Discuss The Archers #108: Has Ed & Emma’s ship sailed? Will Alice stick her oar into Kate's love life? Can Shula walk on water? Come and discuss whatever floats your boat in The Archers.

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

Thank you, @PseudoBadger, for kicking off this long, long series of Archers threads and @DadDadDad for being our resident statistician and keeping the ball rolling when Pseudo stepped back a bit.

All views on The Archers welcome here! New blood welcomed. We don't all agree on all points and most of us are posting tongue in cheek a lot of the time, so don't worry about revealing that you'd like to be Susan's best friend or other unusual views.

Spoilers: not on this thread, please. We don't wait for the omnibus to discuss the weeknight episodes, but we do try our best to avoid cross-contamination from www.mumsnet.com/Talk/radio_addicts/3439443-keep-it-to-yourself-the-archers-spoilers-thread-4, where spoilers are positively welcomed!

For newer listeners, lurkers or those who just have no idea what we're talking about, DadDadDad has created this useful thread: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/radio_addicts/3557323-For-Archers-fans-a-guide-to-acronyms-on-the-long-running-discussion-threads-and-any-other-meta-thread-questions-you-may-have BOOP point for him! (See thread for explanation.)

Thanks to @QuaterMiss for the title of this thread. For reasons of space had to cut out the bit speculating about Oliver and Tracy pairing off. Surely not!

Off now to give blood, something nobody in Ambridge ever does. See you all later.

The place I currently look after is about 400m away from a golf club that's gone bust. They keep the fairways trimmed, but have allowed the bunkers to go wild. They've also dug up the greens, which i guess are in use elsewhere. The clubhouse is MASSIVE and could be a hotel.

When I win the lottery I'll buy the place and rewild the golf course and rework the clubhouse and let somebody else run it.

Just to add. How lovely to see those posters who listen over in forrin.

When Phoebe said ‘I’ve never seen your dad like that’ and Pip said ‘you should’ve seen him ... I thought there were numerous times he’d been angry, Jude being one.
Sorry I missed all the grammar conversation. I personally wish fewer people used less when it should be fewer.

Am I being stupid finding Peggy's question about the profitability of rewilding odd?

I appreciate the winning project can't just be a money hole.
To be sustainable long term it needs to generate an income but it just added to dragons den bollocks. I thought the real ROI here was environmental gain?

Also really annoyed team rewilding didn't just say "we'll buy some land, as is noted in the budget proposal we submitted."

At the risk of being up a boring yet distant memory, the bucket list. Did anyone else find it infuriating? As a woman who got very swollen feet, no centre of gravity and a lot of sickness listening to two men in their 50s (is it? Or close enough.) cavort around skinny dipping and clubbing made an already incredibly distasteful and intentionally ignorant surrogacy storyline worse. (Nothing wrong with anyone of any age doing that, just made the rent a womb thing even more prominent.)

I wonder if with the brexit angle timeline being a disaster for the SW if there will be trouble of a different nature for them with legalities and the moral issues. (I know this has been mentioned before.) On the one hand I hope they do use the opportunity to flag up the issues, on the other hand the less air time they all get the better.

Just to add. How lovely to see those posters who listen over in forrin.

I'm currently listening from forrin, but only on holiday. Can't comment on cows' climbing abilities though because I'm in a part of forrin which has plentiful leather shops (every couple of miles at least), beef on the menus, and cows' milk in the supermarkets, but mysteriously not a single visible cow. Goats and donkeys are legion, occasional sheep, cows = none.

Hurray if Ruth and David have finally had their eyes opened to Pip's undeservedness as golden child.

I presume that you are not in France, Fink. I always found it weird that you could be in deepest countryside - with cows and everything - but that no fresh milk was to be found; it was all UHT.

Did anyone else find it infuriating? As a woman who got very swollen feet, no centre of gravity and a lot of sickness listening to two men in their 50s (is it? Or close enough.) cavort around skinny dipping and clubbing made an already incredibly distasteful and intentionally ignorant surrogacy storyline worse.

Yes. I find the whole surrogacy storyline with not a word about any of the ethical issues or the impacts on women to be exactly what I'd expect from the current BBC.

