One of the things that I was thinking about earlier today was just a memory that I had of visiting the Driffield Show when I was a kid, and I don’t know if I expected to see my grandad there but he was there, and he was showing his tractor, and I have some of those memories that I wish I’d had chance to talk to him about some more later on. He was a farmer – he started in Holmpton – he had a mixed farm in Holmpton and from there he did lots of contract farming later on around Ryehill. He passed away quite young. I think when he began farming in the 60’s maybe they had sheep and cattle...

Yes - most farms would have been mixed farms then, and most farms would have been like one closed ‘bubble’ and then it all got taken over by industry basically. But it’s all circular, so like you had your own muck, you mucked it, but then that was overtaken by the Green Revolution, which is like a weird thing to call it now, but that refers to my dad’s generation, when more monocultural crops and the oil industries started selling you Roundup. Dad remembers the Roundup man coming around, making Roundup in front of them and going “this is a totally safe substance!”.

That’s interesting because my grandad ended up – the last thing he did – was chemical spraying, when barely anyone else would go near it – and a few family friends now who I’ve connected back up with, who are still farmers, some in Welwick, have said that ‘we knew your grandad – he would do things that I’d never do – I wouldn’t do chemical spraying when jobs were offered, but he would and your grandad was like that, and he wouldn’t wear a mask either’. Later on he died from brain cancer and I’ve seen this happen to others and again throughout the agricultural community here.

But the thing is that you can’t prove it afterwards, and that sort of information wasn’t there…

You could maybe say the same in any industry though to make it an even field – like for example asbestos – you know it’s not just in farming, it’s throughout the whole of our lives.

It’s all of manufacturing.

Like plastics, we can’t avoid them now and I feel really cringey whenever I look in my bin and think about how much crinkly plastic there is in there.

It’s across the board isn’t it, and I totally agree with you – you see the impact all of these different chemicals on your families, on yourself – the more you dig the more you realise that that’s what happened. We think we’re alright, that we’re invincible, but we’re not. It’s impacting our selves – we’re taking in lots of pesticides and I’ve had that problem as well. I’ve converted a lot to organic. I know that you have your patch here and I know that it’s not straightforward for farmers, I’m not suggesting it is. It’s not a blaming thing – it’s just that we’ve got to be real about this. This is where many cancers and dementias are coming from.

It's cellular isn’t it – it’s on a deep level that’s imperceptible. Does anyone else have any thoughts around this as well? Around food – because that’s another kind of important point that you pick up on is that we’re consuming so much without necessarily knowing where those things have come from – we might have a vague idea, but we might not even be interested…

Well it can stem from everything you grow through to cooking – pots and pans – aluminium and Teflon in non-stick pans… microfibres…

This is one of the reasons we started growing vegetables at home – just to be able to go outside and taste the difference between different types of onions. Home-grown onions make you cry way more!

Yes if you grow an onion yourself when you chop it your eyes will be streaming!

I come to this from an educational point-of-view because I used to be a schoolteacher, and we always had the children growing things. And it would continue all the way through their primary school life – this was here in Hull. And then you kind of think right well we’ve sown the seed – they’re all going to be doing this as they move through life and go into secondary school and beyond, but they don’t. A few do, but the majority don’t because of all of the other everyday outside influences…

And also maybe the lack of opportunity to, and the interest – I got into gardening from an early age because of farming and stuff, but I grew up with an old lady who grew her own vegetables, and it was a thing wasn’t it – my Auntie Margaret and Uncle George lived down James Reckitt, off of East Park, and their garden was like a Hayao Miyazaki dream – loads of flowers, loads of vegetables… George worked on the docks and they grew up with lots of fresh fish as well. Which isn’t really like the same type of thing anymore is it, because it’s been plundered. I just like the idea of eating really healthily all of the time.

It’s just how to find a way to make it sustainable literally throughout somebody’s lifetime when we have so many other outside influences to veer us away. I feel like as a race we all have to sort of make the pledge.

This isn’t to romanticise the past, but if some of my elder relatives were here they would tell you to bugger off, because it wasn’t easy…

That was one of my dad’s favourite sayings I think, bugger off! He also had a rabbit gun – if anybody unwanted came up the drive he’d have his rabbit gun with him and just… gesture! “Go on, bugger off!”.

