Country Focus
Butterflies and Pop-up Pasta
Rural crime - the cost of crime in the countryside has jumped by 7 percent in Wales according to the latest figures from the rural insurer NFU Mutual.
Fluttered away - Butterfly Conservation reports alarmingly low numbers of butterflies, with the weather a significant factor in the decline.
Lime Kilns - the Llanymynech Limeworks, closed over a hundred years ago calls for volunteers to help with the restoration work, wildlife surveys and keeping the site open to the public.
Mushrooming success in Gwynedd - the grower who's pioneered a method for raising a range of exotic, Lions Mane mushrooms
and how a pop-up pastaria, called Pasta a Mano, has quickly gained a cult following for offering authentic Italian Street Food will be competing in next month's British Street food Awards.
- Duration:
- 30m
- Broadcast on:
- 04 Aug 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
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Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. $45 up for three months plus taxes and fees, promoting for new customers for limited time. Unlimited more than 40 gigabytes per month, so full turns at mintmobile.com. Hello and welcome to Country Focus on Caroline Evans. The cost of rural crime is going up. Conspicuous by their absence, we're having all the butterflies gone. A call for volunteers to help with line works restoration. And award-winning Welsh Italian street food served from a tiny trailer in Caradigio. The cost of crime in the countryside has jumped by 7% in Wales according to the latest figures from the rural insurer, N.F.U. Mutual. Farms and businesses suffered losses of £2.4 million last year. Organized crime gangs, employing increasingly sophisticated methods, are being blamed for the increase. Alan Griffiths is from N.F.U. Mutual, and Alan, we saw a dip during COVID, but overall the trend for rural crime is up. Yes, unfortunately, that is the case, and we saw a big jump last year. This year, the jump is less, but still an increase, and it is an increase of 6.7% to a total cost of 2.4 million last year in Wales, which is concerning. Indeed, what are the criminals stealing mainly? Well, what we are seeing is because technology is improving, but new technology is costly. So what we are seeing is an increase in thefts of GPS equipment on tractors and combines. They seem to be very attractive to thieves, and typically a GPS unit can cost about £10,000 on a typical tractor or combine these days. So that is responsible for the hike in the claims cost. The other things that are very attractive to thieves, of course, as you would expect ATV's quad bikes, which seem to be steadily increasing in numbers, and also power tools, chainsaws, and the like that are always easy, I suppose, for criminals to pass on and cash in. And what about livestock, too? They subject to this increase? Yes, livestock gladly has increased in value in the last couple of years. Sheep in particular seem to be valued more, because I'm not sure if the theft of sheep, the incidents have increased, but certainly because sheep are worth more than, of course, the cost of the theft claims have increased. And unfortunately, you know, what we are seeing is that it's difficult for farmers who have lost sheep to theft to obtain crime reference numbers from the police because the police are facing, you know, ever increasing pressures with regards to their resources. Yeah, it's difficult all round. It's distressing when any crime is committed, but you've had reports having your animals being butchered in the fields. It sounds as if the criminals are becoming more brazen. Indeed, those kinds of incidents, we are few and far between, but they are increasing. And it seems that those criminals are specialists in a way because they have butchering skills. And of course, those kind of incidents, you know, are alarming and farmers when they do see that kind of thing, you know, it tends to affect them as you'd imagine. Yes, of course, it's not just the financial loss, isn't it? There is a very real human cost. Yes, the financial loss is one thing, but the psychological effect of having suffered a theft at your premises is another. Unfortunately, the statistics show that if somebody has suffered a theft, then you're more likely to suffer another theft in a short space of time because brazen criminals, they tend to go back and look and see if they can steal the replacement item as well. So that's quite alarming. Well, Alad, what's being done to combat all of this because you mentioned the police being under pressure there, but I know that NFU Mutual partly funds some of the police work. Indeed, and I'm very pleased that in 2023, NFU Mutual became a major funder of the National Rural Crime Unit, formally established last April. And the unit is staffed by police officers with experience in detecting and preventing rural crime with investigative powers to track and intercept stolen machinery and equipment. So working hand in hand with the NRCU, NFU Mutual, operates a dedicated team which shares claims, data and insight and helps to identify areas at risk and finds theft patterns to assist recoveries of stolen equipment. So this kind of collaboration saw the National Construction and Agri Theft Team, which sits under the Rural Crime Unit, and they seized £3.1 million worth of stolen vehicles and machinery in 2023. So yes, there is work going on in order to tackle this rising trend. Well, that sounds promising, but yet you say that it's difficult even to get a crime number. So do you feel that you're even scratching the surface? Well, you know, I think it's a continued partnership and I do hope that the various police forces in Wales will put the limited resource that they have, but that they can maybe work smarter in order to try and overcome some of the challenges that they understandably have. And what sort of advice do you offer to people? You know, how can they protect their property, whether it's machinery or livestock? I think the best advice is for people to be vigilant, don't have easy targets on your farm and on your rural property. And it's easy to say this, but of course it just operate a bit of common sense. CCTV is quite a cheap technology these days and I would encourage anybody to try and invest in CCTV. But the other thing as well is be mindful and look out for suspicious activity. If you see strange vehicles around, especially vans or the commercial vehicles, then, you know, make a note of the registration number. Take a quick photo with your phone if you can, because if anything does then go missing. If you do suspect that they've been involved in any theft, well, then that can help the police an awful lot in their investigations. Okay, well, I'll add Griffiths from NFU Mutual. Thank you. Have you seen a cabbage white lately or perhaps a common blue? Well, they're not so common this year. Where might you ask for all the butterflies? God. Butterfly conservation has reported alarmingly low numbers of them. To tell us why that's the case is Russell Hobson from the Wildlife Charity. And your annual count Russell has just come to an end for this year, but you