, but are also custodians of the land - and many do take that quite seriously. Treating the land as you have described, doesn’t ultimately make you as much profit as perhaps it once did, a case of both diminished returns and people just wisening up! There are huge numbers of large scale farming operations doing the opposite of what you say above. We farm over 1000 cattle, thousands of sheep, couple thousand hens, about 1000 acres of arable etc etc. We done use any routine meds, don’t use mectins, count earth worms, measure soil compaction, soil organic matter etc. We do this stuff for two reasons - it’s nice and also it makes money! We use the stock to manage the land, and we grow multi species herbal leys with lots of variety. Why? Because it works and it makes money. I see just as much (or more) terrible practices carried out on traditional family farms, and to be fair I think that’s where a lot of the problem lies - in out dated practices which persist as it’s the way it’s always been and these small family units are protected by subs when in reality they aren’t viable in many ways. Ill give you an example - we farm a lot of sheep and totally commercially, I sell a lamb on the hook for about eighty quid and it goes to the supermarket. It’s had no anti biotics, no feed, little or no wormer etc etc. There’s a guy down the toad with a few sheep, sells nice boxed lamb at about 200 a carcass, his lambs are regularly wormed as the pasture is wormy and had sheep on too long, he feeds a bit of cake, lambs are born inside etc etc. In reality my meat is higher welfare and cleaner but any man in the street would say it’s the opposite.

People keep talking about these intensively reared products and large scale commercial farming and all its negativity. Can you explain what you actually mean ? And re decent food being more financially accessible - it’s not got so much to do with farmers as the rest of the chain. I often find small scale producers charge crazy money for something which isn’t overly special.

Salad crops

That’s what I’m saying - there isn’t much incentive to control them when the scam is lining the governments pockets!