Will’s World: How to get more bang from your spring barley
© Lee Boswell Photography Like everyone else who put spring barley in the ground this year, I’ve been praying for rain.
Also like everyone else who put spring barley in the ground this year, I’ve been plagued with crows.
With corn prices lower than Keir Starmer’s standing in the farming community right now, every grain counts. So there was nothing else for it: I dug out the gas gun.
See also: A guide to effective birdscaring kits for farmers
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It’s a mighty sounding thing, this model, and the field where we placed it, being surrounded by woodland and high hedges, only further amplifies it with the resulting echo.
One of my great-grandfathers was a gunner in the Royal Garrison Artillery during the Great War.
Those were the chaps responsible for the obscenely large guns you see on archive footage being brought up to the line on trains.
These fired shells the size of shopping trolleys, and I can’t believe even they made a louder report than the gas gun.
It even prompted someone in a local village Facebook group to complain that it was upsetting their dog, much to my amusement (wicked farmer that I am).
Anyway, it worked, and to my satisfaction, hundreds of crows frantically took flight every time it fired.
Peace and quiet
Ironically, though, having started off talking about something loud, I’ve been trying to find some peace lately.
Not in a hippy way – though I suppose you could consider it mindfulness if you wanted to use the current buzz-phrase. But it’s nothing that grand, more just trying to clear my head once or twice a week.
I find noise to be almost incessant these days, whether it’s for obvious practical reasons like having a large and active family, or working with heavy machinery and animals on a daily basis.
Or perhaps it’s more mental, being constantly bombarded the way we are with news and politics.
Or the million and one things we have to think about on a daily basis just trying to keep up with the admin of running a busy family farm.
Anyway, because I know from previous experience that these things can get on top of me if I let them, I try to do something about it, and I’ve been taking myself off for regular evening walks round the farm.
It’s a particularly lovely time of year for this, with everything bursting back into life, and I gain much pleasure from trying to use my senses as much as possible as I walk, and truly be in the moment.
(There’s another one of those buzz-phrases for you – and yes, you do have permission to roll your eyes.)
Stone the crows
A few weeks back I’d had a particularly busy day, running here, there and everywhere, and my phone hadn’t stopped ringing.
Nothing had gone to plan, everyone was tired and irritable, and I couldn’t wait to get out for a walk to decompress (I can’t stop using buzz-phrases now – what’s wrong with me?).
I donned cap and jacket, picked up my stick, and headed off round the fields, feeling calmer and more peaceful with every step.
I inspected some of the hedge plants I’d put in over winter, I sat down for a few minutes and listened to the birds, and I watched a hare scamper through the grass.
Then, just as I turned for home, an almighty explosion from the other side of the hedge caused me to jump in the air like a character in a vintage cartoon, leaving my ears ringing, my heart racing, and all my renewed sense of tranquillity shattered.
I’d forgotten about the bloody gas gun.