Lyburn youngstock patiently waiting to go out to spring grass.
Never mind the fuel bill, you should see the water bill!. For some time, certainly 2023 and 2024, our water bill has bobbed along at about £12,000 a year. This in my opinion represented good value, given we are watering 250 cattle and make cheese and we are not charged for sewage as most farms deal with their own sewage. You turn on a tap and 99% of the time you get water, sometimes it can be a bit slow, but you do get water, and generally it is clean and fit to drink which is more that can be said for some countries. However, we don’t entirely trust the quality, so we put it through a UV light and a filter to make absolutely sure that the water is clean enough for cheese making. Fast forward to this year and the bill is looking like £21k. This sum last autumn engendered some investigation, only to find that we had been put on a trial tariff that charges twice as much for summer water and half as much for winter water. I have been told by the Southwest ‘tariff supremo’ that this has been done to encourage customers to drink and use less water in the summer months. There followed some lengthy correspondence with our ‘supremo’ about encouraging cows to drink less water in the hot summer months. Inevitably, this all fell on stony ground and said ‘supremo’ struggled to understand that cows needed more water in the summer heat and farmers are unable to do much about it. This of course leaves none of us surprised at the dire state of most of the water and sewage industry. It would appear that the charges are going up even further by some 36% for 26/27, and a rough calculation indicates that the bill for this year is going to be £27k, give or take the odd thousand. Presumably Tombstone Ed and our ‘water supremo’ have been comparing notes over coffee, and in a joint venture, they have a new policy and it’s called, ‘Let’s Bankrupt Britain’. If you would like to know more about Britains water companies and Southwest Water in particular, watch ‘Dirty Business’ on ITV4, great television!
There is some good news. Given that we make a Gouda style, we need to use Lysozyme to prevent the blowing of cheese, holes being created in the cheese by an uninvited and unhelpful gas. Lysozyme is added in very small quantities and is derived from the white of a hen’s egg and given that egg is classified as an allergen it has to be listed on the lable advising everyone. Needless to say, this totally confuses the customer, and highly problematic for the hospitality industry. After 3 years we have been able to remove the egg element, and we are now egg free.