My great uncle Charlie did set up traps on his farm which is like really wild west isn’t it?! But I mean he would definitely be on the cusp of the Victorian times, and that’s why I always find it really interesting how that generational gap’s growing wider and wider, because I remember my grandad told me about the worms pulling the straw down – because you’d left it over the autumn and winter – and then the straw gets pulled down back into the soil, and leaves as well. And it’s one of the most magical things really that you can see – worms are so strong!

Just that these cycles that we live by – and I’m guilty of this as well – whereby we don’t really have a great understanding of the interconnectedness of each of those different ecological levels and layers – means that it’s harder to see…

Well that’s why I feel really privileged as a gardener to be able to work and look really closely at things, and the seasons changing, and learning to appreciate for example winter in all its beauty, or seedheads and what’s living in the seedheads – you can just leave a little bit and loads more will come back – not being overly tidy – and that’s not just for farming, everyone is conditioned to being so clean and tidy, but now we have looming bird flu season around here, and people might say ‘well it’s the blumming geese flying over’, but you just think maybe it is but…

But we’ve shifted those habitats haven’t we…

And I suppose the type of farming is so big now, like you see chicken farms where there are thousands and thousands of chickens, so it’s news because it affects them when they have to be culled… but then there is the question of why they have to be in those conditions in the first place, and we’ve created this horrible monster.

I invited a farmer friend but she couldn’t come because she sells her meat today, but she’s gone down the rare breeds, and organic, grass-fed path, but also does conventional farming alongside because otherwise they wouldn’t have a farm, and they would have to sell it off and think of something else. So she’s doing the ideal bit, but the ideal bit is still run by convention. It’s never that straightforward. Nature itself is also really rough at the minute – we barely had any apples this year and it’s the first time I’ve had to buy apples through the winter. I feel privileged about that, like I planted the trees, but then – there’s a book I’m reading at the minute about indigenous people in America and it’s kind of about how they would look at things in the wild as gifts more than just something to be taken – just taking the right amount.

I think we’ve gotten to a place where the human impulse to want more, and more at the same time is becoming more problematic. And as you say we do tend to romanticise the past, but we also catastrophise the future, don’t we?

We’ve been pleasantly surprised by the variety of animals and birds that we’ve been seeing around us and in our garden. There is a ditch in our garden which seems to be providing hedgehog cover, but also we have had the camera on most nights and we’ve seen foxes – and even a badger. Obviously we have bird feeders out and we’ve had a woodpecker, and owls as well.

I’ve seen quite a few barn owls recently just along the roads, because they go from hedge to hedge. If you put it there, they’ll come won’t they. We have little owls around here as well – they’re really screechy!

I can’t remember the last time I saw a hedgehog. I was having a conversation with somebody about that before, about how my dad loathes them and we used to get them in our garden in Hedon quite regularly – and badgers well I don’t think I’ve ever seen one. Sometimes we’re led to believe that the badger population poses a serious problem. I suppose it depends where you are.

I’ve got a little thing here that I wrote, which goes back to my childhood – so, I sat at a reservoir with my parents, and I remember it was a really lovely day and I heard a curlew, and it was the first time I’d heard a curlew, close to a big council estate in York - we had a beck, we didn’t have a farm, or anything like this – we were told to tidy up our garden by the council, and I heard a curlew and thought to myself when I grow up I want to live where I can hear a curlew. And now we live opposite lake Lebberston!

Which is a farm field – but it’s filling with water because the amount of rain we’ve had.  

Just this morning we saw an ibis flying across the garden…

Wow – its’ like being in a Jurassic world! 

We’ve been there about eleven years and it’s been building steadily. We’ve noticed particularly over the last five years, the flooding happens more regularly, and we see these animals more regularly. There’s arable land just behind the house, and it’s just off the Wolds, so just drops down into the sort of valley landscape.

I’ve got to say that all of us here talking about farming – that is not most people’s perception of the land. We don’t have those perceptions of say, the Roundup man coming, growing up in a little village we had for example park keepers telling you to get out of the park. 

That is a different experience – I’ve been thinking a bit about Hedon Road as well, and just that 15, 20 minutes going one way you’re in the villages and East Hull at the other end, and some of the stark differences there but how I’ve spent a lot of my life on that road, and how my dad and other people have told me that in the 70’s that road was lined with fields or ‘just’ green space, and it became built up very, very quickly. So I guess a landscape can change very quickly, and consequently our perceptions of it.

