Archived News

4th February 2008

I have been busy printing off letters to schools across Surrey telling, them about the Year of Food and Farming and inviting teachers to an informal visit of the farm to see what we can offer in the way of educational visits to a real working farm.

Out on the farm things are getting busy again after a relatively quiet January.

Cattle have been moved about today, freeing up various barns and fields. Twenty five cattle have moved to Hatch Meadow including the cattle that had Cerebrocortical necrosis (CCN) back in December, these made a good recovery whilst in the barns at Raikes Farm.

Ten steers and seven heifers were taken from the fields at Evelyn Cottages to the barns at Raikes, where they were weighed and ear tags were checked.  Just before the cattle go to slaughter at the end of the week the ear tags will be checked once more as will the corresponding passports.

Up until the 20th Century only natural fetilizers were spread on fields, and to this day the muck from livestock barns is still carted to the fields and spread to fertilize the land.

Now, it is a fact of life that humans eat food and subsequently generated waste products, but most of us don't usually think about what happens to that waste after we flush.  In the past some of the waste was dumped at sea, until this practice was banned in 1998. The remaining two methods are to burn the waste or to distribute it in fields as either a sludge cake which is incorporated into the soil or liquid waste which is injected into the soil.

Water Authorities such as Thames Water must find enough land to dispose of the waste and therefore some of our fields are currently being injected.  This natural fertilizer is good for the soil and helps to reduce our need for man-made fertilizers.

Human waste is heat treated to kill off any bugs and reduce the smell; in fact as I walked across the injected area today it was not at all unpleasant.

The liquid waste is transported by tanker to a special pump at the field edge and from here the waste is pumped across the fields through a toughened pipe out to a tractor. The main pipe is connected to the tractor by an umbilical cord which feeds the waste into the ground via legs on a machine drawn behind the tractor.

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