Jeremy Clarkson did a thing! The title may not sound like these topics are entirely related….although what a segue! Amongst the big topics of what went wrong with FarmFest and who won the Big Farmland Bird Count (in Negus’ mind) Prideaux, Negus and McInerney Riley cover off topics as far ranging as weasel taming, mouse attacks, portrait photography and wedding anniversaries.
CountrySlide is a podcast that looks at farming, conservation and life in the British countryside.You can contact us by email on: contact@countryslide.co.uk
Edited and Produced by Amy Green.
This transcript was generated using AI and may contain minor errors.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Say it again.
Richard Negus: When I was a child, I was home alone, which is always dangerous.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I've seen that film.
Richard Negus: Yeah, This was like, rather than hurting other people, I hurt myself. I rolled a pellet of toilet paper up so it fitted into the breach of my 177 Diana air rifle. And I was trying to shoot flies with it and the ballistics weren't all that hot. So I thought for some reason, and I know not why, let's see what happens if I shoot my own big toe. So the range from the end of a Diana .177 air rifle from a 13 year old sort of hand holding it from the sort of hip position to a big toe is actually quite close. And I pressed the trigger at flip me it hurt. So Listen to anyone listening, don't shoot yourself in the foot with a 1950s era air rifle with some Kleenex shoved in it. It's just public service.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: That's a very extended idiom, but I think it's normally abbreviated to don't shoot yourself in the foot.
Richard Negus: In his defence, he was trying to get sent home from the front, back to blighting. Yes, poor old Tommy Negus had to stag on once again holding the horses for the officer class.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: And if you were young, that's going to be, I don't know, Normandy or something? No, the First World War.
Richard Negus: Western Front. Yeah, Can we one day do the episode where Callum says the things he knows about history, but we tried to work out the order in which he knows them? There's that king, wasn't there?
Callum Mcinerney Riley: The first one, Henry.
Richard Negus: Henry one, two, three, 4, 5.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Henry the Eighth was he the he's the more recent one, isn't he?
Richard Negus: Have you heard the rumour? It's a higher number. And I don't know the rumour that when they released the film, The Madness of King George, that they had to for American release. It was originally called The Madness of King George III, right? And they had to change it to The Madness of King George because the American audience wanted to know where episodes two and one were. It sounds plausible enough, doesn't it?
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Do you know that McDonald's were the ones that won the race because Burger King did a higher fraction of beef patty for the same amount of money, but to the Americans that 1/4 pounder seemed like more, even though that's not how fractions work. So yeah. I get this in marketing stuff all the time. When people suggest things, I'm like, you're assuming that most of your audience is bright. And I have to tell you, they are not. They need it spoon fed to them like they are a baby and even then some might slip through the cracks.
Richard Negus: Yeah, The number of things that you buy which are clearly for cleaning bathrooms and it's got do not drink written on there, you have to come to the conclusion that at some point somebody has drunk this thing called toilet duck or, you know, I don't know, They tell who buys the cleaning products in that house. Yeah, I know. Bog Buster, that well-known brand.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I'd buy Richard Negus's signature Bog Buster.
Richard Negus: Lifeguard. Yes, it would be very good.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: That brings us round to this week's sponsor. Use the code Bog Buster 10 for 10% off on your next purchase. Buy an industrial pack of 10.
Richard Negus: Yeah, you bend if you want to. Right, anyway, let's get on with the show. I want to know because you see, whilst you were preparing your large glass of Coca-Cola there, Richard was telling me that he had a good wildlife story. So what have you been up to this week, Richard, and what wildlife did it involve? Well, Richard, this week. I'd quite like to have been on sort of a 1980s, 1990s Blue Peter programme. Yeah, if Janet Ellis is there, I would have been too, like a stoked. Well, there's an image for everyone at home. I'm down to 1 crutch now, so I can sort of hop around off-road, which means I can go and visit all the things that I've been neglecting. And there's our bit of woodland where we run our wild food and wild food sort of cookery quarters. Our next one's in July because we've had to push them back a bit. So I had to go and visit the hot smoker. So the hot smoker, as you may remember from previous episodes, is a big wooden box upon stilts. So I went to visit it last week and you sort of get to it and unlock the door and open it. there was a very confused looking mouse living at the bottom of it and sort of it stopped and stared at me. So to this mouse it would have been like if I just went up to your house now and opened up the side of it and just pulled it all open and there's this huge thing staring at you. And it sort of scuttled off to somewhere else and then I looked up and realized there's a wasp nest in the top. So I. Thought. We'll have to deal with one species at a time. Although my friend did suggest that we I tell the wasps that the mice are invading their territory and tell the mice that the wasps are invading bears and let them sort each other out. So I went back a few days later, sort of trying to empty all this thing out because there's all the shelves and the racking and the thermometers in there and we keep kindling in there because it's the driest place in the woods. So we keep kindling in there in the winter in case we want to start a fire quickly and that's sort of in this big paper bag. So I cleared all the bottom bit out, couldn't find any mouse nests, cleared the top bits, couldn't find anything. So I pulled the bag of kindling out. And as I'm stood there, I've put my crutch down. I'm sort of balancing on my one good leg and somebody else is doing some other tasks somewhere nearby. And I'd open this big paper feed sack and put my hand in it and feel something warm and wriggling. And I realized the mice have made their home. in this feed sack. And that's the point. About 6 mice all erupted from the bag at the same time and sort of ran up my arms onto my head and all over the place. And as my friend who was at camp described it, he said, it looked like you were a wizard casting fireballs, but instead of fireballs, you were firing mice off in different directions while screaming. So the mice are no longer in the smoker cabinet and you can throw a mouse quite a long way when you're in a panic, it turns out. I'm sure they're all okay. It's probably a sport in America, to be honest, mouse tossing or something like that.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I don't care.
Richard Negus: You need tweezers for that.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I don't care how tough you are, but if a rat or a mouse comes at you, it's very unpleasant. It's unnerving. No one should be like, that's okay. Yeah, they're quick and also quite repulsive. They're not nice things you want close to you. Even a little mouse.
Richard Negus: Oh, I'm quite keen on mice.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: But just anything like rodent-y coming at you, not great.
Richard Negus: Have you never had a pet from nature? When I was young, I was obsessed with, I'd catch field voles and I could tame those quite easily. Wood mice were finickety little things. You could put them, I had a large sort of empty, obviously not with water and fish tank, and I put wood mice in there, but they really didn't. Mouse drowning with Richard Negus. Yes, exactly. Swim your blighters. But they were there. But I had a jackdaw, a crow, numerous grass snakes. All sorts of things that I sort of would find. I always wanted a weasel because I know that a friend of mine had a tamed fox and he said, if you get them when they're cubs and they're still black, then they're tamable. Once they've turned red, that's it. They're a fox and they don't want to be tamed. And he also had a pet badger as well. But he said, oh, I think you can do it with weasels. He said, they're just like a ferret. He's passing this law on to you. And so I tried, I tried, is this ChatGPT? I just tried finding weasel nests and never managed to find one that had a sort of attainable age. My dog used to hunt them out and you could find a weasel nest very easy in a hedge, but never managed to find them when they weren't so little pink wriggly things.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: How does one go about finding a weasel nest?
Richard Negus: Hedge bottoms. largely. That's where they will have a nest up north. They nest in dry stone walls, but we'd have them in a hedge bottom and they'll sort of go into little hollows in sort of rotten old bit of hawthorn and they have them in there. I had a dog that was absolutely mustard hunting weasels and would mark where one was. terrier I called Skip and you could rely upon it and then you'd sort of have a bit of footle around and then you'd find just a little load of pink little worms basically and then and then you go oh that's too young I've never managed to find them when they were just baby enough so I could snaffle one and time tame it. It's one of my it's one of my great if you know regrets in life is I never had a tame weasel.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Well maybe at a live show we'll let you recount that story and then we'll give you a But he's here with us tonight.
Richard Negus: Fitchy Whiskers is here. Yay. Or you have a weasel cannon. Yeah. So if anyone has, one of our listeners has got a young weasel that they don't want.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Please send it to Richard Negus #1.
Richard Negus: Windsor Castle. Yeah. I go under my other name of the King. Yes, so what have you done this week? Have you been covered in mice and wasps, Callum?
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I was going to give you my story of my favourite wild pet. I kept a slow worm because it looked like it wasn't doing too well. So I kept it in just like a tank. I knew someone that had like a reptile tank and stuck it in there and then just kept feeding it worms and slugs and odd bits and it did quite well for a long time and then eventually I did release it back into the wild. I kept it for a long old time and it seemed to do pretty well. It quite liked it in its little thing. I just had it in the living room knocking about.
Richard Negus: Didn't have a little smile on their face, but like I found when I was up in Weirdale the other week, I found a common lizard up there and it looked at me and I looked at it and had this funny little smile on its face and I thought, oh, it's the exact same smile that you see on a slow worm when you go and surprise them. It's a lipless grin. It's quite fair. Do you know, that's interesting that actually. So do you find slow worms about any more? No, I haven't seen one for ages.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: There used to be one place that used to be absolutely full of them. I haven't seen a slow worm for two years.
