Category Archives: Farming

Harold architect planning to convert his house back into a barn

barn

Artist’s impression of completed barn re-conversion.

Touched by the plight of lambing sheep stranded on the Somerset Levels, Harold architect Joseph Blythe has applied to Harold Council for permission to convert his high-spec open-plan living accommodation back into the barn from which he created it a decade ago.

“It’s a long-term job that’s going to cost a lot of money,” he said, but remains undaunted by the scale of the project, which involves ripping out the balconied mezzanine above the main living area and replacing it with a simple hayloft and digging up the Italian stone floor tiles to create a soil-level sleeping area for the sheep. Continue reading

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Filed under Around Harold, environment, Farming, floods, Lifestyle, Nature, Pets

Sizzling bacon flavour air freshener proving popular with laundry workers

They contain dangerous toxins and absolutely NO fresh air.

They contain dangerous toxins and absolutely NO fresh air.

Harold inventor Simon Delaney’s new household sprays have brought a ‘breath of fresh air into our homes’.  That’s the verdict on Simon’s new range of pork-based air fresheners given by workers at Dunstable Cotton Laundry.

“I work all day in an atmosphere of freshly-laundered cotton,” said Marge Pellet, “so the last thing I need when I get home is to find my husband has sprayed the entire bungalow with Tesco’s Cotton Fresh air spray.  Men, eh?”

But Delaney’s new Frying Rindless Back Rashers flavour air freshener has brought Marge a new sense of joy when she returns from work and may even have saved her marriage.  “I used to linger outside, picking up twigs and straightening the bins, but now I catch that distinctive whiff of a bacon butty coming down the path and I can’t wait to get indoors and sink my teeth into something meaty,” she said.

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Filed under Aggressively Tested, Around Harold, Europe, Farming, Lifestyle

ABBA admit outrageous outfits were secretly worn ‘to scare off wild birds’

abba

Not a woodpecker in sight

Following speculation that their elaborately glamorous outfits were designed as a tax dodge, seventies band ABBA have now admitted that their real purpose was in fact to scare off crows and other wild birds.

ABBA’s stage clothes were famously extravagant, featuring sequinned jumpsuits, gravity-defying heels and in one case a fully-functioning windmill.
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Filed under Farming, Showbusiness

GM potatoes ‘can now fight and kill small mammals’

gm-potatoes

“Perfectly harmless”

British scientists have developed genetically modified potatoes that have sufficient intelligence and teeth to fight off small mammals.

For years farmers have been blighted by having their potatoes eaten by mice and rats, and have had to invest heavily in traps and poison. Now, after a three year trial run by Harold village scientist Bjorn ‘Three Fingers’ Bjornsson, a strain of potato has been engineered which is practically invulnerable to field animals and hungry tramps.

Following an EU investigation into the potential for terrifying biotechnology to protect crops, scientists at the John Horse Memorial Laboratory began a trial of savage nightmare potatoes in 2010. An early setback ensued when all the trial potatoes escaped one cloudy moonless night, leading to friction with locals and the mysterious disappearance of every cat in the village. Continue reading

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Filed under Around Harold, Farming, science

Horse is ‘so last year’ UK tells China

horseface

A horse doing an impression of the Princess Royal.

His Excellency Liu Xiaoming, the Chinese Ambassador to the UK, has been summoned to appear before an Environment Agency Committee to answer a charge of ‘insensitivity’ over introducing yet another Year of the Horse so soon after last year’s horsemeat scandal.

“We only just put the whole sorry business of horse behind us,” said Owen Patterson, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.  “Now the Chinese seem intent on stirring up all the bad memories again.”

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Filed under Culture, Dating, environment, Farming, Food, Health, International News, Royals

Protesters call for ban on Chinese GM ‘super cows’

GM cows

Large, or really close? – GM Super Cows are ‘upsettingly big’ claim protesters

Huge, genetically modified cows that were created using rat genes have brought howls of protests at a local farm.

Standing at over three metres tall and weighing as much as five tonnes, each cow can produce around 180 litres of milk a day.

