MikeTM150

£30/ton was what I was sort of thinking I could sensibly pay for that size timber, but I think the haulage from Arbroath to Bristol might just kill it. Seems Larch down this end of the country is a tad steeper. was quoted £75/ton for some, but it was perhaps a bit bigger diamter but still bit too pricey for me. Wonder how long a tractor and trailer to Arbroath would take?.............

when you find some, and if there are some extra i'm after a load of them but can't find any at a sensible price!

I'll second that. Ordering stuff is easy and it turns up really quick. Must have a good team of elves doing the packaging behind the scenes! And Rob is always very helpful in giving you the benegit of his advice to benefit you!

wow! Seriously good stuff, I found the bats incredible feeding like that whilst carrying young!

put it in a box, spray a good dose of deodrant or some smelly perfume in with it and they'd never know!!!

thats a proper tractor, and a proper driver when you've done a week of 14hrs days on one to!!!

All so their finger prints weren't on it! A good knee capping would save them having to worry about finger prints been left all over the place!

Our local ramblers association love to wear high viz vests when walking around the countryside, and they wonder why my 250 dairy cows think 20 or 30 people in high viz is an exciting thing to explore and lick?

I reckon he probably already does the hoovering from one of his cranes! Or its a PTO mounted version on the MOG?

My advice with that sort of legislation would to wait until someone official asks the question. Its a bit outdated these days, so shouldn't worry about it!

not sure i'd wanna pedal that up too many hills loaded!

Sorry, looking back it did start becoming a rant! I had just come in from re-planting another 5acres of maize that the rooks had yanked out the ground as it was not treated being organic seed. 3rd piece out of the 120acres I planted, very very frustrating and the cup of tea obviously hadn't quite taken effect yet! But yeah both have pro's and con's, and either way there's not hard set rule!! Good Luck Mike

I started to do a mental calculation the other day when driving up and down the field spraying, of how much money's worth was actually in the sprayer, was doing some T3 on wheat and there was about 6 differents things, some trace elements included. I stopped shortly with the mental maths, the figures were getting too big and seemed a little scary!

We run 1200acres organic and contract farm 600acres conventional as well as running a contracting business, I can assure you its more like 50% decrease in yields and you have some real problems with persistent weeds like couch. You can end up spending considerably more money on diesel trying to 'stale seedbed' these types of weeds than you actually do when you just gave it a good dose of glyphosate! It swings and roundabouts, some parts of our farm are unusable for profitable organic farming, so they're put into HLS wildlife schemes. But if the world really becomes short of food and there are higher levels of population starvation, is organic going to feed the world, No. I prefer not dealing with agro-chemicals, my father has Parkinson's and this is attributed to use of agro-chemicals, I know we are much safer about using them these days (cabs on tractors are good for a start!), but they still aren't exactly what one would call healthy products. Organic sugar beet is grown in area's of the world where there is cheap labour (probably akin to slave labour) to hand weed the crops, and countries where I would suspect 'organic' might not be quite so 'organic' as the paperwork would lead you to believe! I mean, we use 'organic Chinese soya' for feeding our dairy cows, now honestly I know it has all the relevant paperwork and has been 'inspected and tested' but china is not a country that springs to mind when you think organic? Like everything in life, they are two sides to everything and the worlds population is growing rapidly and the area of usable land is going down. That's a serious problem!

I'd do what farmer ben says, just add a drop of new stuff, the old will possibly work fine if just a bit slow. Glyphosate is a very robust chemical. Not like some of the modern 'crap' we use, applied one last week that my agronomist left me with a note on the email ' don't leave in sprayer for more than 1hr without agitation otherwise it'll separate out like concrete'. That was very conducive to pouring it into a 4000litre sprayer and hoping i didn't have a breakdown!

We've spent the last two years trying to get a bridleway that runs right through a busy farmyard moved around the outside. New route would be safer, cleaner and much more picturesque than current one. Local Authority are happy with it, but some lovely people in the ramblers association think I should move the farm yard and not the path. HSE have made a point of pushing for the move after an 'incident' with some dork getting licked by a cow. But can i get them to agree, I've had fours meetings to discuss it, and they came up with a different route to the one I proposed..... it ran through the little court yard at the back of the farm house, up the garden and through the wife's poly tunnel, needless to say we didn't agree to that! Its just ridiculous, the path was there orginally for farm workers to get to the farm, not times have moved on, its time for a simple little move of the path surely. My experience has been one of banging my head against a wall, but i'm sure they are cases where its all fine and its a good move.

Just been to midwife with the wife, baby due in about three weeks. Midwife was going through all the birthing options, I nearly got a black eye when I said ' Its ok, I've brought a new set of calving ropes! ' her sense of humour isn't what it was! I'm really looking forward to it, though I'm sure if i was the pregnant one i'd be feeling slightly different!

I've got some sycamore that is about 40" in diameter if you want, but i think theocus has it covered by the sound of it!!!

I know i certaintly ain't the best at sharpening saws perfectly, but I know i'd have got me pen knife out and used that cuz it'd have been quicker!!!!! They need a word in thier ear from Rob D!

wonder how much of your 3.5T would be left for the load? Unless I guess its plated higher for bigger tow vehicles.

nice job!! I reckon one of them is Ash from perhaps a fork of the branch to give the wide open twisted grain with a clever bit of light staining? As to the other haven't the foggyist!

Organic is a luxury item for those who can and want to afford it! But ultimately to feed the world, its about quantity! Also organic is made more difficult by not being able to use useful things like night soil, to complete the nutrient cycle its really needs to go back on the land, but because of the residues in it were not allowed to use it on organic land. Stevie's veg patch is the perfect place for organic, because he'd be unlikely to use many pesticides with his kids around, and hand weeding is practical on that scale. However a bit of fertiliser in the soil in my opinion isn't really the big problem, artificial fertiliser is still the basic nutrients the plant needs. Its the pesticides sprayed directly onto the plant your going to be eating is where the issues come. If the consumer was aware what was applied on there crop very shortly before they ate it, i think they'd be quite shocked! Horses for courses!

On a farm scale of organic farming, when the fertility of soil reduces without the use of artificial fertilisers alot of the weed problems die away. Not only do yo make the crop grow, but so the weeds as well. Some crops you can't grow easily because of pests and diseases, thats just a fact or organic. Somedays i wish we had no organic land, and some days i wish i had no conventional land, they both have their merits, and there's only one kind of farming that will ever feed the worlds population.......conventional farming. Not saying its the most enviromentally sustainable, but it terms of preventing starving populations its the only way to keep it all going!

Can see where your coming from! But We run 1200acres of organic land, and we use a crop sprayer regulary! Used to apply trace elements and organic products for treating pests and diseases in crops. Not sure they always have much effect but they do seem to make a difference, not so much as when we use it on the conventional farm with the artificial products i'll agree, but i know which i'd rather work with!

we used to do some verge trimming and larger area mowing, used to be a nice little earner, never make you rich but it was worth doing. Now either the council have it back in hand (making there machinery more justifiable which is good for council coffers so good for local people) or there are a few around here who seem to be doing it for less than what i see as cost price, so i've let them get on with it. We had to tender for council contracts, and be an approved contractor. I suspect there's still money out there in it if you get it right, but I guess i didn't move into any new areas so fell out the bracket for it. Also as the contracting business grew, I had enough to do without doing that as well for a cut throat price.