What a night. I’ve just got home from the Nags Head, Peterchurch, having attended the Eskleyside Agricultural Society’s annual silage competition. The Nags is one of the great social spots in the Golden valley. Here you can meet potato growers, social workers, sheep farmers, stranded pilgrims, water diviners and Thomas the cat. I’ve witnessed carol singing and dancing on tables, and the fire only goes out for two weeks each year, in the height of summer.
Tonight the focus is silage. Grass, maize and cereal crops, harvested last summer, have been under wraps ever since in the local barns. Starved of oxygen, they have been steadily “pickling”, to ensure they’re packed with nutrients when fed to hungry cattle and sheep.
I meet the judges out the back, where a livestock trailer holds the entries for all five categories: baled silage, baled haylage, grass pit, maize pit and whole crop pit; this last one is a seed mix of wheat, barley and grasses sown specifically for silage and cut in June at a young age. The smell from the bags is potent – too potent for the pub – but it’s also a beautiful smell; when you get a really good bit of silage, you know it. It looks, dare I say, almost edible.
At some competitions the silage is analysed in a lab for metabolisable energy and crude protein, but here the science of sun and sugar is appraised by hand and nose. To that end, the judges crumble, rub and sniff the goods, testing for sweetness, texture and colour.
At about 8.30pm they enter the bar to a cacophony of cheers and heckles. Prizes are handed out; among the winners are Eric Gwatkin for the baled silage, while Simon Bigley takes the crown for his baled haylage. A judge tells me that despite the summer drought halving tonnage per acre, the quality this year was high.
Gatherings like this feed the soul of rural communities. This particular event depends on the existence of smaller hill farms around the valley, and there is always the fear that, as farms amalgamate into larger holdings, entries could fall. With several young farmers in attendance tonight, my hope is that this event will continue for many years yet.
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