Richard Negus: I've not seen a slow worm. I've not seen grass snakes about as much. I haven't seen adders. You know, it seems to be. Now I went up onto a grouse mall the other day and I found a common lizard. My pal is the keeper up there sent me a picture of it just lifted up a water drinker that he's got up there and a presto. There's a slow worm under it. He got bitten by an adder last year. He found three basking on there. Now this place is crawling with reptiles up there. Bearing in mind that this was on a piece of heather which we were on, which they'd burnt two years ago. So if you read all the narrative, apparently one of the reasons why we've got to stop muir burn is because it kills all these adders and slow worms and other assorted reptiles. And the only place I've seen reptiles in profusion is up on a grouse moor where they have just recently done muir burns. So either someone's telling us porky pies or it doesn't kill stuff. I don't know. It's very peculiar that. Or maybe it's the thing about sort of. upward mobility within the class system because you've got your fewer common lizards, but presumably they've all moved out to Suffolk to become middle class lizards. Middle classes. We don't really have middle class here. We don't have them. We have sort of dropout hippies. Can you say that again? Yeah, we don't have middle class people here. We have dropout hippie. You're in an orangery. This is my study. Middle class people don't have studies. It's the \*\*\*\*\* handed working class.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: How much Ikea furniture is in your house?
Richard Negus: Do you know what a turkey Twizzler is? I know what a pheasant Twizzler is. I don't have any Ikea furniture. No. We used to have Ikea furniture.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: That's my case.
Richard Negus: But.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: No further questions, your honour.
Richard Negus: It's my 19th wedding anniversary today and. I'm of the firm belief that basically you get rid of all your IKEA furniture after your 7th wedding anniversary, because by 7 years the chances are you're probably going to stay married. So you might as well get stuff you both like, right? Whereas if you're going to go and wait for that first six years of marriage, you know, you might go and think, that's a stupid idea. So if you bought IKEA, it doesn't matter because you're not going to go and feel, you know, that emotionally attached to a dining room table, which is called a slack blad or something like that. So you're telling it took you until your nearly 8th wedding anniversary before you were sure about Claire. Is that what you're saying? No, that is not what I said. That sounds like that's what he said, didn't he, Calum?
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I'm pretty sure that's exactly what he said.
Richard Negus: He said that, yeah. If I did sound like that, edit that out immediately because I want to see the 20th wedding anniversary.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: What is 20 years? Doesn't it get more and more disappointing? Like it's like tin. It's like an old crisp packet, you know. like it \*\*\*\* or something.
Richard Negus: You get injected with adamantium. You're just, your bones don't break anymore. My, I believe that the 19th wedding anniversary is bronze. You are correct, it is bronze. Yeah, I did check a week or so ago thinking, shall I get something bronze? I think. No, so I took a lunch in the Angel in Bury St Edmunds instead. So that was that was nicer. It's these fascinating glimpses into the way you live your life and your decision making process. That's why that's why I keep coming back week after week.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: There's so much every just every decision.
Richard Negus: Who wouldn't like to go for lunch in a beautiful old Georgian hotel, you know, where Dickens wrote the Pickwick Papers and Martin Chuzzlewit. And yeah, I mean, it's great. Or would you like to have this random object from bronze because some marketing man from some goods company who sells stuff to people who do wedding anniversary gifts. No, I'm not bowing down to you. What is, what do you have to buy for your 20th? What's the 20th wedding anniversary gift then?
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I've got here China or porcelain.
Richard Negus: Okay, that'd be nice for a potter to give her that, wouldn't it? Yeah, this is made by someone else. Can you give us some China clay? Go and dig it out, go and dig it out in the pits of toxicity in Cornwall. Yeah, I was going to say, that'd be nice. Here, we're going to we're going to Cornwall. that'd be nice. Yes, I've booked us in on a mining trip. That'd be fun. Fun, fun, fun. Yeah. Come on, Callum. So other than taming slow worms, have you done anything contemporarily?
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I visited the county of Suffolk this week. We went back to right near Hadley, a little place called the Marquis and had delightful food. I've enjoyed the sun. If you've seen it in the sky, it's been pretty.
Richard Negus: You were taking photos of women in bikinis at the pool.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I didn't. It wasn't intentional, but some people caught my Instagram story and a few people commented on something that was in the background, which I had no idea about.
Richard Negus: So you perving.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: It was a ladies buttocks and a few people commented on it and I just. I just commented back one for the fans.
Richard Negus: So I mean, have you ever inadvertently taken a photograph when you realise that somebody either famous or not famous is doing something in the background? You go, oh dear, that's a lawsuit waiting to happen. You ever taken a shot when?
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Yeah, so many. I've got a hard drive full of, yeah, loads of stuff. Like celebrities doing things they shouldn't do, just people in high places doing things, not like career ending anything terrible, but if you've done your job properly, people relax to a point that they will show you behind the curtain. And if they show you behind the curtain, that could be taken out of context. But that's the job really, to make people chill out and do those sorts of things.
Richard Negus: Then there's also the photos where that person was doing something that they thought was absolutely okay, but because they didn't, you know, they weren't socially aware or anything like that, you decided yourself for the sake of their reputation to not share it or not edit that one.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I mean, some people, some people that and respect, they'll do things and you're like, it's like your first day on the planet and you've only just worked out that you've got hands and they do things and you think, you're idolized by people. People think you're the best and you're not actually able to function like a regular human being. And you sort of, it really, you do have the option to spoil the illusion of a lot of people.
Richard Negus: Agreed. I mean, I was telling Richard I'm currently reading Middle Land by Rory Stewart. And when Rory Stewart was going for the leader of the Conservative Party, they decided to do these head-to-head things in a studio. And They'd clearly said, well, how we're going to work this is we're going to get the camera to pan on each of your faces. You've got to hold eye contact with the camera for five seconds and it's going to pan from left to right. And so you've got Boris Johnson, you've got Theresa May, you've got Angela Leadsom and Michael Gove and here is Rory Stewart. And most of them, they look slightly uncomfortable because suddenly I'm going to stare into the camera and hold that contact and not say anything. But Rory Stewart's face is like literally they'd said, make yourself look like the least likely person who shouldn't even lead a group of Cub Scouts into a knot tying contest. Because he pulls this bizarre gun. And it was exactly like I say, no one had actually explained to him, when you look at something, make a facial expression that doesn't make you look like a serial killer. It was most, and he did actually write in a book, say, I think I lost my child. in that 5 seconds stare. So yes, it is something that people need to perhaps be aware of if they are going to be in the public eye. What you do with your hands and what you do with your face. Being able to practice a good neutral facial expression that would work for any occasion, you know, funeral. stay in court, middle of an orgasm, whatever it would work for, the same sort of facial expression that's just, that's just all the way through. I think that's a talent. I think it's something to teach you at the right public school. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So anyway, yes. Well, Jeremy Clarkson went to a public school. He went to Repton, I believe. Yes. As we record this on Tuesday, the 26th of May, we're kind of overwhelmed by news stories about how crap Farm Fest was. Yeah. If you believe all the news stories. So I think we should talk about that for a bit. So did either of you know it was on? That's the first question. No, to be perfect, it was something that sort of flashed up on my, funny enough, the only reason I knew it was on was because the no farmers, no food, WhatsApp group has got some sort of high profile-ish farmers. And they were saying, are you going to this thing? Have you been asked this? Have you been asked this? I was like, what thing? And they went, oh, this, and it went back up the thread 30 sort of days before. And so no, I wasn't aware. I only was really aware that it was on when all of a sudden my- What is this? Farm Fest. Exactly. I think that was the problem. I was only aware that Farm Fest had been on when I suddenly saw these very irate stall holders saying that they were either packing up a day early or they were wanting their money back or that it would ruin their business or something like that.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Sounds like they got. a good summation of what farming's actually like.
Richard Negus: Yeah, exactly.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Lack of support for the, what more of an immersive experience can you get? the promise the world, deliver nothing, a really hard time. Yeah, destitute now as a result. There you go.
Richard Negus: You have had the real farming experience. No, I mean, totally more. Have you actually sort of looked into this? Yes, I have, because, you know, sometimes just enough things pass by your little viewports of life and you think, hang on, I'm going to look at this because this is interesting. I was, today I spoke to two or three people who were there as traders, two or three people who were there as punters, and a couple of people.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Is this investigative journalism?
Richard Negus: Well, it's all hearsay. This is the thing. I'm not Guy Adams off of the Daily Mail. You know, I'm not going to do a proper job and actually come with sources and references.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: But you spoke to people.
Richard Negus: I spoke to people. But yeah, but I could say my postman says this, you know. So I think it was Great British Farm Fest and it was this weekend just gone. It was at Stoneley Park in Warwickshire and it was organised by, well, the function below the headline was stable events. So they're the same people who do the game fair and a few other things. I want to preface this, all of this, possibly for the sake of our solicitors, by saying that this is This is all sort of, reporting what has been said.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I have no idea I wasn't there.
Richard Negus: Yeah, this is for instance, yeah, any coincidental likeness of the people or events is well coincidence.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: And my sources are, trust me, bro. Go ahead.
Richard Negus: I've got some WhatsApp voice notes that people have sent me about it. So it looks, all the stuff in the papers at the moment and the news about it is there are a load of annoyed traders. about who said that it was either poorly organised or there was no footfall or nobody can get to the bit of the event where they were or it was very expensive. They didn't sell anything. A few people left early and they sort of took to social media to say why they were leaving. You can look that up for yourself. It's all over whichever social media platform you're on. So I'm going to piece together now as far as I can tell what happened because it's the first time the event's been run It was branded with Team Clarkson, with Jeremy Clarkson, Clarkson's Farm. So everyone who is now effectively a character on the Clarkson's Farm TV show, so Jeremy Clarkson, Lisa, Cheerful Charlie, Gerald, all of these people, Caleb of course, they were all there in one degree or another and they were there in all the marketing for it as well. And it had Hawkstone there and everything like that. And it was the Great British Farm Fest. What I think has happened is that it was touted to the public as a festival, music festival sort of thing, because there were bands there like.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Alex James from Blur, Sophie Ellis Best and Groove Amada on stage, who obviously all featured in the series. So there was some of that.
Richard Negus: It's the late 90s, basically there.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Yeah.
