Young farmers: why agriculture is booming

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).

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Meet the man with 20 jobs

Billy Muir, the man who almost single-handedly keeps the island of North Ronaldsay afloat

Three of us are sitting at the kitchen table at Billy and Isobel Muir’s farmhouse on North Ronaldsay: Robert, the photographer, me, and Billy. Isobel is making lunch. Or she’s trying to make lunch, but Billy keeps getting up and down to look for things, shifting the framed pictures of grandchildren from the mantelpiece, moving the Herd Register For Female Bovine Animals three inches to the left. He’s grumbling under his breath.

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Thomas Joshua Cooper

A profile of the legendary photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper.

It’s a couple of days after the fire at the Glasgow School of Art when I first meet Thomas Joshua Cooper.  Down on Sauchiehall Street people stop and look up Garnet Street, searching for the Mac’s familiar shape and seeing instead derelict window frames and the blackening imprints of flames on the brickwork.  Cooper’s studio on Renfrew Street is a block along from the Mac, and to get there I have to skirt a cordon still pungent with the scent of smoking wood.  On the doorstep, Thomas’s wife Kate Mooney is waiting with a mop and a bucket.  She’s been cleaning off clots of soot and the after-effects of pissed spectators…

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Halflands: Urban Rewilding

From a former armaments factory to a disused explosives site, many of the country's forgotten places are teeming with life.

In the time since the idea of rewilding really took hold it’s generally been seen as a rural pursuit involving the withdrawal from farmland so that animals and vegetation can restore their own ecology.  At its most herbivorous it includes allowing hedgerows or scrub to flourish unchecked and at its most primal it involves deliberately releasing animals such as beaver or wolves in the belief that the re-entry of a single alpha species brings with it a fall of ecological benefits.  Either way, rewilding has come to be associated with big acreages, whether that be at Knepp Park in Sussex or at the 18,000 acre Glenfeshie estate in the Cairngorms.  The perception is that it’s expensive, far away, and often inaccessible.  It certainly isn’t something that just anyone can do.

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How to Listen

I had a couple of head injuries when I was in my twenties, and soon after the second one I started to go deaf.  For a while I did what any well-adjusted adult would do; I pretended it would all go away.  When that was no longer possible, I went along to the local audiology department who told me that my hearing in both ears was already down about 50%.  They issued me with a pair of analogue hearing aids, and that was pretty much it – I just went home and got on with life.   

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