Farmer Diaries

There seems to be some confusion.  I am not the Nic that started this Blog a decade ago.  I am called Nick too, Nicholas actually, I am British (not Canadian) and worked in the City for twenty years, and "retired" back to Norfolk about five years ago, we bought a farm.  We left for many reasons, burnout (my wife is a lawyer) we have four children, and we are empty nesters (boarding school for the last two girls -- it was their choice).  More importantly, we wanted a change and we saw Brexit as an opportunity (plus we knew that financial services would be hit hard in the City -- it was a good exit point). I've not spoken to Nic for a few years, maybe as many as two.   That's it!

For the past few years, we have worked with a well-known European agricultural college that has sent us students in the final year of study to stay with us and work on a real farm.  The school works with our farm for one reason and one reason alone;  I went to university with the school's director.  The students stay with us for six months and are fully integrated into our operations.  They do everything (except for the butchering plant) and are exposed to all aspects of farming.  From feeding to milking goats and cows to operating equipment and watching the management work my wife and I do daily. Many will end up on large farms or agro-businesses, but the principles remain the same.  The last one was from mainland China.  He spoke decent English and obviously another European language.  He was supposed to work on a European farm but was shifted to the UK at the last minute, for the past four years we have taken students from this particular schoo...

We are a seven-day-a-week operation, but it remains that winter and weekends are slower.  I spent the morning with the biodigester team, they were completing the training of some of our employees who will maintain and supervise the units.  I know, strange that this takes place on a Sunday, but it's a 7-day training program that runs from Monday to Sunday... I've spoken about our biodigesters and the concept is simple but the execution is complex, mainly because we compress all the gases we produce (and dry them too).  Both my wife and I spent some time on the training program, but we excused ourselves when it came to the maintenance...if there is a problem we will simply shut the plant down (yes it is possible, for a short time).  It's a biodigester and not a nuclear power station. My main job on weekends is checking things over. Farms are subject to all kinds of inspections, and last week our head butcher told me that we are really overdue for a surprise inspection ...

Our youngest daughter's flatmate, who we met two years ago is a typical Englishwoman with a whole lot of brain.  Her boyfriend for the past two years (they are both studying at Cambridge) is a smart and personable American, and things are getting very serious between them. There were long-standing plans for these two lovebirds to go back to the US, for him to join the family firm, and for her to go to medical school.  The target was Florida.  But things are changing for her.  The girls came up for the weekend and we had dinner yesterday despite a full ride Florida is no longer the target, instead, she is off to Baylor Medical School (Texas).  Now, the University of Florida medical school is ranked 35th in the country, while Baylor is ranked #22.  In Florida, she got a full ride but at Baylor, she's getting a half ride.  It appears that her parents are well off and that the additional financial burden is not a problem, but the reason for her changing me...

The decision to expand the farm has now been made, contracts have been signed, and money has changed hands. At the end of 2022, it became evident that the farm adjacent to ours was going through a change.  For the first time, our neighbour didn't rent any fields from us.  Our neighbour is in his early 70s and has been farming on his great-grandfather's farm since the age of 12, as soon as he could reach their tractors' brake pedals.   Last summer he planned hosting his granddaughters for six weeks but it was all too much and the girls ended up spending five weeks with us, while their parents were away because of their job ( both are doctors).  In fact, our neighbour has three daughters, and their husbands are all London-based professionals. Mr. Clark and his wife would be in our house several hours a day to spend time with their granddaughters. It's not that they didn't love them it's that 24/7 was all a little too much, Mrs Smith is not doing very well and...

Every year there are several agricultural shows, where there are by invitation-only events.  This year we got several invitations because we acquired several tractors.  Many of these events are boilerplate stuff, but over beer, after one event I was talking with several farm equipment dealers, and that's when it clicked for me.  Dealers were all saying that over the past 18 months, they've quintupled the spare parts inventories.  I asked them how they could justify these costs, and one said, they could not afford to have their clients waiting for months because parts were unavailable. They had learned a hard lesson during the pandemic. During the peak of the pandemic, it was almost impossible to find oil filters for our tractors.  At one point belts were difficult to source, and acquaintances told us that the wait time for new tires was weeks.  Old diesel engines were marvels of simplicity, but our Case tractors are computer-controlled marvels of engin...

