One whistle, two dogs, four hundred sheep
A working sheepdog answers a set of whistled commands that are broadly the same across Britain: one signal to circle the flock clockwise, another for anticlockwise, one to lie down, one to walk on. A SHEPHERD can direct a dog half a mile away across a hillside where shouting would achieve nothing at all.
What the dog is doing is remarkable. It is running a hunting instinct with the ending removed — all the stalking and circling, none of the chase and kill — and steering several hundred animals with it. Training a good one takes years, and a really good one is worth more than the quad bike.
Beehives travel by lorry
For a BEEKEEPER, bees are increasingly a service rather than a honey factory. Orchards and nut groves need pollinating within a narrow window each spring and there are no longer enough wild insects to manage it, so hives are loaded onto lorries, driven to the crop, left to work, then moved on to the next flowering.
The largest operations move hundreds of thousands of hives across whole countries. It is a strange and slightly precarious piece of modern farming: a chunk of the food supply depending on insects that can be hired by the acre.
The cows decide when to be milked
Traditional DAIRY work means milking twice a day, at fixed hours, forever. Robotic parlours have changed that on a lot of farms. A cow wanders in when she feels like it, a laser-guided arm cleans and attaches the cups, and a computer logs her yield and flags anything odd about her.
Cows work the system out quickly and generally choose to come more often than the old timetable allowed, which suits both the animal and the yield. The MILKER's job shifts from sitting on a stool at five in the morning to looking after a herd and a machine.
Nobody gets a day off
CROPS follow a calendar. LIVESTOCK follow nothing of the kind. Animals need FEEDING on Christmas morning, lambing arrives when it arrives, and a cow having a difficult birth at two in the morning does not wait for opening hours.
The weather decides the rest. HARVEST comes in a narrow run of dry days, so a FARMER reads forecasts the way a trader reads prices, and why a wet fortnight in August can quietly undo a year of work.
Very few people, feeding everybody
Agriculture still employs something like a quarter of all workers worldwide. In Britain the figure is around one per cent. Machinery, fertiliser and decades of selective breeding mean a handful of people now produce what used to occupy an entire village.
That has changed what the jobs are. A modern GROWER runs satellite-guided machinery, reads soil analyses and negotiates with supermarkets; the person in charge is as likely to be doing paperwork as driving a TRACTOR. The work has not gone anywhere — there are simply far fewer pairs of hands doing it.