No 109. PRIVATE ENTERPRISE pb 02.12.2011

No 109. PRIVATE ENTERPRISE IN FARMING.

Today we have such plethora of food labelling - “origin of product”, “sell by “ dates , “best by” dates , “cook by” dates, store in fridge, store in freezer, thermal cold bags from shop to house, how to cook, how not to cook, heat to 82 C. degrees. How our mothers managed without a thermometer I do not know. It is quite possible none of us should now be alive.

I remember a certain Caithness farmer standing before the Sheriff in Wick trying to explain how his cows’ milk was a bit thin with too low a fat content and too low in “solids not fat”. He reckoned that his old mother must have inadvertently knocked the water tap in passing on her way to the dairy with the bucket of milk!!! “Good one”, said the Sheriff, “Guilty as charged. £10.”
That farmer was before his time, now we have thin milk, 1% milk, 2% milk, full cream milk, blue top milk, red top milk, green top milk, double cream, thin cream, whipping cream. Do the cows know, and do they really care!!

Another farmer, or it might have been the same one, was before the Sheriff charged under Potato Marketing Board Rules, trying to explain that the undersized potatoes he had been selling must have been that the van driver picked up the wrong bag of tatties which he had set aside for the pigs!! Today he would have got the Queen’s Award for Industry as being before his time in tapping the market for baby potatoes!!
Same verdict, £10.

On a later appearance he tried to explain that the blue stained potatoes that he was selling cheap were a variety called Black Hearties, or Forty-fold, blue inside when cooked and very tasty. Again he was in advance of his time. The possibility that they could be confused for surplus tatties blue stained by the Potato Marketing Board and disposed of by them very cheaply to be used for for stock feed only, had never occurred to him. Or so he said. Tasted the same anyway if eaten in a poor light!! Guilty. £10.

The potato peelings that he threw to his pigs were missing by many years the much more rewarding and modern market for potato skins, a money-spinning by-product of the oven-ready potato chip industry!!!

There was a great pig industry built on feeding swill mostly from Hotels and Restaurants. Our father knew a man from Orkney called Brass who had been feeding pigs on swill in a big way on a small farm just outside Edinburgh. When asked by father if he was still in that trade he said no, not any longer. When father asked him why he said that when he was dirt poor he could stand the smell, but once he had made enough money he could stand the smell no longer, bought more land, and was now more of a gentleman farmer. Did well at that too!! Swill feeding is now banned!!

Oliver Drever, who had emigrated in 1908 from Stronsay to Carnegie, Brandon, Manitoba, Canada, wrote 4/10/1908 in a letter to his brother-in-law Wm Tait in the Bay Farm, Stronsay:-
“In my opinion Willie Croy ( Stronsay ) is about the most particular farmer I see anyway near here. He does make the best certainly of everything. He has a big garden & he told me he had 150 dollars for onions alone & he has a great lot of strawberrys & all kind of berries which they do up in jars & sell in Brandon. He has a right managing wife & makes a big lot of butter & eggs. Bob Scott (probably Stronsay too ) farms well & people say he has improved his farm a lot since he went on it.

He also wrote “One man here had seed from Scotland last Spring & sowed it on breaking (ploughing land) & thrashed 115 bushel to the acre, that's about the best I've heard of. Oats in general goes anywhere from 40 to 80.(bushels)”
( 115 bushels would be just short of three ton an acre, a very good yield in 1908 anywhere.)

Nearer home during the 1939 War when the Royal Navy was hugely in Scapa Flow there
was a dearth of vegetables in the Far North. Cabbages were making good money. Our
father grew a fair bit at Whitehall and shipped them in to Kirkwall. Cabbages finished, but
no matter.
He cut the green shaws off the Swedish turnips and sent them in to Kirkwall to Charlie
Tait of J.and W.Tait who had the contract to supply the Navy. Seemed all right till many
years later I was sitting in the waiting room of then Motorway Tyres in Thurso while getting
new tyres fitted. An elderly English gentleman, retired by then and now living in Port Skerra,
was there too.
We talked, and he referred to my writing in “Parish Life on the Pentland Firth”
about the Swedish turnip leaves. I was quite proud of our father’s enterprise until my new
friend said:- “I was in the Bloody Navy in Scapa Flow during the War. Never did get used
to turnip shaws. Always wondered where they came from !!! “

Private Enterprise was a great thing.