Long hours, intense physical labour, low pay and foxes in the hen house: who’d be a farmer today? A growing number, it seems. We enters a brave new world of drone tractors and designer sheep.
Long hours, intense physical labour, low pay and foxes in the hen house: who’d be a farmer today? A growing number, it seems. We enters a brave new world of drone tractors and designer sheep.
At the Three Counties Show, the shearing competition is in full swing. Tucked into one corner of the vast showground in Malvern, Worcestershire, is a stage into which are fitted six little booths like the starting gates on a racecourse. Each one has a number, a chalked-up name and an electrical point into which the competitors fit their shears. Six men line up and on the signal each one opens the gate, extracts a sheep, flips it on to its back, wedges its head between their thighs, bends over and starts shearing, belly first. The ewes do not seem quite as happy with this arrangement as the audience does.
Each shearer is trying to remove the fleece as quick and clean as pulling off a jersey, no nicks or cuts, and no more than three minutes per sheep (the current British record stands at 30 seconds). The spectators see six pairs of spindly legs splayed out like the wrong end of a hen party, while the commentators’ voice rises and falls in one seamless sentence: “And they’re going at it hammer and tongs here ladies and gents number five’s already into the first front shoulder and number four’s turning to come down and that’s a Blue Leicester over in number six useless breed buy ’em in the morning snuffed it by the evening and number three’s streaking ahead down the last side easy home run and we’ve got the man from mid-Wales out to beat the English champion looks like number three’s going to be first out ooooh bad luck he’s got hold of a real wriggler she’s gone all Michael Flatley on him see tap-dancing all over the place shame about that cost him a couple of seconds and number one’s gone in for his second ewe looks like it’s going to be very tight here…”
Read the original full article written by Bella Bathurst and published on the Guardian.