I’ve just bought a copy of Alec Gill’s new photography book of his work on Hessle Road from 1971 to ’88 and that’s a really interesting time because there is still a wild aspect there. There are horses still on the streets, and children are out and about being mucktubs, and being allowed to be slightly more free and creative, whereas now you don’t see that as much. We don’t let them wander around to their mates houses – like my mum and dad wouldn’t have worried about me being outside until, like, midnight when I was a kid – I mean we grew up on a farm, but it’s dangerous on a farm as well. There are lorries and tractors, pullies and bails – don’t play on the bails!

Going back to the food – I’m interested in how archaeologists will dig up plots, and find food, like grains, that have been cooked and then they piece together what those people have been eating, and what their lifestyle has been like, but in my work I like to look at how, if we say go to the Rudston monument or somewhere like that you can see how there are layers of history – there’s Roman history, medieval history, Victorian history, and I like to look at how: yes, this a Wolds landscape, with farming and all sorts of things going on, but we’ve been here for centuries, and you can see that because over here is a Roman grave.

Just that one little grave is like a portal.

That plot in Rudston is really small. It leads you to think that if somebody in a thousand years digs up our pots, they might ask what we were doing!

We can’t go in the old granary here today because it’s a bit of a health and safety nightmare, but I’ve taken a rubbing here of a bit of a folklore that still survives in these parts – it’s a witches’ rose mark, and here it’s above where they would have stored the crop, and it would have protected the crop. When you talk to my mum she’s still really superstitious and I’ve had to fight against it… My grandma used to take us out to Burton Agnes, and talk about this head being buried in the wall at Burton Agnes, but this sort of thing stems back to pagan belief – pagans used to put horsehair at an entranceway for good luck, and apparently they were still doing this too in medieval times at Burton Agnes. I thought grandma was just making this up when I was little.

We have a fire mark at the end of our barn… I’ve brought a photo of my grandad – this was taken in about 1900 and I think it’s at Sandtoft Grange. He was a horse man all his life really – he was a third lad working with horses, he wasn’t a second lad, and in this photo it looks like it’s been a miserable wet day, and he’s trying to get them rubbed down and fed, but the itinerant photographer has turned up like they used to do on farms in those days, and in country places there was always a job for the itinerant photographer. And so he’s been told to stand there…

I never really thought about that at all – that there would have been itinerant photographers, that would travel around the farms.

And then in the ‘80s it was the big thing that the helicopter guy would fly over and take aerial photographs.

This is my dad with a Clydesdale that my grandad bred – just short of 19 hands high – very big. My dad was about eleven here at the time. Your remark about the corn being longer in those days – well, it was a lot longer… it’s all a lot shorter these days.

Yes – because it lodges easier, and it’s easier to stook it and stack it.

And easier on the binder as well.

Yes exactly. But they were stronger varieties back then as well, and you were using seed that had got used to the area, and the seed therefore creates it’s own resilience to the environment that it’s in, but now you have to buy little scrap ones… but everybody wants straw so maybe we should be making it taller again?!

And it had its use for corn dolly making – my husband used to make corn dollies, but they’re made from an old variety of straw which you can’t buy routinely now – normal fine straw is no use, so you have to send away for it. Corn dollies go back a long, long way – back into superstition really.

It always looks like a jolly time in these photographs but maybe that’s a case of having gone ‘snap’ at the right moment, whereas my mum’s from a family of nine on her farm, and the men all became teachers or doctors, because there wasn’t enough to keep the whole lot of them going in that business so they branched off, but some came back – Uncle Charlie became an anaesthetist but he came back and combined every summer as his ‘downtime’ from the NHS. 

Hard work was instilled in them. And so people that came from farming families worked hard, wherever they went.

My grandad had a mixed farm in Kent, and my dad was the eldest son, but he had to do National Service and he joined the air force, and he loved it so he stayed in, so the second son became the first son, and every summer I’d go back with my dad for about three weeks – but we’d drive back and he’d get stuck in.

Maybe this is more an ideal sort of situation where people are trying out different aspects of work, doing different things, and this maybe uniting people a little bit more.