Richard Negus: The late 90s, early 2000s. And it was sort of put together as a festival for the public, but it looks like it was sold to the traders as being more like the game fair, which is more like an agricultural show, shopping moment event. And the marketing maybe, I have no idea if it's good or not, because I knew about it weeks ago, but we're kind of in this space, but loads of people I know who are also in the space had no idea what it was on. No. It seems like a lot of their marketing went via, they approached agricultural influencers. to be ambassadors for the show. And I've always got this theory that because somebody has a lot of following on Instagram or TikTok or wherever, it does not mean it will translate any way into sales of a physical product or a service because what people follow that person for is the stuff they do on social media, not to pay 30 quid or 60 quid and drive to Warwickshire for a day in the sun. Yeah, couldn't agree more. Could not agree more. So you have that issue and then If you look at what a few of the traders say, they were approached at other shows and say, earlier in the year to say, oh, well, do you know Jeremy Clarkson's doing his own farming? show. It's going to be at Stoneley Park. Why don't you come? Here it is. Here's the bill for two grand for a pitch or thereabouts. As always with these events, the pitch fees vary depending whether you're on a corner, whether you've got a double slot, a single slot, wherever you are. So people are quoting anything between two, the cost of between 2:00 to 10 grand, but some people are sort of bundling in staff costs and all of that. It looks like people who were there pretty happy with it overall as a festival if you're a punter. And people who were there as traders, either food or retail, feel like they were mis-sold or they sold too many trader slots. And I think one of our food contacts, and I won't say who it is, but they spoke to a few of their friends who were there and Basically, you would have sold about 200 items if you spread the attendance evenly between the food traders, which is not enough to make back your costs, even at festival prices where people are charging 15 quid for a baked potato.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Yeah, this is it though. Like 15 quid for, I mean, I'm sure there's people that sell Coles. beers probably didn't do like the Hawkstone lager tent probably wasn't struggling to get people to spend their money. But if you're selling 15 pound baked potatoes on one of the hottest day of the year, I'm sure you will struggle.
Richard Negus: And there's one that someone a lot of people are picking up on is effectively a pet food company selling 25 kilo bags of dog food, which is not a great seller at a festival where you've got to you've effectively got to do a march across dry fields to get there. What you're going to do is sort of turn around, go back to the car, then come back.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Can you imagine murder on the dance floor with your 25 kilo dancing round?
Richard Negus: I mean, I have to say, I've only got some experiences of some of the events that Claire has been to selling her pottery this year. that this time last year sales were up and she was sold out and that we saw similar footfall, similar sort of demographic. It's not that people aren't going to events. I just think people are drawing their horns in slightly. And so therefore buying that thing that you don't necessarily need but you might want, you might not buy there. I know people sort of specifically with a game fair They say I'm saving money because I'm going to go and buy something at the game fair because I'm bound to get a good discount deal. I don't know whether you do or you don't there, but you know you've got all those things on mass. I bought 3 guns at the game fair over the years, yeah. So I mean I think any new event, just because it's got the magic fairy dust of Clarkson over it does not necessarily mean it's going to be a success. Clarkson's Farm hasn't been on the telly for a couple of months. So therefore it's not that hot and fresh in the minds of some, many. And I'll tell you one thing, the Suffolk show last year, they realised that sales were down and there was a very large potato buying firm who makes frozen potatoes, probably the most famous one, was going to sponsor one of the areas, the farming live demonstration area. and they pulled out quite last minute.com and it really put the Suffolk show in show organising terms quite on the back foot. And the chairman of the Suffolk Agricultural Association was talking about this over dinner and his daughter said you ought to get Spudman in. Now Spudman for me I've never heard of him but this guy's got a million plus followers on Instagram and TikTok and He bought his baked potato wagon there and the Suffolk Show reported that ticket sales went up when he said I am going there by 13%, 1.3% just because they gave him the prime pitch right next to the Farmer Desert and he went on and did his thing. He absolutely performed for the cameras. He gave more selfies than flipping you can shake a stick at and he did brilliantly. So I think if you're going to rely upon influencers to help your marketing. You have to have someone who has got a vested interest in the success of the event. So when Spudman travels from wherever it is he's from in his thing with his pink Mohican and people want to go that, then that makes a difference. Just because you've got someone who wears a ridgeline fleece and shakes a fist at people or you're an influencer, same thing with the Game Fair. Just as some hooray Henrietta in large sunglasses and a silly hat, or some poncey knob in a, you know, in who wears bricks to bed, is not necessarily going to get you more football. Hello. Yes, well, I know that's you. haven't going to be able to take your trousers off since the legs. Exactly. That's why you're still wearing them. But I think that the power and influence of the influencer is greatly, greatly overrated and you've got to choose it. And you need someone like Spudman to make that serious footfall. 13% upturn in ticket sales is the difference between the Suffolk show being a financial success or not. You know, just having a couple of people putting on saying, hey, I'm off to Farm Fest, ain't it going to be great? And then I'm going to cuddle a lamb. That ain't enough, I don't think. I think that's to misunderstand. This is proof that you weren't, you were actually paying attention to your wife today and you weren't looking at the news or your emails because Spiderman was there. He was one of the people saying that he didn't have a great first day and then the second day was okay. But that was one of the things that drew the attention to it. But it is, so I've got this theory about the whole thing, but I always go for a \*\*\*\* up over conspiracy. Yeah. On anything.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I like that. That's a good phrase.
Richard Negus: Yeah. If you any commercial event and I've never really put on those kind of like festival type of events, but I've been a safety coordinator for them and I've used to do big multi-day mountain ultra hard \*\*\*\*\*\*\* triathlons and organise those. They are expensive and they are hell on earth whilst you're organising it for the event team and the marketing team before it is chaos. at best, well-organized chaos, but it's still chaos. It's really, really hard to put an event on and it's getting harder because everything's costing more and the insurance alone for these events now is huge. So getting the event running and it happening is great. If you are a trader and you say, I want to come to this thing and I'll give you a couple of grand for my pitch, they're going to say yes because we've got to cover their cost. So I think a lot of traders went there expecting it because it was Clarkson. It was basically going to be like sort of the retreat from Moscow. It was just going to be people stumbling past their stand waiting to give them money. Whereas actually they were there to go and see Jeremy Clarkson and Sophie Ellis-Bextor. So you've got that element. You've got people sort of obsessed with the Clarkson brand. because Clarkson has been, as we've all said, Clarkson has been great for farming, but Clarkson is also a huge brand within his own right. And as Callum said, you've got Hawks and Lager and the beers there. There's this weird thing that I've heard other people say before this, that when Hawks and Lager turns up at an event, that is basically the majority of the sales of beer or cider. makes it very, very hard then if you're a local brewer or cider producer who went at an event when you're next to the Hawkston Lager stand, because you're not going to sell anything unless people can't be asked to queue for Hawkston. No, what are you going to say? Now this stuff, that stuff, the organiser's stuff is \*\*\*\*. Drink wine. Yeah, it's not easy, is it? Yeah. It's a new event as well. It's a new event. I mean, I've never been to any event. I went to a lovely book event in a beautiful location and they were disappointed by the turnout. But I said, well, you're going to have to see this through because what will happen now is the X number of thousands who came will say what a lovely thing it was. And they'll probably go say, do you know, it wasn't too crowded. And then next year that means that there'll be another four families who have listened in will say, we better go to that because it's not too crowded. And then before you know it, oh, it was so busy. I sympathise because anyone who makes their living by going to events and retail is always a challenge. And particularly if you're selling perishable goods, it's not like you go and pack up your burgers back in the van and say, well, didn't sell that many. You know, that's lost stock. I'm going to make my final prediction. So next month is the next, when the next season of Clarkson's Farm comes out, but that was filmed. some of it over a year ago because you've always got that delay in production and things. Every season of Clarkson's Farm so far has had some sort of race to the finish thing for the last episode or somewhere towards the end. So it was getting the farm shop ready and then getting the restaurant, pop-up restaurant and then the pub and stuff like that. So that seems to be a thing they quite like doing. I'm going to put my prediction that the race to the finish of this was, Can we get a festival for farmers off the ground? Yeah. They had to make that bit of it work for the show. That's, I don't know for sure, but I'm getting. Got to get bit jeopardy in it. Talking of jeopardy, one, I wonder what county, because this is important. I wonder what county, do you think registered the largest number of counts in the GWCT's Big Farmland Bird Count. Callum, would you like to guess which county provided the most number of counts this year?
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Is it Suffolk?
Richard Negus: Yes, it's Suffolk. The jeopardy is at an end. Thank God. We have beaten Norfolk finally. Three years. There is a sort of always a three-way race between Suffolk, Norfolk, and Lincolnshire. And for a large number of years now, those damn six-fingered beasts from the wrong side of the Waveney have beaten us.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Wait, tell me for it. What do you what? We've done one in the very cold winters. Did we do one in the snow?
Richard Negus: We did. We did one in the snow. So yeah, it's done basically the winter count. So it's in February. It takes them this long to collate all the data. So they basically take all the reports that have come in and they then go and I'm not an ecologist. So they sort of filter out all the dross ones. They filter out the people who are clearly just putting, yeah, I saw 3 million grey partridges. If you'd like to shoot one of these grey partridges, please go to guns on pegs. Exactly. They also filter out, I think, the repeats. And they get it so that they clean the data up so they know what they've got. And so the results are in for this year's. So the one that was done this winter, the results have now come out.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: So GWCT have had their abacus and they've sat and worked out. And the results are in.