Hurray if Ruth and David have finally had their eyes opened to Pip's undeservedness as golden child.

TBH I doubt it will make a long term difference. If Ruth wins the money Pip will rapidly retrench in terms of wanting to support the poor wee cousin or similar. I'll be massively irritated if the winner is someone only doing it for the money anyway as that makes it just another farm subsidy and not an environmental initiative.

QuaterMiss - what do the landowners get out of rewilding? According to the book I'm reading, Isabella Tree's accounting of rewilding at Knepp, the family estate in Sussex, they did it because they were losing money massively from traditional arable farming.

They are profitable now and make most of their money now from tourism, and from selling the meat from the animals they cull. And of course the environmental & biodiversity benefits are massive - so if you ascribe a value to Natural Capital ... which we should ... it's even better.

On another subject, has No Deal Brexit been mentioned on TA at all in the last couple of weeks ???

Not currently in France, R4, but I do travel there for work fairly frequently. You can get 'lait cru' (is it called 'raw milk' in English? I'm not sure. It means unpasteurized, not UHT, fresh milk) from vending machines. You either bring your own bottle to refill or buy a new bottle from the machine, then fill up with how much you want.

I've seen the machines in Italy and Greece too. I love them!

“Can’t eat, barely sleeping.”

Emma said this about the prospect of losing the house.

Now Ed’s saying it about the prospect of losing her ...

Stands to reason that fresh milk is a lesser part of the diet in countries with hotter weather - best to get all the milk preserved into cheese asap. Also use oil and suet in cooking rather than butter. Portugal has a famous dessert which translates as "pork fat from heaven", just one of many which use lard where we'd use butter.

Re: farming for biodoversity - I saw a comment from one of the farmers involved in the "restoring hay meadows" project in N England "I used to farm with high inputs and high outputs, but I realised I could make the same profit with low inputs and low outputs" - great for the individual farmer, and great long term for the rest of us, but a problem short term if we go over to low input/low output agriculture - either food becomes more expensive, or we import more - and if you're going to move towards biodiversity and lower inputs, it doesn't make a great deal of sense to arbitrarily tear up a large portion of your existing food trade agreements at the same time.

Am I being stupid finding Peggy's question about the profitability of rewilding odd?

Yes it was odd - implied to me that only pre existing farms were eligible. Phoebe was very clear in her pitch (on relistening) that the income streams were the free range meat and tourism (so very much in line with the likes of Isabella Tree).

I find it odd that in an industry where making business proposals and managing budgets should be bread and butter the LSWs seem to have no grasp of how much this kind of process costs to run (against a 500k pot) and the processes/management model it needs. They seem to be treating it like a school project for a prize with the rules for that prize changing every five minutes.

I just think the prize is too big. £100K would be far more feasible and believable as a prize, with maybe the chance of attracting further investors through the publicity.

Listening again this morning to Phoebe's pitch, she did mention renting land to do it on, so I don't know why Peggy asked if they had land to do it on.

Listening again this morning to Phoebe's pitch I haven't listened for a couple of days ... are they really expecting us to sit through some sales pitches? Don't they think that perhaps some of us have had to sit through far too many pitches in our working lives?

You could forgive some tedium when TA was the propaganda arm of the Min of Ag, but now it seems to have given up all its aims to educate us (even when it has an opportunity to be educational, you can't rely on any of the info) it should at least try to be interesting.

What was the point of ther pitches being public (apart from Dramatic Effect). Did the public ask questions or have say?

with ruth's pitch - why don't they do that already? why do they need the 'project' as incentive?

Isn't the bit about planting trees is happening anyway with Natasha and Tom's arboriculture or whatever it was?

What Peggy laid out as the point of her Charitable Trust was that she was funding a financial award, to go to (the farm putting forward) the best plan for a sustainable farming project.

Bye bye apple trees, bye bye rewilding, bye bye building a school about farming practices; the only one we have heard about so far that actually fits the requirement she stated, a sustainable farming project, is the Brookfield one, though the one about bees might be in with a chance.

I don't think it's a charitable trust, just a trust. If so I think I may be able to work out the impact on the rest of Peggy's estate, but it partly depends on who wins the investment.

I thought it was registered with teh charity commission?