Dropping prices and food goals

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19 April 2023

Farmer James Cossins has used the slow, wet start to spring to assess new sustainable farming methods and asks if food production is really encouraged

Rolling the fields at Rawston in the late 1960s.

As we move into April the weather has again been challenging for farmers and growers. In February we received virtually no rain and in March there has hardly been a day without it! Here at Rawston, this means that very limited field-work has taken place so far this year. In February we did manage, in dry but rather cold conditions, to sow most of our spring crops such as beans and barley.
As I write at the end of March, they are just beginning to emerge, which is encouraging. We should now be rolling silage fields and any winter crops that escaped the roller – but the conditions are just too wet.
We have also been unable to turn out our milking cows as the grass seems to be only growing slowly and conditions underfoot have simply been too wet. Feed stocks are consequently getting short and, because of the late spring, we are having to purchase maize silage from a nearby farm to see us out for the last of the winter.
The price of the foods that we produce largely seem to be in decline. Our milk price has dropped by 7p in the last few months and further reductions are on the way. The price of wheat and barley has dropped from the highs achieved last autumn by around £70 per ton. Oilseeds appear to have dropped even further. There is so much uncertainty in the markets – so much so that the effects of the Ukrainian War can make prices move dramatically on a daily basis. Fortunately, fertiliser prices have come down to slightly more sensible levels, but are still well above the levels they were before the war started.

The move to sustainability
I have attended a number of meetings, listening intently to discover what help DEFRA is offering to farmers and growers. It seems to be a complex mix based around how to farm in a sustainable way. However, food production hardly seems to get a mention. This has made me consider one of the options of planting a legume ley for two years, taking no production from it to improve the soil structure and saving any labour and machinery costs.
Unfortunately, this type of farming won’t feed anyone! Arla, our milk buyer, is also encouraging its suppliers down the sustainability route, with financial incentives dependent on milk production methods. It seems to be a logical approach: producing milk efficiently is one of the key goals. For example, not overfeeding protein in the diet and then wasting it through the manure produced.
We will also be disadvantaged financially if we purchase soya from sources where there has been deforestation.
The incentive starts in July, so we are still learning how we can become more sustainable.

Come on, Cherries!
In other, non-farming news, we AFC Bournemouth supporters had a season highlight last month with the 1-0 defeat of Liverpool. It was a very entertaining afternoon, with Liverpool missing a penalty and Bournemouth playing with great determination, showing their desire to remain in the Premier League despite being near the bottom of the league with our local rivals Southampton. Let’s hope the results go our way for the last couple of months of the season. Come on, you Cherries!

Sponsored by Trethowans – Law as it should be

Tom Waters comes home to Dorchester

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Editorial team

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19 April 2023

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Tom Waters (r) on stage with Ronnie Wood

After a sold out tour of Europe with the band, Tom returns to his home town for a surprise one off gig with his new band Electric People.
Tom Waters, nominated for Young UK Blues Artist 2023, had an unconventional education growing up in Dorset. His parents were musicians who toured with well-known blues and jazz musicians such as Charlie Watts, Jools Holland, and Ronnie Wood. Tom and his sister would accompany their parents on tours during school holidays, soaking up the sights and sounds. Age five, Tom fell in love with music after hearing Willie Garnett and Don Weller play with his dad’s band, Rocket 88. He got his first saxophone shortly after and played with Charlie Watts’ band at a young age. In 2013, Charlie Watts secretly organized a saxophone lesson and gifted Tom a new saxophone.
Tom left conventional school to tour with his father and played with various bands worldwide. At 16, he was offered a place at the prestigious Purcell Schools of Music in London, where he met Jack Thomas. They played in many different bands together, including The Electric People, and later went to The Royal Academy of Music together.
Tom has an impressive CV, having recorded with The Rolling Stones and Sir Ray Davies, played in The Jools Holland Rhythm and Blues Orchestra, and played hundreds of sell-out shows worldwide.
For his homecoming show, Tom wants to celebrate the music he loves; Blues, Rock, Jazz, and an Electric show. He has also invited local friends to join him on stage.
Tom Waters Electric People at Dorchester Corn Exchange, 28th April 8 pm.
Tickets (£22) and more info here