Richard Negus: Paul J Jana Colony, who is a lovely, lovely young lady. She's an expert on bees and insects and things. She has. She's the scientist. She's good. what she could have done, she would have probably gone and put them, or one of them at least would have ended up on a little pin board because she's just got this tray of insects with pins to the back so that she shows people and there's lots of Latin names. But Jane has collated all this and she is now communicating the information out there. And the good news is that Suffolk came first, Norfolk second, Lincolnshire third. So in Suffolk, there are 139 individual farms, gave a count, 101 in Norfolk and 62 in Lincolnshire.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: And what was the interesting insight? So isn't it like, is it like 4 hours or something? You sit and count how many? An hour. Is it an hour? An hour you sit out and you count how many birds you can see in that.
Richard Negus: They saw 34 individual species on the red listed were spotted and counted over this. There were in total 1,201 counts done across the UK. A total number of birds counted was 275,024. And that was over a coverage of 292,828 hectares of total. So it's that's a fair old whack of land which they have done this count over. You know it's proper farm science when it says hectare. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, not acre.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: How do we how do we find the results?
Richard Negus: It was in the show notes. By the time this comes out, we'll put a link in the show notes. Yeah. That's how that's how it works. That's how it works in the modern world, Callum. That's how it works, mate. See, the interesting thing I do would say, one thing, 67% of the participants are in an agri-environment scheme. So therefore, what that does show is that you are still, and it is a problem that we have, is that those who do the most have already embraced the thing, not, you know, So what do you think about this, Richard? Well, that's kind of picking up on the same point because the fact that it's the GWCT count kind of self-selects, doesn't it? Because you're not going to get Mr. Scum-tastic, dirty as farm in the veil, which decorates the hedges with silage wrap and decides that slurry is the top dressing for every surface on earth. They're not going to be in this and no one it's unlikely anyone's going to be going to their farm to do this. So it is skewed, but I don't think in a negative way towards better farms that have better habitats. So you're going to see a greater diversity of species in there and it's more likely because of the GWCT being pretty much the only conservation organisation that is openly in favour of selected predator control. you're going to get better outcomes in those places because that's what you get on land with predator control. So you're always, it's always going to be better results there, but that's good. But. It's sort of when the other organisations come with their data instead, because today was when the RSPB said, look, every raptor ever has been killed by a gamekeeper. And the BBC really helped out by putting an interactive map on their website that showed you where your nearest raptor has been killed. Completely unbiased reporting. But that's, those two sets of data don't meet in the middle because one is appealing to the public and saying everything's crap. and one's talking to people who are already doing good on the land or support it, saying, look, it's doing good. And finding the messaging to fit in between is hard, but I'd rather go with the GWCT data than the look, everything's crap, we need your money data. Yeah. That's a very sensible point. And I think one of the biggest challenges the GWCT will always have is that they are so frequently preaching to the choir is that they are people who, like you say, that they are doing that. They have embraced this idea of stewardship and that's therefore so sometimes the data is skewed. But I also think it's a ridiculously cynical thing. And once again, I'm going to point the finger straight at the RSPB's communications team because they gave Mark Nowers the day, the RSPB gave him the day so that he, on the launch day, those of us who were invited to go to Loddington where it was launched this year, the RSPB They invited Mark, they gave him a sort of a special reward for, award rather, for his work on behalf of the turtle dove. They gave me the second prize of a bag of bird food, which was very kind. The mice have eaten it, probably some of your mates, I have to say, Richard. But, you know, and he gave a fantastic walk and talk for people because his ear is infallible and he was telling us what he could hear that others couldn't and you can't see stuff because of that time of year in the winter you're not seeing so much display. So he was telling all that stuff. So he got him out there and what do they do? They decide to go and give a set of data and what really \*\*\*\*\*\* me off about the RSPB thing is that this comes off the back of some rather fatuous statement that Becky Speight, the RSPB's chief executive, has done. She said, things that this government could do to make things better. And her.4 was to get tougher on wildlife crime. And she then went into something about raptor persecution. Well, the three leading, most prosecuted and most prevalent wildlife crimes are not raptor persecution. The first one is illegal hair coursing and poaching. The second one is river pollution and fisheries pollution. And the third one slightly escapes me at the moment. We've got nothing to do with frigging Raptors. So they almost, when the GWCT want to put out this story, this is the big farm and bird count, and yes, I think you're quite right, Richard, you can go and criticise it because like all polls and all data there is flaws in it. But it was something where the RSPB and the GWCT came together at its launch and they decided to go and put this fatuous thing out and their buddies at the BBC go and lap it up like a tame kitten. And you think, We're never going to see nature recovery because there are complete \*\*\*\* \*\*\*\* in the communications team at the RSPB who if they can't get a story out there, they'll just fabricate one so that they can go and steal some headlines. It's just childish. Or omit crucial details like the most recent one with an injured raptor that they were saying was found on a moorland. Yes, it was found on a moorland by the gamekeeper who took it to the vet. Yes. That bit's missed out of the story. Yeah, But this is, he will be the worst criminal ever if he took the evidence of his crime to the vet. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't work. I don't know what's happened here. It's just fell out the sky, you know. Yes, I mean, it's not going to happen. Spontaneously exploded. Yeah. I mean, do you know, the big farmland bird camp is something that if you did get more data. You did get more people. There needs to be more of an incentive, possibly, for more people to go and do it. And let's be perfectly honest, a lot of farmers, they genuinely can't be \*\*\*\*\*. You know, they don't care.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Do you think they'd all know the birds?
Richard Negus: No, they don't.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I know some.
Richard Negus: One of the one of the great things this year, they got together with Perdix. And so what they're able to literally do, because there are a lot of little brown jobs, a lot of people wouldn't know a linnet. They would not immediately go and say, oh, there's a linnet. And when you're looking at a lot of the hen species, they are little brown jobs. They, you don't know. I mean, are you going to be able to spot a garden warbler immediately? I can when it sings. I can't when the thing is just sat there in a hedge. I wouldn't, there's a warbler, I think, you know, and I'm a bit of a of a birder. And so, but they got through with that. So what they were able to do was that they were able to basically say, little brown thing, describe it, and then that's why it took a bit longer to go and collate all the data, because they were basically putting these amateurish, ham-fisted descriptions. These apparently got 53 dodos in Hertfordshire at the moment, which is, you know, from a Mr. C. McEnerney Riley, yeah.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I'm looking forward to the point where AI can help with this kind of stuff because this is actually very informative. And I think there will be a point where you could do something, maybe it's like supplementary feeding or it's like Merlin, but Merlin's not always accurate, but it's somewhat.
Richard Negus: I think it's accurate enough though, wouldn't it be?
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Yeah, it is enough. So a bit of visual, a little bit of visual, a little bit of audio and you could get a very clear picture without people actually being out. So that would be a very positive use of AI and I think something could be good. You can use these tools for conservation and positive good.
Richard Negus: I know that what Perdix have done is that they have developed something for counting bobwhite quail in America and they are trying to count covey numbers of bobwhite quail. Sounds like a pseudonym for some. Yes, exactly. And it sounds like a sort of minor assassin, doesn't he? Bob White Quail. He just comes in.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I use the detective.
Richard Negus: Exactly.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Bob White Quail.
Richard Negus: Anyway, what they use is they use sound detection and AI tells you it plots how many they think are in this covey by the volume that's coming through. So I think they're using it. And I'm sure that things that GWCT have got perdix on board, I think they're one of the few people actually in our world who knows what AI means other than artificial insemination.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Some of it's probably quite easy to tell some of the like the volumes of certain birds are probably quite easy to know if it's a lot of them like black grouse. You can, there's noise and it amplifies. The more there are and the more females there are, the more it amplifies. I mean, it'd probably be quite easy to plot that. And things like, I always remember the Gadwell, that sound like the intro to the Beastie Boys song. Like when you hear that from far away, that there's usually a lot of them all together having a little sing-song. If.
Richard Negus: You get someone from Perdix on, we actually, I know we do actually have listeners within there and Sparsholt. and the close relationship between them. We know the listeners and I've got their cards sat on my desk and I meant to get them on as a guest last year and I still haven't done it. So, yes, we could get Joe. Well, I'll tell you what, we'll doorstep Jodie when we go to the game fair and just go and say we're going to interview you. And then? No, not after the last time when Callum spilt a pint on their stamp. Did you? Sort of. You were chatting at women in the back end pretending to interview them. Oh, I know. And Calum and I were drinking. The back end.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Wow. How can I say? Quite frankly, I resent the accusation.
Richard Negus: I had to interrupt your interview because somebody wanted a book signing. Yeah, I know. Isn't it just, you know, lifestyles of the rich and the famous? It's ridiculous, isn't it? My mother actually told me this. She said, You're famous, my dear. And I said, why is that? I was speaking to a lady at the Mid-Suffolk Light Railway and she knew your book. Well, there we go. What more can you want if you make it in the Mid-Suffolk Light Railway Steam Exhibition, 1940s, think, what more can you do? She works with models. Right. Anyway, so we have done today the Was it terrible or was it not terrible? Farm Fest. And we have done the Big Farm and Bird Count where Suffolk came out on top, as did the Starling, Lapwing, Fieldfair and Linnet, which were the most seen red listed species. I would just like to have my own brag. I've got some starlings now nesting in the roof of the house and The other day, it was, what's today, Tuesday, on Thursday of last week, I had feeding in my garden, I had a turtle dove, I had a collar dove, I had a stock dove, and I had a wood pigeon. So I had all the doves. You like the lava drink? You like some whiskey? Drink? All in one little spot together. And I sort of thought, Very, very quietly, I tried to get my phone out to go and take a photograph of it. And by the time I got around, there were just like 2 fat pigeons staring at it going, well, mate, thanks to the turtle dove food. It's very nice. Thanks, mate. You know, and that was it. All the others are \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\* off. So, yeah, I haven't got the talent that Callum would have got them all in the same frame, but not me, no. A good place to wrap it up. We're going to the aftershow and to take us through to the aftershow, Callum is going to make the noise of a great white eagle being fed into a wood chipper.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Say it again.
