agriculture beta?

[lotesse]

Hi friends, wondering if any of you are available to beta on the farmcore aspects of the next story in my TDiR series; I know some of you have related special interests! I'm looking for information about reparative agriculture in England in the early 1990s; what kind of liberal farming was commonly practiced, if in my story I should set them up as certified permaculture or locavore or halal or organic or some other sort of period-specific utopian project.

My characters are starting from scratch in an old farmstead that's just been lived in for a few decades, not farmed, and I'm trying to figure out what I need to have them plant/rear and also what to pursue in terms of grants and funding, investments ect. The story is set in August/September through May or so, in the Thames River Valley; I've been using Susan Cooper's childhood home of Dorney as my geographical stand-in for the location of the village.



-You plant the new young trees in the fall, I know that much!
-Before the frost, till up the land to start preparing the soil? Are alfalfa and soy good crops to plant in this context, or are those for factory farming and it should be more like corn, peas, squash, and carrots? Do I sound too much like an American, with all these New World plants?
-Maybe set up animals before winter? for fertilizer ect. I'm thinking sheep or goats, chickens, and rabbits. Do I want a pig? Pig might be too much.
-I need at least one horse, for plot-related reasons. Does the horse need companion animals? Is it okay to have just the one? (There could be a barncat! Horses like cats, don't they?) Also what kind of dog would make sense, as a working breed?
-Build the raised beds for the kitchen garden in the fall, I think? And then plant in spring?
-When do I need to get herbs in by? Should some of that have been put in right away, at the end of the summer season, to get established? Or would it make more sense to prepare beds and then start from seed in the spring?

There's also a whole class of questions I've got to work out about the politics of the establishment; I'm trying to make a sort of farm-Camelot, so it has to be powerful and just, and I want to get the equivalencies and the ethics right.

-Are they a nonprofit or heritage site, maybe?
-One of the themes in the series is celebration of cultural diversity via foodways, and I was thinking that I could develop that further here. Halal butchery is fasure a relevant sociopolitical issue, and might be something my characters should look into providing in this context. Are there other ag products that non-white families in 1990s Britain would have been looking for, that my characters ought to supply? Lamb is a thing like that, I think; what about herbs and spices? Different veg?
-I'm researching period social programs that would include working at a farm like the one I'm imagining as part of service or support; any leads on that sort of thing would be very welcome!

Comments

[melannen]

My experience is in the US, but it's specific to "starting over in a farmstead that hasn't been farmed for a decade", so: bear in mind that in a decade, any land that hasn't been actively managed - farmed, grazed, or mowed - will have become a young forest (here's a website with photos and timelines, although their plot was completely wiped out to start, so it would probably be even faster on your farmstead: secondary succession in the UK.)

Their first work will be about turning the land back into farmland from oldfield thicket, not about putting crops in. You bushwhack around the land, trying to figure out what's actually still there from when it was being worked and what's salvageable (old orchards? remains of fences or field boundaries?) and what needs to start from scratch.

The ways to do this that I know about are a) if the forest is big enough, sell the wood to a timber company and have them clear it for you, and then clear the stumps, which is another huge job, or b) if it's still more scrubby, fence in the land and run sheep and/or goats on it a few years to let them clear the growth out for you, and then decide what to do. You can also sometimes do controlled burns, depending on where you are.

That said, this is all based on rural areas of the eastern US where there is a lot of marginal farmland going back to forest all the time. My vague knowledge of English agricultural land is that if it's good farmland in an agricultural area, this probably won't apply, because it was probably being managed somehow, even if it was just being leased for haying or grazing by other farmers, unless there's some story/character-based reason why the people living there chose to let it go wild. At minimum, the people there may have at least run a few sheep on it to keep the undergrowth down.

Also randomly based on my own knowledge in the US: politics aside, providing lambs to people who need halal or kosher lamb for religious reason is a fairly good business strategy for small-scale livestock farmers - on the farm I was visiting last week, they usually sell live lambs directly to customers who handle the butchering themselves because they want to control or observe the whole process, and getting them from small-scale local farmers is the easiest way to do that. (There can be some ethical issues there on the farmer's end, though, since you have no way of knowing what will actually happen to the animal once it's sold.)

RE: the horse: a small-scale farm with inexperienced but friendly owners *will* accumulate a motley crew of rescue animals/animals other local farmers want to rehome, unless they quickly learn to say no. So a paddock with a horse and a couple donkeys and some dogs or peacocks or wallabies or whatever, who are just there because somebody didn't want to feed them anymore and your people were soft-hearted, makes perfect sense (realism-wise. Not really farming-budget-wise, but....)

[lotesse]

I think the property's been kept in hay, just not more actively worked than that. Thanks so much for the concrete details, this gives me something to go on!

[staranise]

It really depends on just how hippy-dippy you want them to be, how many people they have to do the work, how many people they're feeding, and whether they need to earn an income. The 1990s was after we'd started to realize just how much of Western agriculture needed to be questioned (answer: almost all of it, right down to "cut down the trees and plough the fields") but in the farming world, you do what you have the resources to do, and modern agriculture is as cheap and labour-efficient as it can manage.

But this was about the time British forest gardening had left the incubation stage and was ready to be deployed in force. In the late 80s and early 90s, a lot of people were visiting Robert Hart's forest garden in Shropshire and building their own. Getting one of the books from that early era might give you some insight into the very local native species (bc of the push for biodiversity instead of worldwide mass-produced clone species) in England.

[staranise]

Ah, here's another resource: The River Cottage Year is from 2003, and provides a month-by-month breakdown of the work there.

[lotesse]

Ta very much for sources!!!