All Stars with the Sherborne School Swing Band

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19 April 2023

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Friday 26th May at 7.30pm
Dining Hall, Sherborne School

Enjoy a three-course dinner and some foot-tapping numbers from the Swing Band!
Dress code: Smart casual

Tickets £25.00

Scan the QR code in the advert to book or email [email protected]

Meet your local – Thyme After Time

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18 April 2023

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Tucked into a farmyard complex outside Stalbridge, Thyme After Time is a local favourite for breakfast and scones. Rachael Rowe reports

Thyme after Time cafe at Spirehill.
All images: Rachael Rowe

The smell of a breakfast cooking is always enticing, but there’s a lot more than eggs and bacon going on behind the scenes at Thyme After Time near Stalbridge. Owner Margot Dimmer talked about how her business started and described her latest developments.
‘Nineteen years ago, when my son was born, I started making jellies, chutneys and jams. I supplied delis and places like River Cottage. I worked from home and used to deliver them all with my son in the car. I did some work for Parkers, an outside caterer, and built up networking links. People started asking me to do parties. Before I knew it I was doing 16 weddings a year.
Then I had a catering business at Hazelbury Bryan, with a cafe at the side. But it was the cafe that really took off. I chatted to the landlord here at Spirehill Farm, and they found a space for me. In July we’ll have been here eight years. We still do catering, but since the lockdowns we only supply events and parties – and will shortly be supplying funerals. We don’t do weddings any more, Saturdays are too busy here at the cafe.
We managed to survive the lockdowns, but they changed the business. I saw what we needed and acted fast. Overnight we did a massive overhaul of the website so we could offer Saturday night takeaways with a world menu such as Chinese and Mexican. The first lockdown was really good for us, but it was increasingly difficult in subsequent lockdowns due to the competition – everyone else caught on!’

Dorset Cream Teas by post
The lockdowns made Margot realise there was an opportunity waiting for her. She was getting regular requests to post her produce and she began to look at the e-commerce aspect of the business.
‘We set up a crowdfund to raise £9,500 so we could develop the e-commerce business. We had got half way to the target with just two days to go, and at that point a long-standing customer stepped in and made up the difference. That enabled us to purchase the Rationale cooker (which produces 200 scones per hour!) plus the additional equipment for the mail order side of the business. It has taken 18 months to get off the ground.’
The Dorset branding and eye-catching packaging have paid off. Did you know that a hare is a symbol for Dorset? It is emblazoned on the cream tea delivery boxes – not only do they look absolutely beautiful, but they are strong enough to be reused for storage. But there is more to the image – Margot shows me why the Droste Dorset Hare has its name.
‘Droste is an anagram for Dorset, but it’s also an old Dutch word describing a picture appearing within itself.’
Sure enough, if you look closer at the packaging you can see a couple of mini hares.
‘Everything is sourced locally and everything is recyclable.’ Margot says. ‘Our buttermilk for the scones is from the BV Dairy in Shaftesbury. Craig’s Farm Dairy in Weymouth provides the clotted cream and New Forest strawberries are used in our homemade jam. You can get strawberries from them 11 months of the year. Our coffee comes from Read’s in Sherborne.
We thought carefully about our packaging, making sure it is all recyclable. The scone bags are bamboo and compostable. We get our ice packs (for the cream) from a medical company in Gillingham; instead of using a chemical-based gel, we use de-ionised water. You can freeze it and pop it in a G&T!
‘We send hampers and cream teas all over the country from the Dorset Hand Made Food Company. And people can add extras such as Mounter’s Gin from Marnhull or our popular chocolate biscuits.’
If you are looking for a gift for that hard-to-please person, or just to brighten someone’s day, these teas look ideal. Margot also produces afternoon teas and cream teas that can be ordered as takeaway or delivered locally.