Richard Negus: When I was a child, I was home alone, which is always dangerous.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I've seen that film.
Richard Negus: Yeah, This was like, rather than hurting other people, I hurt myself. I rolled a pellet of toilet paper up so it fitted into the breach of my 177 Diana air rifle. And I was trying to shoot flies with it and the ballistics weren't all that hot. So I thought for some reason, and I know not why, let's see what happens if I shoot my own big toe. So the range from the end of a Diana .177 air rifle from a 13 year old sort of hand holding it from the sort of hip position to a big toe is actually quite close. And I pressed the trigger at flip me it hurt. So Listen to anyone listening, don't shoot yourself in the foot with a 1950s era air rifle with some Kleenex shoved in it. It's just public service.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: That's a very extended idiom, but I think it's normally abbreviated to don't shoot yourself in the foot.
Richard Negus: In his defence, he was trying to get sent home from the front, back to blighting. Yes, poor old Tommy Negus had to stag on once again holding the horses for the officer class.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: And if you were young, that's going to be, I don't know, Normandy or something? No, the First World War.
Richard Negus: Western Front. Yeah, Can we one day do the episode where Callum says the things he knows about history, but we tried to work out the order in which he knows them? There's that king, wasn't there?
Callum Mcinerney Riley: The first one, Henry.
Richard Negus: Henry one, two, three, 4, 5.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Henry the Eighth was he the he's the more recent one, isn't he?
Richard Negus: Have you heard the rumour? It's a higher number. And I don't know the rumour that when they released the film, The Madness of King George, that they had to for American release. It was originally called The Madness of King George III, right? And they had to change it to The Madness of King George because the American audience wanted to know where episodes two and one were. It sounds plausible enough, doesn't it?
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Do you know that McDonald's were the ones that won the race because Burger King did a higher fraction of beef patty for the same amount of money, but to the Americans that 1/4 pounder seemed like more, even though that's not how fractions work. So yeah. I get this in marketing stuff all the time. When people suggest things, I'm like, you're assuming that most of your audience is bright. And I have to tell you, they are not. They need it spoon fed to them like they are a baby and even then some might slip through the cracks.
Richard Negus: Yeah, The number of things that you buy which are clearly for cleaning bathrooms and it's got do not drink written on there, you have to come to the conclusion that at some point somebody has drunk this thing called toilet duck or, you know, I don't know, They tell who buys the cleaning products in that house. Yeah, I know. Bog Buster, that well-known brand.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I'd buy Richard Negus's signature Bog Buster.
Richard Negus: Lifeguard. Yes, it would be very good.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: That brings us round to this week's sponsor. Use the code Bog Buster 10 for 10% off on your next purchase. Buy an industrial pack of 10.
Richard Negus: Yeah, you bend if you want to. Right, anyway, let's get on with the show. I want to know because you see, whilst you were preparing your large glass of Coca-Cola there, Richard was telling me that he had a good wildlife story. So what have you been up to this week, Richard, and what wildlife did it involve? Well, Richard, this week. I'd quite like to have been on sort of a 1980s, 1990s Blue Peter programme. Yeah, if Janet Ellis is there, I would have been too, like a stoked. Well, there's an image for everyone at home. I'm down to 1 crutch now, so I can sort of hop around off-road, which means I can go and visit all the things that I've been neglecting. And there's our bit of woodland where we run our wild food and wild food sort of cookery quarters. Our next one's in July because we've had to push them back a bit. So I had to go and visit the hot smoker. So the hot smoker, as you may remember from previous episodes, is a big wooden box upon stilts. So I went to visit it last week and you sort of get to it and unlock the door and open it. there was a very confused looking mouse living at the bottom of it and sort of it stopped and stared at me. So to this mouse it would have been like if I just went up to your house now and opened up the side of it and just pulled it all open and there's this huge thing staring at you. And it sort of scuttled off to somewhere else and then I looked up and realized there's a wasp nest in the top. So I. Thought. We'll have to deal with one species at a time. Although my friend did suggest that we I tell the wasps that the mice are invading their territory and tell the mice that the wasps are invading bears and let them sort each other out. So I went back a few days later, sort of trying to empty all this thing out because there's all the shelves and the racking and the thermometers in there and we keep kindling in there because it's the driest place in the woods. So we keep kindling in there in the winter in case we want to start a fire quickly and that's sort of in this big paper bag. So I cleared all the bottom bit out, couldn't find any mouse nests, cleared the top bits, couldn't find anything. So I pulled the bag of kindling out. And as I'm stood there, I've put my crutch down. I'm sort of balancing on my one good leg and somebody else is doing some other tasks somewhere nearby. And I'd open this big paper feed sack and put my hand in it and feel something warm and wriggling. And I realized the mice have made their home. in this feed sack. And that's the point. About 6 mice all erupted from the bag at the same time and sort of ran up my arms onto my head and all over the place. And as my friend who was at camp described it, he said, it looked like you were a wizard casting fireballs, but instead of fireballs, you were firing mice off in different directions while screaming. So the mice are no longer in the smoker cabinet and you can throw a mouse quite a long way when you're in a panic, it turns out. I'm sure they're all okay. It's probably a sport in America, to be honest, mouse tossing or something like that.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I don't care.
Richard Negus: You need tweezers for that.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I don't care how tough you are, but if a rat or a mouse comes at you, it's very unpleasant. It's unnerving. No one should be like, that's okay. Yeah, they're quick and also quite repulsive. They're not nice things you want close to you. Even a little mouse.
Richard Negus: Oh, I'm quite keen on mice.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: But just anything like rodent-y coming at you, not great.
Richard Negus: Have you never had a pet from nature? When I was young, I was obsessed with, I'd catch field voles and I could tame those quite easily. Wood mice were finickety little things. You could put them, I had a large sort of empty, obviously not with water and fish tank, and I put wood mice in there, but they really didn't. Mouse drowning with Richard Negus. Yes, exactly. Swim your blighters. But they were there. But I had a jackdaw, a crow, numerous grass snakes. All sorts of things that I sort of would find. I always wanted a weasel because I know that a friend of mine had a tamed fox and he said, if you get them when they're cubs and they're still black, then they're tamable. Once they've turned red, that's it. They're a fox and they don't want to be tamed. And he also had a pet badger as well. But he said, oh, I think you can do it with weasels. He said, they're just like a ferret. He's passing this law on to you. And so I tried, I tried, is this ChatGPT? I just tried finding weasel nests and never managed to find one that had a sort of attainable age. My dog used to hunt them out and you could find a weasel nest very easy in a hedge, but never managed to find them when they weren't so little pink wriggly things.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: How does one go about finding a weasel nest?
Richard Negus: Hedge bottoms. largely. That's where they will have a nest up north. They nest in dry stone walls, but we'd have them in a hedge bottom and they'll sort of go into little hollows in sort of rotten old bit of hawthorn and they have them in there. I had a dog that was absolutely mustard hunting weasels and would mark where one was. terrier I called Skip and you could rely upon it and then you'd sort of have a bit of footle around and then you'd find just a little load of pink little worms basically and then and then you go oh that's too young I've never managed to find them when they were just baby enough so I could snaffle one and time tame it. It's one of my it's one of my great if you know regrets in life is I never had a tame weasel.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Well maybe at a live show we'll let you recount that story and then we'll give you a But he's here with us tonight.
Richard Negus: Fitchy Whiskers is here. Yay. Or you have a weasel cannon. Yeah. So if anyone has, one of our listeners has got a young weasel that they don't want.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Please send it to Richard Negus #1.
Richard Negus: Windsor Castle. Yeah. I go under my other name of the King. Yes, so what have you done this week? Have you been covered in mice and wasps, Callum?
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I was going to give you my story of my favourite wild pet. I kept a slow worm because it looked like it wasn't doing too well. So I kept it in just like a tank. I knew someone that had like a reptile tank and stuck it in there and then just kept feeding it worms and slugs and odd bits and it did quite well for a long time and then eventually I did release it back into the wild. I kept it for a long old time and it seemed to do pretty well. It quite liked it in its little thing. I just had it in the living room knocking about.
Richard Negus: Didn't have a little smile on their face, but like I found when I was up in Weirdale the other week, I found a common lizard up there and it looked at me and I looked at it and had this funny little smile on its face and I thought, oh, it's the exact same smile that you see on a slow worm when you go and surprise them. It's a lipless grin. It's quite fair. Do you know, that's interesting that actually. So do you find slow worms about any more? No, I haven't seen one for ages.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: There used to be one place that used to be absolutely full of them. I haven't seen a slow worm for two years.
Richard Negus: I've not seen a slow worm. I've not seen grass snakes about as much. I haven't seen adders. You know, it seems to be. Now I went up onto a grouse mall the other day and I found a common lizard. My pal is the keeper up there sent me a picture of it just lifted up a water drinker that he's got up there and a presto. There's a slow worm under it. He got bitten by an adder last year. He found three basking on there. Now this place is crawling with reptiles up there. Bearing in mind that this was on a piece of heather which we were on, which they'd burnt two years ago. So if you read all the narrative, apparently one of the reasons why we've got to stop muir burn is because it kills all these adders and slow worms and other assorted reptiles. And the only place I've seen reptiles in profusion is up on a grouse moor where they have just recently done muir burns. So either someone's telling us porky pies or it doesn't kill stuff. I don't know. It's very peculiar that. Or maybe it's the thing about sort of. upward mobility within the class system because you've got your fewer common lizards, but presumably they've all moved out to Suffolk to become middle class lizards. Middle classes. We don't really have middle class here. We don't have them. We have sort of dropout hippies. Can you say that again? Yeah, we don't have middle class people here. We have dropout hippie. You're in an orangery. This is my study. Middle class people don't have studies. It's the \*\*\*\*\* handed working class.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: How much Ikea furniture is in your house?
