febuary 10

Hello or should i say G'day,

I took the family away over Christmas and new year to ,yes you've guessed already AUSTRALIA ! Trip of a lifetime ! We had been saving up for and looking forward to this trip for about a year and it did not disappoint ! Flew into Sydney,couple of days there ,then flew to Brisbane where we picked up a hire car to start our adventure up the east coast to eventually end up at the top at Port Douglas.

Fair to say we had a ball ! Christmas Eve in surfers paradise on the beach having a barby is weird when you've never had a Christmas outside the uk . The Aussies don't really do the festive season and a Christmas tree with Santa Claus flying around in his sleigh in the snow ,is very hard to get your head around !! They do however know how to celebrate the new year and the firework display we saw in Cairns ,New Years Eve, was the best I've ever seen .

I was going to have a rant about the weather that we have been having lately here ,ie the huge amount of rain .But that night in Cairns we had,from 8.15pm to 8.15 am the next morning we had 14 inches of rain !! Up in the rainforest, that we went up into the next day , over a period of 24 hrs they had 1 METRE of rain !!!

The farming was great too , lots of sugar cane ,banannas , pineapples,mango's and peaches.Everybody seemed so much more chilled out than we do over here , they seem to have so much more time and definetely more space.However , it's a very long way away and I like my season's. Winter,spring ,summer and autumn all have so much to recommend them and in their own way I look forward to them all. I like the changes in the colours the range of temperature, the snow , the sun and the different smells that the seasons bring .We may be small ,congested ,built up ,overpopulated but Great Britain and her green and pleasant lands has something that I just couldn't leave.

Anyway ,less of the sentimental stuff and on with a quick update of what is happening on the farm.We have been making a lot of moist blend feedstuff for KW Alternative Feeds , which is used for dairy and beef cattle .There has been an increased demand in the market for straw as the wet weather has continued, so we are shifting our stock of straw which has been very useful.However the bad weather has stopped us doing anything on the land except we did manage to get 60 acres of ploughing done at the beginning of Febuary .

The oils ,dressings ,mayo's and new sauce have been going very well and we have been building our local base steadily.The radio show which i do for FROME FM  which you can listen to only on the internet ,has been going well and I now have a new slot , live on a sunday afternoon once a month.It's all about different aspects of farming ,the farmers themselves and the people that supply the farming trade and work with us and I try to make farming a bit more understandable for people that have never been involved in it. Have a listen see what you think ! You can always email me here or why not text or email me when i'm on the air .Have a look on the Frome Fm web site there is alot of good stuff on there . Enjoy !

Well thats it for the moment ,

Think British

Andy