The mega cattle were initially conceived to get round EC milk quotas, which are based on the number of heads in a herd. But despite quotas being phased out the moo-sive cows are gaining popularity, this time as a simple show of farming might.

The cows were produced by China’s burgeoning biotech sector, combining genes from a regular Holstein-Friesian cow and a rat. “Rats have an amazing property: they never stop growing”, explained head of research at Deng Bio, Dr Wei Tsao. “By combining this trait with the highly productive Holstein, we have created an enormous cow with lucrative udders.”

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Filed under Around Harold, Business, Farming, Technology

Putin welcomes Eastern Asians; “Just leave the dogs alone.”

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Following on from his comments that gay people can “feel free in your relationship but leave the children alone”, man of the world and Russian president Vladimir Putin has been rolling out the rainbow carpet to all people from all over the Globe.

“I would like to extend the strong yet moisturised manly hand of friendship to everyone,” Putin told media.
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Filed under Culture, Farming, International News, Politics, Sex, Sport

Duke of Cambridge’s ‘free pass’ to study at Cambridge ‘tip of the iceberg’ says local historian

Thick as pig shit? Or time-honoured tradition?

Thick as pig shit? Or time-honoured tradition?

The news that the Duke of Cambridge will spend a term studying a “bespoke” course in agriculture at Cambridge University has prompted a backlash from other students who resent him being given a “free pass” when they had to work so hard to get there.

But this isn’t the first time aristocrats have used their connections to gain entry to namesake seats of learning says Jason Simms, a local author and expert on the education of Britain’s nobility.

“One example that most people will remember was when the 5th Earl of South Bank side-stepped London South Bank University’s entry requirements to do a foundation course in Psychology, but there is in fact a much longer tradition of royals choosing to study at universities that have the same name as them.”

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Filed under Education, Farming, News, Royals, Uncategorized

David Cameron comes out as Bulgarian

David Cameron rearing sheep

In happier days, rearing sheep on the farm

In a move certain to shock the world of UK politics, Prime Minister David Cameron has taken advantage of the newly-relaxed EU work laws to announce that he is actually a Bulgarian immigrant named Binka Zhelyazkova. Cabinet insiders had long suspected that Cameron was of Eastern European extraction, but few realised that his privileged English background was totally faked and his family are in fact peasant otter farmers from the remote Targovishte Province.

‘Obviously until the law changed I couldn’t really admit to being a Bulgarian,’ the Prime Minister explained to journalists this morning. ‘It was very difficult to keep up the facade, the ‘фасада’ as we say in my country. Hopefully I can put this behind me now. And it’ll be a relief not to have to hide the otters.’ Continue reading

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Filed under Farming, Politics

England cricket team put down by Perth vet

dead cricketer

Had a good innings – just not recently…

Deeply lamented by a large circle of sorrowing friends and acquaintances,  the England cricket team was finally put out of its misery today by a sympathetic Perth veterinary surgeon.

Like a horse with a broken leg, a blind dog or a really crap cricket team, spirit broken and body reduced to a wheezing shell, England had been reluctantly hobbling blindly onward under the whip of public opinion. By the end the team were little more than things of amusement for the howling cruelty of the Australian crowds and David Warner. Continue reading

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Potato found in field near Harold

spudfield

Potato ‘undressed me with his eyes’ claimed Jane Fondant.

There was much excitement in Harold today following local tramp John Horse’s lucky find of a solitary late-season King Edward in a field on the outskirts of the village.

“We had a long chat about the England back four,” said Horse, “and shared a couple of jokes about Rio Ferdinand before I realised I was dealing with an organism with far more intelligence than any English footballer.  So I popped ’im in me pocket.”

Horse successfully fought off an imaginary mob of ‘bastard thieving scavengers’ clearly intent on snatching the precious vegetable from his grasp as he made his way along the central reservation of Chiggley Moor Lane, finally reaching the sanctuary of the Squirrel Licker’s Arms.
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Filed under Around Harold, Farming, Food, Lost and Found, Nature

‘Butter up your elderly relatives in time for Christmas’, says Prince Charles

queenBanquet

I suppose an OBE’s out of the question, then?