Dorset Handmade Food Company cream tea hamper by post

How many are in the team?
‘We have ten people, including our three Saturday kids – Eve has been here for six years and Liv is an apprentice.’

What flies out of the cafe?
‘Breakfasts! We serve them at lunch as well. Our Thornhill Brunch is an 11-piece breakfast, and we have breakfast specials too. All the ingredients are local, of course – the eggs come from the farm next door!
‘We also sell our preserves. Medlars are a rare fruit – I get my supplies from someone from the local vintage motorcycle rally. The John Boy’s marmalade is named after my uncle. When I took some marmalade to him he always stirred in some whisky.’
What are you most proud of?
‘That I’m still going! Lockdown was a valuable experience; I discovered that my culinary repertoire is much bigger than I imagined. I challenged myself to come up with a different menu item each week in lockdown.’

And your biggest challenge?
‘Actually it was coming out of lockdown. It has been really tough, especially this last winter. People got out of the habit of going out. These first few weeks of spring have just started seeing things pick up again.’

So what’s next?
We’re currently promoting our hampers with the cream teas by post. Here at Thyme After Thyme we’re trialling Sunday breakfast openings, with some special additional ingredients (think pre-breakfast pastries and brunch platters). There’s also a doggie full English. And for the summer I’m looking at having a Sunday breakfast or brunch event with a musician playing. You’ve got to keep moving continually in business.’

For cream teas by post, visit DorsetHandmadeFoodCompany
Thyme After Time cafe
is open Monday to Saturday, 8am to 2pm, at Spire Hill Farm, Thornhill, Stalbridge, DT10 2SG

A Sherborne man on a mission – Looking back

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Editorial team

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18 April 2023

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Roger Guttridge reveals plans to provide a fitting memorial to a largely forgotten pioneer of press freedom and help for the poor

Today, the Goadby burial plot is marked by a wooden fence and a young oak tree. Image: Roger Guttridge

Thousands drive past every day, unaware that barely a stone’s throw from the A30 lie the remains of one of 18th century Dorset’s most influential figures.
For reasons unknown, publisher, author and bookseller Robert Goadby and his wife Rachel chose to be buried not at Sherborne Abbey, with which they had close ties, but in unconsecrated ground a couple of miles away at Oborne.
Robert certainly loved the spot, and is said to have walked there most days from his home in Long Street, Sherborne. He loved nature and admired the view from Oborne (which is now obscured by a railway embankment).
But his affection for the place doesn’t explain why, some time before his death at the age of 57 in 1778, Goadby acquired a burial plot not within the churchyard that surrounds the ancient chancel at Oborne but on glebe land (an area of land within a parish used to support a parish priest) ten yards outside it. The chancel – protected by the Churches Conservation Trust (CCT) – is now the only surviving part of what was once St Cuthbert’s Church.
For almost exactly 200 years, the Goadby plot was itself appropriately protected by an iron fence.
Inside the fence was an inscribed headstone praising nature as our link to God and describing a fir tree that originally grew out of the grave.
By the mid-20th century, the original fir had long since given way to a mature elm (image opposite, top).
The elm eventually fell victim to Dutch elm disease, and when tree surgeons arrived to fell it in 1977, they also removed the railings and most of the shattered memorial stone. A wooden fence has since replaced the railings and a young oak now grows on the spot once occupied by the fir and the elm.
Only fragments of the memorial stone remain.

