A Few Musings

Our local community seems to be ticking over fairly smoothly of late despite the new political order beyond the electrified fences and sodden ditches of the village. We simple farming folk have been promised special training in customer care/animal welfare to ensure that we are aligned to the "brand promise". I am not sure why I find this to be mildly insulting.

I have been rather exercised in earlier posts about the whole milk production process. I understand these postings can appear quite obtuse - it is my attempt to make sense of the central importance played by data collection and processing. The process is reflexive - the need to record behaviour causes behaviour to change. Practices that have developed to enhance our work now have to change to meet the demands of a box-ticking bureaucracy. Paradoxically, these changes do nothing to enhance the relationship between shepherd and sheep, making the experience less satisfying for both, and potentially at odds with the "brand promise".

While I am on a roll, it strikes me that we invest a lot of time and energy in trying to avoid undesirable outcomes that are theoretically possible but statistically improbable. We have become overcautious, scared of wolves that left these shores genrations ago. The simplest of tasks become confusingly complex, Byzantine, subject to an ever-evolving tangle of rules and exceptions. To my simple mind, the more we are focused on trying not to make mistakes, the more likely it is that we will make mistakes. And the more ways it is possible to get it wrong, the more ways there are to fall from grace.