I have to say I like GLAS. It encourages and rewards good environmental farming practice and cover crops are a case in point. It Is doubtful that I would have motivated myself enough to plant cover crops if we weren’t in GLAS.

I now think cover crops are such good practice that if I were the Minister for Agriculture I’d issue a decree and make them compulsory before spring barley.

GLAS might also encourage a few farmers to dabble in min-till. Oddly, we didn’t go for this option but we did opt for some low-input permanent pasture. It is ideal for our parkland, which is full of old species of grasses like cocksfoot, timothy and plantain, as well as a few buttercups. That lovely delicate little flower of damp grassland, Lady’s Smock, will appear here in early summer. Despite what Teagasc may think, I believe that cattle finish better on these old pastures that are largely unspoiled by fertiliser and where ryegrass is an alien species.

As for the GLAS-inspired bird boxes, the songbirds will enjoy access to better and more comfortable little homes that do the human homeless on our city streets. I bought one of those good-value GLAS bundles which includes bird, bat and bee houses. They are nicely made but the timber is untreated softwood which may have the durability of a wet brown paper bag outdoors. But, as the guy selling them said, they’ll certainly outlive GLAS.

Unfortunately, that isn’t good enough for me. If I do anything I have to do it properly and buy the best.

It’s a terrible disease, the most recent outbreak of which led me to buy excessive Christmas pocket-emptying presents like a Yamaha keyboard for my daughter and a Dyson V8 cordless vacuum cleaner for Mrs P. Anyone else would buy her a vacuum cleaner in Lidl for €49.99.

So I went on the internet and bought some German Schwegler Woodcrete bird boxes, which are the bee’s knees and cost as much as a penthouse suite in the IFSC. But with a guaranteed life of 20 years, they’re clearly the Fendt of bird houses. I hope the Irish birds are impressed but doesn’t every bird like a classy home that’s better than her neighbours?

Soil tests

I’ve had every field soil tested and, true to form, the results aren’t brilliant. Despite an ongoing liming programme, we still need to spread 275t of lime over eight divisions.

Lime application doesn’t worry me as it is money well spent but our P and K indices are, as ever, mostly all from low to very low. Because our heavy soils have a high cation exchange capacity, even if I owned Yara Ireland, I couldn’t shift these indices. The soil organic matter content is fine, with all fields above 5% or more, which is pleasing.

Finally, I was up again with Michael Slavin, in Tara, who had another gem of an old book for me. Beautifully leather-bound and entitled The Code of Agriculture, it dates from 1821. For those of you who think min-till is an environmental GLAS creation, think again. I’ll leave you with a quote from the book: “It is maintained that in several districts spring crops may be successfully sown into friable and porous seedbeds without spring ploughing.”

And that was without Roundup. Let’s hope MEPs Mairead McGuinness and her colleagues don’t drag us backwards to those weedy days.