A giant elm tree marked the plot until it succumbed to Dutch Elm Disease in 1977

Private, keep out
Fortunately, a group of heritage enthusiasts has been working to provide a fitting memorial to the Goadbys once again – although even this has proved more challenging than expected.
‘Our original plan was to erect a new gravestone to replace the one that was destroyed in 1977,’ group member Barbara Elsmore told me in 2019. To this end, a grant was obtained from the Simon Digby Trust, only for the group to learn that a new headstone was out of the question, as the site was on private land and there was no public access.
Instead, the group proposed to erect an information board on a pew in the chancel.
Four years – and lots of negotiations – later and the group has finally been given the go-ahead, not only for the noticeboard remembering Robert and Rachel but also the publication of a booklet featuring articles and other information about them.
Although born in London in 1720, by the age of 21 the go-getting Goadby was already running his own bookshop in Bath. In 1744 he moved to Yeovil and launched his first newspaper, the Western Flying Post and Yeovil Mercury.
Five years later, he bought Dorset’s first newspaper, the Sherborne Mercury, moved his operation to Long Street and merged the two titles to become the Western Flying Post or Sherborne and Yeovil Mercury.

The Goadby burial plot in unconsecrated ground prior to the 1977 removal of the elm tree

Freedom of the press
Goadby campaigned tirelessly for press freedom and was motivated by a desire to educate the public and help the poor.
An inscription above the door of his Long Street printworks read: ‘The liberty of the Press and the liberty of the people fall together. Long may heaven avert it.’
The second edition of Hutchins’ History of Dorset, published in 1796, said of Goadby: ‘Few men have been more generally known in the West of England than he was, and few have had more friends, or more enemies.
‘Truth was the object of his researches, in the pursuit of which he was indefatigable … His knowledge was of course considerable, and he was well versed in several languages…The productions of his press were numerous; almost all of them of a moral or religious tendency.’
As well as newspapers, Goadby’s many other publications included the long-running Book of Fairs and, in three volumes, The Family Library. He was heavily involved in civic life, serving as a warden of Sherborne Grammar School and also as a surveyor of the local highways.
He founded a subscription library in Cheap Street.
When he died, he left £200 to the poor people of Sherborne and £2 a year to the town’s vicars on condition that they preached an annual sermon ‘on the wisdom and goodness of God in creation’.
It was still being preached 100 years later.
Rachel and Robert’s personal life was tinged with tragedy. Their only child, also Robert, died in 1756 aged seven and is buried in Sherborne Abbey.
Rachel died 12 years after her husband and was buried alongside him.

Next month, Roger Guttridge will look at the fascinating history of Dorset’s first newspaper (which Goadby bought) and its early successors.

Grand finale with Elgar masterpiece at GMC

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Editorial team

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18 April 2023

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WE have grown used to changing arrangements at short notice, but Gordon Amery from Gillingham Methodist Church (GMC) thought he was safe in planning a concert on Saturday 6th May 2023. Then along came the Coronation.

So the scheduled performance of Elgar’s sublime choral work The Dream of Gerontius, with a 50-strong choir and international concert organist David Briggs playing the Sweetland organ and taking the place of the orchestra, will now be given on Sunday 7th. There will also be three well-known soloists, including tenor John Graham-Hall singing the role of Gerontius.
The concert is particularly poignant as the church, where Gordon has run the very successful Music at GMC programme for many years, will be closing its doors sometime during the next year. This will be the final concert, and the most ambitious event, in its history.
The Dream of Gerontius is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest pieces for chorus and orchestra ever written, and it has long been Gordon’s dream to hear it performed in Gillingham. David Briggs last came to GMC in 2019 for a performance of Louis Vierne’s Messe Solennelle, and it was during that visit that he and Gordon agreed that it would be amazing to perform The Dream with the same choir. Plans were drawn up during the latter part of that year and a performance was pencilled in for 2020. But, like so many other events, it was postponed by the pandemic. Since then it has been an uphill struggle to get the organist, the choir and the soloists free at the same time.
‘But I have finally managed to do it! says Gordon, who is keen to fill the church for the celebration of Music at GMC.
‘Sunday 7th May is the big day! I am sure that this will be a very special and spiritual (not to mention emotional) evening,’ he says.
For more information, visit Music at GMC , and tickets (£20) are available here.