Following the suggestion by Princess Anne that Britons should eat horsemeat to improve the animals’ quality of life, another member of the Royal Family has come forward with his own alternative to traditional beef.

Prince Charles, who has a range of organic and inordinately expensive products from his Duchy of Cornwall range, has stepped into the row with his ‘Queen Bessie’ line.

While many have been put off the idea of eating elderly or infirm relatives by the poor quality of the meat, weeping sores and lack of good recipes, HRH thinks that it is an option which will garner more and more popularity as rising energy, food and residential care costs bite harder.
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Filed under Around Harold, Farming, Food, From the Vicarage, Royals

Star Wars fans angry at news next movie will be set around Bristol

donkeytrooper

These aren’t the droids Eeyore looking for

Star Wars fans were venting their anger this morning after news leaked out from Disney studios that unusually for the series, the next Star Wars film will be set “largely in Bristol and Somerset.”

The current open casting auditions in Bristol had led some film buffs to question whether characters from the next film would have West Country accents, and it now seems that this is no accident.

“We’re really excited at the prospect of filming in the south west of England,” explained a Disney spokesperson today. “It’s a lovely part of the world, and fits very well with the plot of the next movie, which I can’t give away but is heavily based around cider.”
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Filed under Culture, Farming, Showbusiness

McDonald’s to replace ketchup with orangutan blood

barrow of apes

Urangutans are delivered to ape rendering plant using low carbon transport

Following the discovery that Heinz ketchup doesn’t have any affect on rain forests, McDonald’s has announced it will phase the condiment out in favour of orangutan blood.

McDonald’s restaurants have served Heinz ketchup for over 40 years, despite the tomato-based product actually tasting of something. But now Heinz has realigned the product by popping it in the bin, and using something more typically bland that you don’t want to think about where it came from.

“Orangutans are the ideal source for orangutan blood and it’s a source that’s  sustainable, for at least as long as there are orangutans”, explained Nigel Manning, the company’s head of near-human resauces. “There have been a few teething problems with this natural product being a little bit too runny, but our food scientists are busy tackling that problem.”
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Filed under Business, Economy, Farming

Edinburgh Zoo look to ‘human methods’ to induce panda’s labour

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With the world’s media gathered at Edinburgh Zoo getting increasingly impatient to see if their female panda, Tian Tian, is pregnant, staff are looking at ways to induce labour.

“If Tian Tian did become pregnant during a course of artificial insemination she will be due any day now,” her keeper told us. “But finding out if a panda is pregnant is not as black and white as it may seem.”

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Filed under Farming, Nature, News

BBC apologises for breasts

holly

Hello, what are these, then?

The BBC has apologised after inadvertently revealing to viewers of The Voice that there is an above-waist difference between men and women.

More than 1000 rabid drooling people smelling of urine phoned the corporation after Saturday night’s live final on BBC One to complain that presenter Holly Willoughby’s low-cut dress clearly showed that women have ‘upper body curvy places which might very well have nipples attached’.

The dress in question, a black lace affair, apparently revealed some five square inches of chesty skin, which caused a bespectacled man in Altrincham to spontaneously ejaculate in anger.

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Filed under Badgers, Farming, Fashion, Lifestyle, Showbusiness, Vicars

Opposition grows to intensive Panda farm

panda

Abattoir workers lure in a panda with scampi nik-naks and half a Bulmers

One farmer’s move into the lucrative ‘exotic meats’ market has drawn crowds of protesters to the village.

With people growing bored with eating cows, pigs and baby baa-lambs, market prices have seen a corresponding tumble. But thanks to local farmer Phil Evans’ efforts to intensively rear pandas, Harold’s gourmands have something new to chew over.

First-time visitors to Harold might not notice the food revolution straight away, but they’ll soon get the gist from the angry placards, and chants for Evans’ blood.

“From a distance, pandas do look a bit like stumpy, fat heifers”, explained Evans. “But look more closely, and you’ll notice that they’re useless, lazy twats.”

Evans faced a number of hurdles before he could get his herd ‘up and running’, although after a couple of days he gave up on that approach and now leaves them laying around, chewing sticks.
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Filed under Around Harold, Business, Farming