A really cool farm series from the BBC: The Wartime Farm!

Elkhound has posted episode 5 over at the Country Singletree! e5 wartime farm

I bought my DVD from Amazon for somewhere around $25/27

BBC has gone down hill. No longer have such wonderful series as Upstairs/Downstairs, To the Manor Born and All Creatures Great and Small.

One problem with BBC shows being aired in the US is BBC in Great Britian does not have commercials. For the US program content has to be removed to get in the advertisements.

uTubes deleted.

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Yes, those series never stay up for long, alas!

I bought the series book to give to myself for Christmas.

ITS BACK! How long who knows.....

Something I dont understand. England KNEW they were likely be be drawn into a war. They KNEW that they would be blocaded when the war commenced. WHY in the mid late 30s didnt the government try to buy all the modern machinery they could BEFORE they were surrounded, instead of waiting until nothing could get to them, and they having to reenvent themselves into farming again.
Nother thing. With them haveing NO machinery nearly. Im not sure they wouldnt have been better to GRASS the whole place and living on meat, rather than trying to farm it having nothing to do it with. They would have had meat, milk, leather, wool, and a bunch of byproducts from animals.
Also, all the acreage they TRIED to farm that wouldnt be farmed was a total loss, in time, gas, seed. Left to grass it would have produced well and provided much. ADD to that as much other ground as possible into grass, they could have kept their stocks and flocks of cows and sheep, that they already had well established, and I think in the end and long run, been better off.

I can't find episode 6. Anybody have a link?

Thanks!

Cindyc.

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"Relish your reading. Make note of the melody of the phrases, the architecture of the page. Let the joy of discovery soak right down to your bones!" Dr. George Grant (paraphrased)

Part of the problem after the war was that we were totally broke - fighting the war took everything we had and then we had to pay reparation to the folk who came to help us.....

It was terrible the way people had their farms taken from them. You had no redress. Sometimes the farms seemed to go to the families of government officials....

For all the epsiodes, try Daily Motion video: wartime farm videos on Dailymotion

This groupr of archeologists has also done other series on farming in different eras. Search daily motion for Tales of the Green Valley, The Edwardian Farm, and the Victorian Farm.

I love them all!

Rationing remained common in England into the early-mid-1950s. I remember my Liverpool-born mother packing boxes of goods to ship to her family back home, things like chocolate and canned meat and other stuff. Plus, goods that could have helped feed the population during the war were often destroyed. Just before D-Day, my father (who was in the U.S. infantry) helped load convoys of trucks with canned hams, canned fruit, flour, and other foodstuffs that wouldn't be needed by the troops shipping out to Europe. All those trucks went to the dump, and the food was doused with gasoline and burned because handing it out to the civilians would have "disrupted the rationing system," he was told.

And yes, the British government handled the whole agriculture situation bass ackwards. Heritage breeds that could have helped alleviate so much suffering were allowed to disappear in favor of inefficient and low-yield row-cropping that destroyed productive grasslands. English agriculture was at least 50 years behind the U.S. and the government made no effort to prepare for the inevitable war when it had the chance in the mid-late 1930s.

I downloaded the entire series and have been watching them here and there as time allows.

One thing that jumped out to me in the first episode (IIRC) was that part of the problem was that imports were so cost effective that they had all but stopped farming in favor of livestock.

I see this very thing going on here in the US. When I was a kid, I distinctly remember seeing more cropland than pasture, but now, if it's not already down in pasture, some builder buys it up and sticks cutesy-named "neighborhoods" full of overpriced, cookie-cutter houses on it...or even worse, golf courses.

We should take heed...seriously.

My first thought about minimal livestock was addressed in one of the later episodes: No manure. They played out the soil b/c they didn't feed it - especially the acreage that should never have been planted.

And it sickened me when they shared the story of the fellow who held the govt at bay until they shot him. They wanted him to farm land that should never have been tilled, then they took everything away from him.

Dang. Still sick about that.

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http://homesteadingfamilies.proboards.com/

good link for episode 6

DaClips - Just watch it!

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Je ne suis pas Alice

http://homesteadingfamilies.proboards.com/

its easier to return a golf course to cropland though!

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chaora dhubh
"Don't raise your voice, improve your argument."

cruachan

I dont know of one that has been returned to cropland tho

It might surprise some to learn that in the 1930's, I believe 1938, during the heart of the Great Depression, the United States government decided the reason farm prices were so low was there was too much being produced. The fact that most folks didn't have any money apparently was not considered, nor the fact that people in cities were starving to death. They sent agents around to farms that sold milk and counted the milk cows, then told the farmer how many fewer cows they should have, put a low value on the cow/cows, and set a date to come back to slaughter the animals. The farmer was told to have a pit already dug to put the animals in because they were not to be used for food under penalty of imprisonment.

When the agents came back around, they paid the too low price for the livestock, shot the cows in the head and stood and watched while the farmer buried them.

Now, my great uncle was one of those farmers. He had a wife and 4 kids to feed. My grandparents lived on the neighboring farm and had 7 kids plus 2 grandkids to feed. The agents came around in January and killed the cow just before dark. My granddad and great uncle dutifully buried the cow, the agents left, and everyone went on about their normal routine until about 2 hours after dark. Then they dug up the cow, hauled it into my granddad's barn and started butchering. The men cleaned and cut while the women cooked and canned. Before daylight they gathered up the mess, took it back to the spot and buried it again.

They ran out of lids for the canning jars, so they preserved a lot of it the old fashioned way. They cooked the meat thoroughly, packed it into non-metal containers, then poured melted lard over it to seal out air and kept it in a cool spot. Since those old houses were not insulated that wasn't really very hard.

38 was near the end of the Depression. From 32 to 36 was the worst.
Yes, I had been told several times by my aunt about them being stopped on the Mo River Bridge at St Joe Mo, and agents dumping milk, eggs, livestock over the side, and shooting them. Made her mad ever time she told it. My folks never told of such a thing. Guess they were too poor to have anything to take, OR that they took it to Atchison KANS in which they didnt have to cross a bridge into Mo.

Canning. When used as a term for putting up in glass, it's a contradictory term that only the USA would accept. In English-speaking countries, the appropriate term is "preserving", "bottling", or "putting up". "Canning" (aka "tinning" - same thing) means preserving in tinned metal cans. My mother preserved many dozens of jars of fruit, jams, chutneys, pickles, and bottles of sauces every year. If you asked an English-speaker if they'd "canned" anything, the only ones who would answer "Yes" would be ones who'd worked in a cannery.

OTOH, the USA invented home pressure preservation (what you call pressure "canning"), but your companies never bothered to spread it out to the rest of the world. Sheer business stupidity, and it left the majority of the world (aka "market") without access to it other than via extraordinarily expensive individual imports.

I believe that after 15yrs or so, a products patent is open and free to be copied by anybody willing to do so. Why didnt the rest of the world jumpo on the pressure cooker band wagon when they knew the patentsa had run out on them??

Likely the same reason England didnt have adiquate machinery to do all the farming they wanted to do in WW 2. Considering what they had for machinery, I say again, that they should have stuck with livestock, and everybody ate meat, the rap for fertilizing the hay grounds, and the crop grounds for making hay for cows/goats/sheep/work horses.