Housekeeper/Cleaner required | Plumber Manor Sturminster Newton

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Editorial team

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18 April 2023

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Plumber Manor, the archetypal Dorset country hotel, is a fine Jacobean country house, still owned, and now run as a luxury hotel, by the same family that built it in the early 1600s, located in the heart of Thomas Hardy’s ‘vale of little dairies’, one of the most beautiful parts of Dorset.

Person wanted for primarily Saturday’s and some Sunday’s as required.
Hours to be discussed.
Please contact
[email protected]

Full time herd person required | Rawston farm Tarrent Valley

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17 April 2023

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With over 5 generations of farming experience, the Cossins family proudly hand rear Aberdeen Angus, Hereford and Rawstar milking cows on our family farm in Tarrant Rawston, Dorset. Our herds are grass fed all year round on the naturally lush and mineral rich grass of the Tarrant Valley.

A vacancy has now arisen for a full time herd person to tend to our herd of 150 milking cows.

We are looking for someone with at least 5 years of experience and for the right person this position will come with good accomodation. Salary to be discussed but will be dependent on the experience brought to the role.

If you think you have what it takes to be our next herds person, then please apply in the first place with your CV, a covering letter and any references to James Cossins to [email protected] or call 07836 729475 for more details.

https://www.rawstonfarmbutchery.co.uk

Questions around identity

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17 April 2023

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Questioning identity does not equate to a crisis, says Dorset Mind – but calling it one can create a drama around a very normal process

It’s normal to question who you are – your core beliefs, personality, and sexual or gender identity. Questioning one’s identity can occur at any age. Often this reflection can provide an opportunity for growth and positive change.
You may have seen the term ‘identity crisis’ in the media, usually alongside a generic headline on ‘how to cope’. Questioning your identity is not a crisis; it shouldn’t be stigmatised, nor is it something to be frightened of.

Gender Identity
‘Gender identity’ is a person’s sense of their own gender. UK Census Data showed that 262,000 people aged 16 years and over in England and Wales identified as a different gender than the one they were assigned at birth. (Census, 2021).
It’s important to acknowledge these statistics, especially considering mental health challenges within the transgender community. During the 2020/21 period, 2,630 hate crimes against transgender people were recorded by the Police (Home Office, 2021).
One of my personal key takeaways from completing Unconscious Bias training at Dorset Mind was that we all form judgements, often without realising, due to the many factors affecting who we are, such as our own gender identity.
People may react confron-tationally towards others, simply due to differences, and the uncomfortable feelings created by the ‘otherness’. Additionally, the ‘hate’ may stem from an individual’s lack of education or understanding.
Dorset Mind’s messaging
Within Dorset Mind, we continue to amplify the voices and experiences of people in our communities, often through online blogs or vlogs. We want to encourage all ages to contribute, so we can better support each other. In Dorset Mind wellbeing groups, we’re delighted to provide participants safe and confidential spaces to talk about who they are.
Within our LGBTQIA+ group, ‘MindOut,’ participants share their own experiences, help each other to embrace their own personal sense of identity and take part in mindful activities which help develop self-compassion. Dorset Mind work placement organiser and volunteer Billie Frater helps to co-facilitate the ‘MindOut LGBTQIA+’ group.
She says: ‘The beauty of life is that it gives us the opportunity to explore who we are. It’s OK to feel confused and question our sexual and/or gender identity.
‘However you feel or identify, you are valid and loved. Additionally, there are people and resources that can help you better understand and learn about yourself. Don’t feel pressured to figure out who you are. It’s a journey, not a race!’

Need support?
Samaritans provide a phone listening service which operates 24hrs a day, 365 days a year. Contact them FREE on 116 123.
If you’re a part of the LGBTQIA+ community or questioning your gender identity, find signposting and support groups for young people and adults on the rainbowdorset.co.uk website.
Additionally, contact MindLine Trans+, a free, confidential listening service for people identifying as trans or non-binary, and their friends and families, on 0300 330 5468.
Other support links can be found on Dorset Mind: dorsetmind.uk