Richard Negus: Do you know what a turkey Twizzler is? I know what a pheasant Twizzler is. I don't have any Ikea furniture. No. We used to have Ikea furniture.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: That's my case.
Richard Negus: But.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: No further questions, your honour.
Richard Negus: It's my 19th wedding anniversary today and. I'm of the firm belief that basically you get rid of all your IKEA furniture after your 7th wedding anniversary, because by 7 years the chances are you're probably going to stay married. So you might as well get stuff you both like, right? Whereas if you're going to go and wait for that first six years of marriage, you know, you might go and think, that's a stupid idea. So if you bought IKEA, it doesn't matter because you're not going to go and feel, you know, that emotionally attached to a dining room table, which is called a slack blad or something like that. So you're telling it took you until your nearly 8th wedding anniversary before you were sure about Claire. Is that what you're saying? No, that is not what I said. That sounds like that's what he said, didn't he, Calum?
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I'm pretty sure that's exactly what he said.
Richard Negus: He said that, yeah. If I did sound like that, edit that out immediately because I want to see the 20th wedding anniversary.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: What is 20 years? Doesn't it get more and more disappointing? Like it's like tin. It's like an old crisp packet, you know. like it \*\*\*\* or something.
Richard Negus: You get injected with adamantium. You're just, your bones don't break anymore. My, I believe that the 19th wedding anniversary is bronze. You are correct, it is bronze. Yeah, I did check a week or so ago thinking, shall I get something bronze? I think. No, so I took a lunch in the Angel in Bury St Edmunds instead. So that was that was nicer. It's these fascinating glimpses into the way you live your life and your decision making process. That's why that's why I keep coming back week after week.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: There's so much every just every decision.
Richard Negus: Who wouldn't like to go for lunch in a beautiful old Georgian hotel, you know, where Dickens wrote the Pickwick Papers and Martin Chuzzlewit. And yeah, I mean, it's great. Or would you like to have this random object from bronze because some marketing man from some goods company who sells stuff to people who do wedding anniversary gifts. No, I'm not bowing down to you. What is, what do you have to buy for your 20th? What's the 20th wedding anniversary gift then?
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I've got here China or porcelain.
Richard Negus: Okay, that'd be nice for a potter to give her that, wouldn't it? Yeah, this is made by someone else. Can you give us some China clay? Go and dig it out, go and dig it out in the pits of toxicity in Cornwall. Yeah, I was going to say, that'd be nice. Here, we're going to we're going to Cornwall. that'd be nice. Yes, I've booked us in on a mining trip. That'd be fun. Fun, fun, fun. Yeah. Come on, Callum. So other than taming slow worms, have you done anything contemporarily?
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I visited the county of Suffolk this week. We went back to right near Hadley, a little place called the Marquis and had delightful food. I've enjoyed the sun. If you've seen it in the sky, it's been pretty.
Richard Negus: You were taking photos of women in bikinis at the pool.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I didn't. It wasn't intentional, but some people caught my Instagram story and a few people commented on something that was in the background, which I had no idea about.
Richard Negus: So you perving.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: It was a ladies buttocks and a few people commented on it and I just. I just commented back one for the fans.
Richard Negus: So I mean, have you ever inadvertently taken a photograph when you realise that somebody either famous or not famous is doing something in the background? You go, oh dear, that's a lawsuit waiting to happen. You ever taken a shot when?
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Yeah, so many. I've got a hard drive full of, yeah, loads of stuff. Like celebrities doing things they shouldn't do, just people in high places doing things, not like career ending anything terrible, but if you've done your job properly, people relax to a point that they will show you behind the curtain. And if they show you behind the curtain, that could be taken out of context. But that's the job really, to make people chill out and do those sorts of things.
Richard Negus: Then there's also the photos where that person was doing something that they thought was absolutely okay, but because they didn't, you know, they weren't socially aware or anything like that, you decided yourself for the sake of their reputation to not share it or not edit that one.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I mean, some people, some people that and respect, they'll do things and you're like, it's like your first day on the planet and you've only just worked out that you've got hands and they do things and you think, you're idolized by people. People think you're the best and you're not actually able to function like a regular human being. And you sort of, it really, you do have the option to spoil the illusion of a lot of people.
Richard Negus: Agreed. I mean, I was telling Richard I'm currently reading Middle Land by Rory Stewart. And when Rory Stewart was going for the leader of the Conservative Party, they decided to do these head-to-head things in a studio. And They'd clearly said, well, how we're going to work this is we're going to get the camera to pan on each of your faces. You've got to hold eye contact with the camera for five seconds and it's going to pan from left to right. And so you've got Boris Johnson, you've got Theresa May, you've got Angela Leadsom and Michael Gove and here is Rory Stewart. And most of them, they look slightly uncomfortable because suddenly I'm going to stare into the camera and hold that contact and not say anything. But Rory Stewart's face is like literally they'd said, make yourself look like the least likely person who shouldn't even lead a group of Cub Scouts into a knot tying contest. Because he pulls this bizarre gun. And it was exactly like I say, no one had actually explained to him, when you look at something, make a facial expression that doesn't make you look like a serial killer. It was most, and he did actually write in a book, say, I think I lost my child. in that 5 seconds stare. So yes, it is something that people need to perhaps be aware of if they are going to be in the public eye. What you do with your hands and what you do with your face. Being able to practice a good neutral facial expression that would work for any occasion, you know, funeral. stay in court, middle of an orgasm, whatever it would work for, the same sort of facial expression that's just, that's just all the way through. I think that's a talent. I think it's something to teach you at the right public school. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So anyway, yes. Well, Jeremy Clarkson went to a public school. He went to Repton, I believe. Yes. As we record this on Tuesday, the 26th of May, we're kind of overwhelmed by news stories about how crap Farm Fest was. Yeah. If you believe all the news stories. So I think we should talk about that for a bit. So did either of you know it was on? That's the first question. No, to be perfect, it was something that sort of flashed up on my, funny enough, the only reason I knew it was on was because the no farmers, no food, WhatsApp group has got some sort of high profile-ish farmers. And they were saying, are you going to this thing? Have you been asked this? Have you been asked this? I was like, what thing? And they went, oh, this, and it went back up the thread 30 sort of days before. And so no, I wasn't aware. I only was really aware that it was on when all of a sudden my- What is this? Farm Fest. Exactly. I think that was the problem. I was only aware that Farm Fest had been on when I suddenly saw these very irate stall holders saying that they were either packing up a day early or they were wanting their money back or that it would ruin their business or something like that.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Sounds like they got. a good summation of what farming's actually like.
Richard Negus: Yeah, exactly.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Lack of support for the, what more of an immersive experience can you get? the promise the world, deliver nothing, a really hard time. Yeah, destitute now as a result. There you go.
Richard Negus: You have had the real farming experience. No, I mean, totally more. Have you actually sort of looked into this? Yes, I have, because, you know, sometimes just enough things pass by your little viewports of life and you think, hang on, I'm going to look at this because this is interesting. I was, today I spoke to two or three people who were there as traders, two or three people who were there as punters, and a couple of people.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Is this investigative journalism?
Richard Negus: Well, it's all hearsay. This is the thing. I'm not Guy Adams off of the Daily Mail. You know, I'm not going to do a proper job and actually come with sources and references.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: But you spoke to people.
Richard Negus: I spoke to people. But yeah, but I could say my postman says this, you know. So I think it was Great British Farm Fest and it was this weekend just gone. It was at Stoneley Park in Warwickshire and it was organised by, well, the function below the headline was stable events. So they're the same people who do the game fair and a few other things. I want to preface this, all of this, possibly for the sake of our solicitors, by saying that this is This is all sort of, reporting what has been said.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I have no idea I wasn't there.
Richard Negus: Yeah, this is for instance, yeah, any coincidental likeness of the people or events is well coincidence.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: And my sources are, trust me, bro. Go ahead.
Richard Negus: I've got some WhatsApp voice notes that people have sent me about it. So it looks, all the stuff in the papers at the moment and the news about it is there are a load of annoyed traders. about who said that it was either poorly organised or there was no footfall or nobody can get to the bit of the event where they were or it was very expensive. They didn't sell anything. A few people left early and they sort of took to social media to say why they were leaving. You can look that up for yourself. It's all over whichever social media platform you're on. So I'm going to piece together now as far as I can tell what happened because it's the first time the event's been run It was branded with Team Clarkson, with Jeremy Clarkson, Clarkson's Farm. So everyone who is now effectively a character on the Clarkson's Farm TV show, so Jeremy Clarkson, Lisa, Cheerful Charlie, Gerald, all of these people, Caleb of course, they were all there in one degree or another and they were there in all the marketing for it as well. And it had Hawkstone there and everything like that. And it was the Great British Farm Fest. What I think has happened is that it was touted to the public as a festival, music festival sort of thing, because there were bands there like.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Alex James from Blur, Sophie Ellis Best and Groove Amada on stage, who obviously all featured in the series. So there was some of that.
Richard Negus: It's the late 90s, basically there.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Yeah.
