British farming's green shoots - Telegraph

British farming's green shoots - Telegraph

PG Wodehouse once observed that it was never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine. He could equally have been talking about farmers, who are not known for the sunniness of their dispositions.

Indeed, it can sometimes seem as if they are only happy when they have something to complain about. And there is nothing they like complaining about more than the weather, which is always conspiring against them. When they are trying to grow their crops it never rains; when they are trying to harvest them it never stops.

And it was ever thus. I remember the title of one of the few books that was passed around the Yorkshire farming community in which I grew up: Rain and Ruin: Diary of an Oxfordshire Farmer, 1875-1900.