Tractor lines and wheat

click photo to enlarge

I've lived in Lincolnshire for five years and during that time I've taken an interest in the agriculture that is to be found here. Cereals and vegetables prevail, especially on the Fens and the better land. Beef and dairy cattle are also reasonably common though there is much less than in the west of Britain. Sheep can also be seen though again in smaller numbers than in the west. What is very noticeable is the way that the land is intensively cultivated with a view to maximizing production and profit. This is most obvious in vegetable production, but it can be seen with cereals too.

I read that the UK produces more wheat than it consumes. However, though some wheat is exported, there is also importation of wheat varieties that can't be grown in our climate. All this is good for the balance of payments, seems to produce a good income for farmers (with the help of the EU farm policy), and provides for the country's food needs in flour and animal feed. Over the past few years I've watched the cycle of the local winter wheat production. The activities are roughly as follows, modified, of course, by the weather: September - land ploughed and prepared for sowing; October - seed sown (drilled); November - herbicide application to control weeds; December - young wheat left to grow; January - as for previous month; February - fertiliser applied; March - fertiliser applied; April - nitrogen fertiliser applied; May - nitrogen fertiliser applied; June - fungicide application applied; July - wheat left to grow; August - wheat harvested. As you can see there is very little respite for the land, and the wheat fields' contribution to feeding wildlife, which was formerly significant, has been reduced to virtually zero.

On a recent outing to photograph "lines in the landscape" I saw many fields with flourishing wheat, some with patches where recent strong winds and rain had flattened the crop, and more than I've seen before with puddles of water in the tractor lines. The example above is not untypical. It will be something of a nuisance for a farmer, but for a passing photographer it's a very useful piece of foreground interest!

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 24mm
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/250 sec
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -1.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

The staff of life

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Britain's farming population is in long-term decline. In 1996 there were 616,000 people employed in agriculture. By 2007 this had gone down to 526,000, the result of increasing mechanization, the amalgamation of farms into ever larger units, and the declining profitability of the sector. Over the same period the age profile of those employed in agriculture increased.

Changes in wheat farming are fairly typical of the sector as a whole. Over the same period the area devoted to cultivation declined from 1976,000 hectares to 1816,000 hectares, and the volume produced also went down.The income generated by milling wheat and feed wheat slumped, and the amount of wheat produced as a percentage of UK use fell from 125% to 106%. There was, and is, money to be made by producing wheat, but of the 60,000 cereal farmers in the UK it is principally the large landowners and corporate bodies who can benefit from larger subsidies who are making it. The smaller, independent farmers have seen incomes fall drastically, then rally slightly recently. A consequence of this is that a significant number of cereal farms, with hundreds of acres under cultivation, are now worked by the farmer alone, assisted by no permanently employed farm hands. Family members, friends, and occasionally some bought-in contract hours, are the only additional help. It's true to say that the main ingredient of the "staff of life" is grown and harvested with virtually no staff at all! Not surprisingly, since as much of the work as possible is mechanized, the land (and landscape) where these crops are grown is tailored to be managed by farm machinery.

I gleaned this information some time ago from the Statistics pages of UK Agriculture, and from Corporate Watch, and it came to mind as I was looking at this photograph of a combine harvester. I took it a while ago on the Yorkshire Wolds near Weaverthorpe. The solitary driver, alone in his cab in the large, regimented, rolling fields of this cereal growing upland area, seemed to encapsulate the predicament of today's wheat farmer in Britain.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E500
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 134mm (268mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/160
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: N/A

Both sides of the hill

click photos to enlarge

I was driving through the rolling hills around Folkingham in Lincolnshire when the manicured, intensively farmed fields prompted me to look for some landscape images. There were rich colours and strong lines, and I wondered if I could make something of them. After a bit of searching I came upon a yellow oilseed rape field on a hillside. Some parts were yellow with flowers, but elsewhere the green leaves still predominated, and on the steeper slope, where the rape didn't grow as well, lines of brown soil showed through. These colours attracted me, especially against the blue and white of the sky. But what made me take the shot was a row of trees along the horizon that hadn't yet come into leaf. So I clicked away, then meandered on, not heading anywhere in particular, and turning up any road that took my fancy.

Soon I came to a flat area of pale stubble with a hedge, and beyond a field of green wheat with lines where a tractor had been spraying. With the sky above this presented three bands of colour. But once again it was a row of trees on the skyline that made me consider the shot. When I framed it a hare came bounding into the viewfinder. I pressed the shutter, and as I did so I felt a touch of sympathy tinged with admiration for this gentle animal. Here it was, an insignificant creature in a big landscape that is heavily controlled by man, finding food where it can, subject to regular disturbance by people and machinery, hunted with guns and dogs in winter, and yet still managing to eke out a life as its forebears had done for millennia.

When I got home and was processing the shots it dawned on me that the trees on the horizon were the same in each image: I'd captured them from opposite directions. I had been so engrossed in looking for photographs that I hadn't noticed I'd driven round to the other side of the hill! So, here they are, two shots of Eastern England's arable farmland, wonderfully productive of food, but not so good at growing wildlife.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 1st image: 84mm (168mm/35mm equiv.), 2nd image: 150mm (300mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1st image: 1/1250, 2nd image: 1/320
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: 1st image: -0.3 EV, 2nd image: 0EV
Image Stabilisation: On