There are five main byproducts of a biodigester; water, compost, methane, hydrogen sulfide (which stinks), and carbon dioxide.  The compost is farm-ready that we use on our fields, it doesn't smell like manure, in fact, it has an "earthy smell", and is rather pleasant.  The gases are processed and we extract CH4, S2O, and CO2.  The process is complicated because we need to use the methane to make heat and pressure to remove the CO2 and S2O and dry and compress all the gases.  About 40% of the methane is used for this process.  We pump the CO2 into our greenhouses.  The S2O is a waste gas that we "sell" to a local gas company that on-sells (after processing) to industrial users. It is a complicated process that requires a great deal of surveillance and maintenance, but assuming no major breakdown, and that's a big assumption we should be able to recover the cost of our biodigesters within 5/7 years, which we consider a major achievement.  For example, w...

First,  a few hard truths, current unemployment in the UK is below trend.  Secondly, UK inflation is slightly higher than on the continent but its difference is almost statistically insignificant.  Third, in many sectors of the economy, there has been dislocation, especially in historically important sectors such as the automobile.  Fourth, the UK's demography is better than Germany and Italy, but worse than France.  Fifth, its energy sector remains very dependent on imports (about 60%). We employ 172 people on our farm, 61% are part-time employees, 100% are British nationals, but 45% lived outside the UK before the Covid epidemic.  Pickers are the largest group and they are 77% women, while our dairy production is about half and half.  Our butchering operations are 100% men, but there are only twelve of them and it is considered hard manual labour.   The most interesting thing is that nearly half our staff worked on the continent for several...

The United Kingdom has been agrarian for a long long time.  In fact, you have to go back to the 13th century to see the more or less identical farming look.  Granted there were more farms closer to the big city, but still, in Norfolk, you can find local maps that show farmland largely identical to what it is today.   When we purchased our farm in 2018, the first step was to hire an ecologist and biologist to look over the entire property and see what needed to be done.  Where were the springs (we have three on our property) what is their flow, where are the field walls, topography and what is the soil condition.  Our farm had stopped being productive in the late 1990s, and the vast majority of the working fields were leased to various local farmers for their crops -- nothing unusual there.   We had developed a 20-year business plan and had well capitalized the business so that it may be successful.  We acquired 20 permanent greenhouses that w...

 About three weeks ago, in Sweden, IG Metal, the largest trade Union in the country persuaded dock workers, and postal employees to not provide services to Tesla, to boycott Tesla because it was opposed to certifying any union for its twenty or so mechanics that work in Sweden. It looks like Tesla was the big bad guy here, and IG Metal added that eventually all of Tesla's workers need to be unionized otherwise no Tesla in Sweden (at least).   What a massive miscalculation by IG Metal. What we know so far: (1) Tesla in Sweden has offered its Swedish employees the opportunity to unionize, but apparently, in Sweden, the offer cannot come from the employer it has to come from the employees. (2) The mechanics of Tesla indicated in an open letter to the major financial newspaper in Sweden that they never asked to join a union, that IG Metal never offered for them to join, and frankly they don't want anything to do with the Union. (3) Tesla is considered in many parts of the wor...

First of all, I am a farmer, so events in China have little to do with me, although two of our four tractors were built in China, and about half of the equipment on our biodigester was also manufactured in China.  I checked, so there is supply chain exposure. After my dinner with friends of ours I went down the "Chinese rabbit hole" and one statistical item, if true, is catastrophic for the Chinese economy in general and savers specifically.  At least two Chinese government agencies reported that there are more than one billion excess apartments in China.   Despite having left the firm some years ago, I am still good friends with the current chief economist, out of the blue he called me to congratulate me on the blog.   I thought that it was nice and we had a short conversation about China, and he said, the firm has no exposure so it's not a problem, plus the Yuan is not freely convertible so there is almost no systemic risk. He then related the following s...

Thanks to the President of Brazil's crass (but not unexpected) "bribe" demand talks between Mercosur and Europe on a free trade agreement are "on hold" although there is a summit between the EU and Mercosur in the next few days.  The reality is that following the recent Argentinian presidential elections, Mercosur is in trouble.  The newly elected Argentinian President Javier Milei hates two things:  China (Argentina's single largest trading partner) and Luis Inacion Lula de Silva...the President of Brazil.  Whereas in domestic affairs the new President of Argentina has little leeway, he can do a lot on the international scene.   That is the preamble, to my point despite strong European voices (e.g. Germany) EU bureaucrats know that the free trade agreement is now dead in the water.  That means that EU trade negotiators will focus on the next priorities on their long and exhaustive list.  Some are now redundant; a more in-depth relationship with J...