CovSoc Vice Chair, Peter Walters, reports back on a Coventry’s Society talk from retired farmer and CovSoc member, Richard Grindal. Peter writes…..
In Richard Grindal’s early childhood, horses were still used on the family farm at Barnacle just north of Coventry.
The farm, bought by his great-grandfather during the First World War, was a traditional agricultural family business, with pigs and chickens as well as cattle and a rotational crop system featuring wheat, barley, turnips and grass.
Change came in the shape of the T 20, a small tractor made by the Massey Ferguson company in Coventry, now known throughout the farming world as the legendary ‘little grey Fergie.’ And it was a revolution in its own right, Richard recalled in a talk to fellow members of the Coventry Society in February 2019 following the closure of the factory in Banner Lane.
Richard took over the family farm from his father in 1970, running it until his retirement two years ago, and has witnessed many revolutions and fundamental change in the way the countryside is farmed.
In his early years, the whole community of Barnacle would be willing to muck in and help on the farm at times like the harvest. It was a part of village life. Now farmers find themselves having to block field gateways with concrete to keep out intruders. At one time County Councils could offer farm tenancies to people keen to get into the industry. Now it’s become hard to get into farming unless there’s already a family stake in it.
Increasingly, farmers who just wanted to get on with the day-to-day business of farming had to deal with pressures from outside, from the 1947 Agricultural Act, which Richard acknowledged was brought in to stabilise prices, to madcap schemes like the hiring of a South American expert to teach farmers how to lasso cattle.
His talk was at its most powerful in describing the impact of the 2001 outbreak of foot and mouth disease, a devastating experience, he said, that stopped the countryside in its tracks and made many farming folk despair of the future. It’s not surprising, he went on, that the mental health of farmers, in the light of rising suicide rates, is now a massive issue in the industry.
The Grindal family had business connections with the city just down the road – they sold their milk to the Coventry Co-op dairy in Swan Lane, and they were among the first locally to diversify in search of new ways of earning a living. Back in 1978, Richard’s wife, who had been in hospitality before they met, started a bed and breakfast business at the farm. At the time it was sufficiently unusual for the production team behind the radio serial The Archers to pop in to have a look.
But after fifty years in farming, Richard has not changed his view. Farming is there to produce food, he said, and it’s not a job. It’s a way of life.