This Farming Life episode 3: Ronnie and Pete prepare for a leggy new arrival, Joanna embarks on a steep learning curve, and young farmer Sean nears the end of a bumper lambing season. Filmed across a year, this series follows six families in remote and stunning Scotland.
It’s early spring as the farmers gear up for lambing, their busiest weeks of the year. In Northumberland, Emma and Ewan are rounding up their cattle and sheep as they prepare to move from Emma’s home for the last ten years to a farm seven times the size, on the Isle of Bute just off Scotland’s west coast. The move means taking on huge financial risk, and when they finally arrive on Bute, the scale of the challenge that lies ahead begins to sink in.
On the outskirts of Stranraer, Andy Love is preparing to hand over the reins of his dairy business to his daughter, Kayleigh. With Andy’s blessing, she plans to maximise the dairy’s earning potential by bringing a large part of the business in house – pasteurising and bottling their own milk. It’s a risky new venture, at a time when she’s also facing huge challenges at home. Husband Rab is undergoing chemo for bowel cancer, and the couple also run an Italian restaurant which has been hit hard by covid restrictions.
In Loch Ness, Cousins Donald Fraser and David Girvan are preparing for the busy spring season ahead. Donald’s partner Joanna is new to farming. This year she’s keen to get as hands on as possible, and push on with ambitious plans to set up a farm shop.
This Farming Life episode 3
Agriculture or farming is the practice of cultivating plants and livestock. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that enabled people to live in cities. The history of agriculture began thousands of years ago. After gathering wild grains beginning at least 105,000 years ago, nascent farmers began to plant them around 11,500 years ago. Pigs, sheep, goats, and cattle were domesticated over 10,000 years ago. Plants were independently cultivated in at least 11 regions of the world. Industrial agriculture based on large-scale monoculture in the twentieth century came to dominate agricultural output, though about 2 billion people still depended on subsistence agriculture.
The major agricultural products can be broadly grouped into foods, fibers, fuels, and raw materials (such as rubber). Food classes include cereals (grains), vegetables, fruits, oils, meat, milk, eggs, and fungi. Over one-third of the world’s workers are employed in agriculture, second only to the service sector, although in recent decades, the global trend of a decreasing number of agricultural workers continues, especially in developing countries, where smallholding is being overtaken by industrial agriculture and mechanization that brings an enormous crop yield increase.
Modern agronomy, plant breeding, agrochemicals such as pesticides and fertilizers, and technological developments have sharply increased crop yields, but cause ecological and environmental damage. Selective breeding and modern practices in animal husbandry have similarly increased the output of meat but have raised concerns about animal welfare and environmental damage. Environmental issues include contributions to global warming, depletion of aquifers, deforestation, antibiotic resistance, and other agricultural pollution. Agriculture is both a cause of and sensitive to environmental degradation, such as biodiversity loss, desertification, soil degradation, and global warming, all of which can cause decreases in crop yield. Genetically modified organisms are widely used, although some are banned in certain countries.