Richard Negus: The late 90s, early 2000s. And it was sort of put together as a festival for the public, but it looks like it was sold to the traders as being more like the game fair, which is more like an agricultural show, shopping moment event. And the marketing maybe, I have no idea if it's good or not, because I knew about it weeks ago, but we're kind of in this space, but loads of people I know who are also in the space had no idea what it was on. No. It seems like a lot of their marketing went via, they approached agricultural influencers. to be ambassadors for the show. And I've always got this theory that because somebody has a lot of following on Instagram or TikTok or wherever, it does not mean it will translate any way into sales of a physical product or a service because what people follow that person for is the stuff they do on social media, not to pay 30 quid or 60 quid and drive to Warwickshire for a day in the sun. Yeah, couldn't agree more. Could not agree more. So you have that issue and then If you look at what a few of the traders say, they were approached at other shows and say, earlier in the year to say, oh, well, do you know Jeremy Clarkson's doing his own farming? show. It's going to be at Stoneley Park. Why don't you come? Here it is. Here's the bill for two grand for a pitch or thereabouts. As always with these events, the pitch fees vary depending whether you're on a corner, whether you've got a double slot, a single slot, wherever you are. So people are quoting anything between two, the cost of between 2:00 to 10 grand, but some people are sort of bundling in staff costs and all of that. It looks like people who were there pretty happy with it overall as a festival if you're a punter. And people who were there as traders, either food or retail, feel like they were mis-sold or they sold too many trader slots. And I think one of our food contacts, and I won't say who it is, but they spoke to a few of their friends who were there and Basically, you would have sold about 200 items if you spread the attendance evenly between the food traders, which is not enough to make back your costs, even at festival prices where people are charging 15 quid for a baked potato.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Yeah, this is it though. Like 15 quid for, I mean, I'm sure there's people that sell Coles. beers probably didn't do like the Hawkstone lager tent probably wasn't struggling to get people to spend their money. But if you're selling 15 pound baked potatoes on one of the hottest day of the year, I'm sure you will struggle.
Richard Negus: And there's one that someone a lot of people are picking up on is effectively a pet food company selling 25 kilo bags of dog food, which is not a great seller at a festival where you've got to you've effectively got to do a march across dry fields to get there. What you're going to do is sort of turn around, go back to the car, then come back.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Can you imagine murder on the dance floor with your 25 kilo dancing round?
Richard Negus: I mean, I have to say, I've only got some experiences of some of the events that Claire has been to selling her pottery this year. that this time last year sales were up and she was sold out and that we saw similar footfall, similar sort of demographic. It's not that people aren't going to events. I just think people are drawing their horns in slightly. And so therefore buying that thing that you don't necessarily need but you might want, you might not buy there. I know people sort of specifically with a game fair They say I'm saving money because I'm going to go and buy something at the game fair because I'm bound to get a good discount deal. I don't know whether you do or you don't there, but you know you've got all those things on mass. I bought 3 guns at the game fair over the years, yeah. So I mean I think any new event, just because it's got the magic fairy dust of Clarkson over it does not necessarily mean it's going to be a success. Clarkson's Farm hasn't been on the telly for a couple of months. So therefore it's not that hot and fresh in the minds of some, many. And I'll tell you one thing, the Suffolk show last year, they realised that sales were down and there was a very large potato buying firm who makes frozen potatoes, probably the most famous one, was going to sponsor one of the areas, the farming live demonstration area. and they pulled out quite last minute.com and it really put the Suffolk show in show organising terms quite on the back foot. And the chairman of the Suffolk Agricultural Association was talking about this over dinner and his daughter said you ought to get Spudman in. Now Spudman for me I've never heard of him but this guy's got a million plus followers on Instagram and TikTok and He bought his baked potato wagon there and the Suffolk Show reported that ticket sales went up when he said I am going there by 13%, 1.3% just because they gave him the prime pitch right next to the Farmer Desert and he went on and did his thing. He absolutely performed for the cameras. He gave more selfies than flipping you can shake a stick at and he did brilliantly. So I think if you're going to rely upon influencers to help your marketing. You have to have someone who has got a vested interest in the success of the event. So when Spudman travels from wherever it is he's from in his thing with his pink Mohican and people want to go that, then that makes a difference. Just because you've got someone who wears a ridgeline fleece and shakes a fist at people or you're an influencer, same thing with the Game Fair. Just as some hooray Henrietta in large sunglasses and a silly hat, or some poncey knob in a, you know, in who wears bricks to bed, is not necessarily going to get you more football. Hello. Yes, well, I know that's you. haven't going to be able to take your trousers off since the legs. Exactly. That's why you're still wearing them. But I think that the power and influence of the influencer is greatly, greatly overrated and you've got to choose it. And you need someone like Spudman to make that serious footfall. 13% upturn in ticket sales is the difference between the Suffolk show being a financial success or not. You know, just having a couple of people putting on saying, hey, I'm off to Farm Fest, ain't it going to be great? And then I'm going to cuddle a lamb. That ain't enough, I don't think. I think that's to misunderstand. This is proof that you weren't, you were actually paying attention to your wife today and you weren't looking at the news or your emails because Spiderman was there. He was one of the people saying that he didn't have a great first day and then the second day was okay. But that was one of the things that drew the attention to it. But it is, so I've got this theory about the whole thing, but I always go for a \*\*\*\* up over conspiracy. Yeah. On anything.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I like that. That's a good phrase.
Richard Negus: Yeah. If you any commercial event and I've never really put on those kind of like festival type of events, but I've been a safety coordinator for them and I've used to do big multi-day mountain ultra hard \*\*\*\*\*\*\* triathlons and organise those. They are expensive and they are hell on earth whilst you're organising it for the event team and the marketing team before it is chaos. at best, well-organized chaos, but it's still chaos. It's really, really hard to put an event on and it's getting harder because everything's costing more and the insurance alone for these events now is huge. So getting the event running and it happening is great. If you are a trader and you say, I want to come to this thing and I'll give you a couple of grand for my pitch, they're going to say yes because we've got to cover their cost. So I think a lot of traders went there expecting it because it was Clarkson. It was basically going to be like sort of the retreat from Moscow. It was just going to be people stumbling past their stand waiting to give them money. Whereas actually they were there to go and see Jeremy Clarkson and Sophie Ellis-Bextor. So you've got that element. You've got people sort of obsessed with the Clarkson brand. because Clarkson has been, as we've all said, Clarkson has been great for farming, but Clarkson is also a huge brand within his own right. And as Callum said, you've got Hawks and Lager and the beers there. There's this weird thing that I've heard other people say before this, that when Hawks and Lager turns up at an event, that is basically the majority of the sales of beer or cider. makes it very, very hard then if you're a local brewer or cider producer who went at an event when you're next to the Hawkston Lager stand, because you're not going to sell anything unless people can't be asked to queue for Hawkston. No, what are you going to say? Now this stuff, that stuff, the organiser's stuff is \*\*\*\*. Drink wine. Yeah, it's not easy, is it? Yeah. It's a new event as well. It's a new event. I mean, I've never been to any event. I went to a lovely book event in a beautiful location and they were disappointed by the turnout. But I said, well, you're going to have to see this through because what will happen now is the X number of thousands who came will say what a lovely thing it was. And they'll probably go say, do you know, it wasn't too crowded. And then next year that means that there'll be another four families who have listened in will say, we better go to that because it's not too crowded. And then before you know it, oh, it was so busy. I sympathise because anyone who makes their living by going to events and retail is always a challenge. And particularly if you're selling perishable goods, it's not like you go and pack up your burgers back in the van and say, well, didn't sell that many. You know, that's lost stock. I'm going to make my final prediction. So next month is the next, when the next season of Clarkson's Farm comes out, but that was filmed. some of it over a year ago because you've always got that delay in production and things. Every season of Clarkson's Farm so far has had some sort of race to the finish thing for the last episode or somewhere towards the end. So it was getting the farm shop ready and then getting the restaurant, pop-up restaurant and then the pub and stuff like that. So that seems to be a thing they quite like doing. I'm going to put my prediction that the race to the finish of this was, Can we get a festival for farmers off the ground? Yeah. They had to make that bit of it work for the show. That's, I don't know for sure, but I'm getting. Got to get bit jeopardy in it. Talking of jeopardy, one, I wonder what county, because this is important. I wonder what county, do you think registered the largest number of counts in the GWCT's Big Farmland Bird Count. Callum, would you like to guess which county provided the most number of counts this year?
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Is it Suffolk?
Richard Negus: Yes, it's Suffolk. The jeopardy is at an end. Thank God. We have beaten Norfolk finally. Three years. There is a sort of always a three-way race between Suffolk, Norfolk, and Lincolnshire. And for a large number of years now, those damn six-fingered beasts from the wrong side of the Waveney have beaten us.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Wait, tell me for it. What do you what? We've done one in the very cold winters. Did we do one in the snow?
Richard Negus: We did. We did one in the snow. So yeah, it's done basically the winter count. So it's in February. It takes them this long to collate all the data. So they basically take all the reports that have come in and they then go and I'm not an ecologist. So they sort of filter out all the dross ones. They filter out the people who are clearly just putting, yeah, I saw 3 million grey partridges. If you'd like to shoot one of these grey partridges, please go to guns on pegs. Exactly. They also filter out, I think, the repeats. And they get it so that they clean the data up so they know what they've got. And so the results are in for this year's. So the one that was done this winter, the results have now come out.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: So GWCT have had their abacus and they've sat and worked out. And the results are in.
Richard Negus: Paul J Jana Colony, who is a lovely, lovely young lady. She's an expert on bees and insects and things. She has. She's the scientist. She's good. what she could have done, she would have probably gone and put them, or one of them at least would have ended up on a little pin board because she's just got this tray of insects with pins to the back so that she shows people and there's lots of Latin names. But Jane has collated all this and she is now communicating the information out there. And the good news is that Suffolk came first, Norfolk second, Lincolnshire third. So in Suffolk, there are 139 individual farms, gave a count, 101 in Norfolk and 62 in Lincolnshire.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: And what was the interesting insight? So isn't it like, is it like 4 hours or something? You sit and count how many? An hour. Is it an hour? An hour you sit out and you count how many birds you can see in that.
Richard Negus: They saw 34 individual species on the red listed were spotted and counted over this. There were in total 1,201 counts done across the UK. A total number of birds counted was 275,024. And that was over a coverage of 292,828 hectares of total. So it's that's a fair old whack of land which they have done this count over. You know it's proper farm science when it says hectare. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, not acre.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: How do we how do we find the results?
Richard Negus: It was in the show notes. By the time this comes out, we'll put a link in the show notes. Yeah. That's how that's how it works. That's how it works in the modern world, Callum. That's how it works, mate. See, the interesting thing I do would say, one thing, 67% of the participants are in an agri-environment scheme. So therefore, what that does show is that you are still, and it is a problem that we have, is that those who do the most have already embraced the thing, not, you know, So what do you think about this, Richard? Well, that's kind of picking up on the same point because the fact that it's the GWCT count kind of self-selects, doesn't it? Because you're not going to get Mr. Scum-tastic, dirty as farm in the veil, which decorates the hedges with silage wrap and decides that slurry is the top dressing for every surface on earth. They're not going to be in this and no one it's unlikely anyone's going to be going to their farm to do this. So it is skewed, but I don't think in a negative way towards better farms that have better habitats. So you're going to see a greater diversity of species in there and it's more likely because of the GWCT being pretty much the only conservation organisation that is openly in favour of selected predator control. you're going to get better outcomes in those places because that's what you get on land with predator control. So you're always, it's always going to be better results there, but that's good. But. It's sort of when the other organisations come with their data instead, because today was when the RSPB said, look, every raptor ever has been killed by a gamekeeper. And the BBC really helped out by putting an interactive map on their website that showed you where your nearest raptor has been killed. Completely unbiased reporting. But that's, those two sets of data don't meet in the middle because one is appealing to the public and saying everything's crap. and one's talking to people who are already doing good on the land or support it, saying, look, it's doing good. And finding the messaging to fit in between is hard, but I'd rather go with the GWCT data than the look, everything's crap, we need your money data. Yeah. That's a very sensible point. And I think one of the biggest challenges the GWCT will always have is that they are so frequently preaching to the choir is that they are people who, like you say, that they are doing that. They have embraced this idea of stewardship and that's therefore so sometimes the data is skewed. But I also think it's a ridiculously cynical thing. And once again, I'm going to point the finger straight at the RSPB's communications team because they gave Mark Nowers the day, the RSPB gave him the day so that he, on the launch day, those of us who were invited to go to Loddington where it was launched this year, the RSPB They invited Mark, they gave him a sort of a special reward for, award rather, for his work on behalf of the turtle dove. They gave me the second prize of a bag of bird food, which was very kind. The mice have eaten it, probably some of your mates, I have to say, Richard. But, you know, and he gave a fantastic walk and talk for people because his ear is infallible and he was telling us what he could hear that others couldn't and you can't see stuff because of that time of year in the winter you're not seeing so much display. So he was telling all that stuff. So he got him out there and what do they do? They decide to go and give a set of data and what really \*\*\*\*\*\* me off about the RSPB thing is that this comes off the back of some rather fatuous statement that Becky Speight, the RSPB's chief executive, has done. She said, things that this government could do to make things better. And her.4 was to get tougher on wildlife crime. And she then went into something about raptor persecution. Well, the three leading, most prosecuted and most prevalent wildlife crimes are not raptor persecution. The first one is illegal hair coursing and poaching. The second one is river pollution and fisheries pollution. And the third one slightly escapes me at the moment. We've got nothing to do with frigging Raptors. So they almost, when the GWCT want to put out this story, this is the big farm and bird count, and yes, I think you're quite right, Richard, you can go and criticise it because like all polls and all data there is flaws in it. But it was something where the RSPB and the GWCT came together at its launch and they decided to go and put this fatuous thing out and their buddies at the BBC go and lap it up like a tame kitten. And you think, We're never going to see nature recovery because there are complete \*\*\*\* \*\*\*\* in the communications team at the RSPB who if they can't get a story out there, they'll just fabricate one so that they can go and steal some headlines. It's just childish. Or omit crucial details like the most recent one with an injured raptor that they were saying was found on a moorland. Yes, it was found on a moorland by the gamekeeper who took it to the vet. Yes. That bit's missed out of the story. Yeah, But this is, he will be the worst criminal ever if he took the evidence of his crime to the vet. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't work. I don't know what's happened here. It's just fell out the sky, you know. Yes, I mean, it's not going to happen. Spontaneously exploded. Yeah. I mean, do you know, the big farmland bird camp is something that if you did get more data. You did get more people. There needs to be more of an incentive, possibly, for more people to go and do it. And let's be perfectly honest, a lot of farmers, they genuinely can't be \*\*\*\*\*. You know, they don't care.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Do you think they'd all know the birds?
Richard Negus: No, they don't.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I know some.
Richard Negus: One of the one of the great things this year, they got together with Perdix. And so what they're able to literally do, because there are a lot of little brown jobs, a lot of people wouldn't know a linnet. They would not immediately go and say, oh, there's a linnet. And when you're looking at a lot of the hen species, they are little brown jobs. They, you don't know. I mean, are you going to be able to spot a garden warbler immediately? I can when it sings. I can't when the thing is just sat there in a hedge. I wouldn't, there's a warbler, I think, you know, and I'm a bit of a of a birder. And so, but they got through with that. So what they were able to do was that they were able to basically say, little brown thing, describe it, and then that's why it took a bit longer to go and collate all the data, because they were basically putting these amateurish, ham-fisted descriptions. These apparently got 53 dodos in Hertfordshire at the moment, which is, you know, from a Mr. C. McEnerney Riley, yeah.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I'm looking forward to the point where AI can help with this kind of stuff because this is actually very informative. And I think there will be a point where you could do something, maybe it's like supplementary feeding or it's like Merlin, but Merlin's not always accurate, but it's somewhat.
Richard Negus: I think it's accurate enough though, wouldn't it be?
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Yeah, it is enough. So a bit of visual, a little bit of visual, a little bit of audio and you could get a very clear picture without people actually being out. So that would be a very positive use of AI and I think something could be good. You can use these tools for conservation and positive good.
Richard Negus: I know that what Perdix have done is that they have developed something for counting bobwhite quail in America and they are trying to count covey numbers of bobwhite quail. Sounds like a pseudonym for some. Yes, exactly. And it sounds like a sort of minor assassin, doesn't he? Bob White Quail. He just comes in.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: I use the detective.
Richard Negus: Exactly.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Bob White Quail.
Richard Negus: Anyway, what they use is they use sound detection and AI tells you it plots how many they think are in this covey by the volume that's coming through. So I think they're using it. And I'm sure that things that GWCT have got perdix on board, I think they're one of the few people actually in our world who knows what AI means other than artificial insemination.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Some of it's probably quite easy to tell some of the like the volumes of certain birds are probably quite easy to know if it's a lot of them like black grouse. You can, there's noise and it amplifies. The more there are and the more females there are, the more it amplifies. I mean, it'd probably be quite easy to plot that. And things like, I always remember the Gadwell, that sound like the intro to the Beastie Boys song. Like when you hear that from far away, that there's usually a lot of them all together having a little sing-song. If.
Richard Negus: You get someone from Perdix on, we actually, I know we do actually have listeners within there and Sparsholt. and the close relationship between them. We know the listeners and I've got their cards sat on my desk and I meant to get them on as a guest last year and I still haven't done it. So, yes, we could get Joe. Well, I'll tell you what, we'll doorstep Jodie when we go to the game fair and just go and say we're going to interview you. And then? No, not after the last time when Callum spilt a pint on their stamp. Did you? Sort of. You were chatting at women in the back end pretending to interview them. Oh, I know. And Calum and I were drinking. The back end.
Callum Mcinerney Riley: Wow. How can I say? Quite frankly, I resent the accusation.
Richard Negus: I had to interrupt your interview because somebody wanted a book signing. Yeah, I know. Isn't it just, you know, lifestyles of the rich and the famous? It's ridiculous, isn't it? My mother actually told me this. She said, You're famous, my dear. And I said, why is that? I was speaking to a lady at the Mid-Suffolk Light Railway and she knew your book. Well, there we go. What more can you want if you make it in the Mid-Suffolk Light Railway Steam Exhibition, 1940s, think, what more can you do? She works with models. Right. Anyway, so we have done today the Was it terrible or was it not terrible? Farm Fest. And we have done the Big Farm and Bird Count where Suffolk came out on top, as did the Starling, Lapwing, Fieldfair and Linnet, which were the most seen red listed species. I would just like to have my own brag. I've got some starlings now nesting in the roof of the house and The other day, it was, what's today, Tuesday, on Thursday of last week, I had feeding in my garden, I had a turtle dove, I had a collar dove, I had a stock dove, and I had a wood pigeon. So I had all the doves. You like the lava drink? You like some whiskey? Drink? All in one little spot together. And I sort of thought, Very, very quietly, I tried to get my phone out to go and take a photograph of it. And by the time I got around, there were just like 2 fat pigeons staring at it going, well, mate, thanks to the turtle dove food. It's very nice. Thanks, mate. You know, and that was it. All the others are \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\* off. So, yeah, I haven't got the talent that Callum would have got them all in the same frame, but not me, no. A good place to wrap it up. We're going to the aftershow and to take us through to the aftershow, Callum is going to make the noise of a great white eagle being fed into a wood chipper.