already know that butterfly numbers are down. So at this stage, we're only able to really eyeball the figures and what it looks like is that numbers are down and might be the lowest average count per person. Since the start of the big butterfly counts 14 years ago, and the previous lowest number was around nine butterflies per count in 2022. And last year was actually boosted in 2023 by an influx of red admiral butterflies. So that masked a little bit of what the actual underlying count for our breeding species was. That all sounds very concerning. Why do you think this is the case? So historically butterflies have been in a big decline for the last 40 to 50 years. And what we're now seeing is when we get these extreme weather events, whether that's drought or whether that's heavy rainfall or cool temperatures, that's having an amplified effect on butterfly numbers. And the drought last year saw some species that we would be familiar with in Wales, such as the brown ringlet butterfly or the green vein white, which like wet conditions, their numbers suffered. And they've not actually been able to respond this year is what we think, looking at the figures that we've got to date. What do you think are the long term consequences of this? Indeed, are there any or can they bounce back? Well, we know we can get butterfly numbers to bounce back where we've put in specific conservation measures. But for these more widespread species, it really is about the state of people's gardens of the wider countryside. And if we get these ongoing extreme weather events, it's likely that butterfly numbers, they're just not going to be able to get out and breed, and therefore they can't respond. So you get this amplification effect happening where butterflies end up in a cycle of decline. So we might see some years where they pick up certain groups of species. This year, some of the spring species, some of our rarer species did seem to do slightly better. But we're talking about numbers at a historic low level. What will that mean in Wales? Will we lose more of the butterflies that we're familiar with? I think one of the fantastic things about butterflies is the fact that people really engage with them. It does make people feel better to see them flying around. And we've got research to show that people's wellbeing when they see butterflies is improved. And what it just means is we end up with an environment that is less rich, is less engaging, fills us with less joy. And that is surely something that we don't want to lose. So important then, I guess, that you keep gathering this data. Your butterfly count is at an end for this year, but presumably you'd like people to get involved next year? We'd love people to get involved, and they don't have to wait until next year if people want to continue recording butterflies in their gardens. And seeing what else is around. Or people are interested in finding out what caterpillars are in their gardens or in their local park. Then there's loads of ways that they can engage with that if they just go to the butterfly conservation website. Indeed, that's Russell Hobson from Butterfly Conservation, and we'll put a link to their website on our own countryfocus web page at BBC.co.uk/radiowhales. You can also find out there how to get involved with our next item. A site of industrial heritage in a village that straddles the Welsh English border says it's in desperate need of volunteers to help with the restoration work. The Santa Monica Line Mercs closed over a hundred years ago, but as Lauren Baker reports without help, it's feared things like surveys and public access to the kilns may have to be shelved. As on many weekends, Martin Young and Bob Cotter are working in the old stable buildings at Hannah Monica Line Works. The Line Works has a unique kiln and chimney, and you can explore the whole site from the quarry itself down the old rail tracks to inside the actual kiln. Martin says at its height it was a hub of activity with up to 200 men working there. In the mid-1860s, 1870s through a produce in 60,000 tons of product per year from the quarry. That was building stone down to raffle for footpaths, railway ballast and stone coming down into the kilns to be converted into quickly. When you think it was over a thousand tons a week, and most of that was being brought out of the quarry using basic hand tools and powder. So yes, it was quite a busy, productive area. Crutline was an important product because it was used in agriculture to neutralise the acidity of soil, so it helped with crops. Crutline in itself is also a product that's used in fluxing in the ironworks. It uses a filler and pottery, filler and paper. It's got many, many uses. And besides Crutline, it was also producing raw limestone, which was a building product for structures, for roads, for canal paths, ridges, all sorts of things. But Martin says there's no evidence to say exactly why the kiln was closed. The whole process closed, we believe in August 1914, and a lot of suspicion goes towards war. We've got no proof for that. We don't know. The thing personally I don't understand is we've got a modern kiln here producing Crutline, which is an important part of casting industry. We've gone to war, we've been casting iron months, guns, etc. The Crutline was an essential product within that casting process. Yet, it closed. Why? We don't know. At it closed several months after war, you might have thought it was a decline in the workforce. But you've also thought that it was a reserved occupation because it was producing a valuable product. So there's a bit of a mystery to it as well. There's a massive mystery to it. There's a lot of secrets hidden here. But one thing that's no secret is that the team looking after the line works now is too small. Bob Cotter is one of them. Slowly over the time that I've been here, we've had a decline in the volunteers, people passing on, people moving away, and generally just losing interest. We have slowly declined, and we've got a nuclear sort of about five at the moment, which is not really enough to be able to do the kind of things that we would like to do. I know when the group was first formed way back in the early 2000s, there were about 30 or 40 or more, and I'm actually the only elected committee member at this point in time. So we desperately need more people to come along, not just to do the maintenance, also to help us in the general administration of what we're doing here. The quarry area of the line works is designated as a nature reserve and site of special scientific interest. Bob says the recolonisation by wildlife is important here, but measuring it is something that might fall by the wayside without more help. We have in the past had people here who've carried out surveys of the flora and fauna. We need to continue that so that we can understand that the work that we're doing here is helping them to flourish. We need to do the surveys. They've been done in the past, so we have lots of information, but we need those updated to understand how things are improving. Sometimes we find that things have not been seen for several years, and all of a sudden you see that particular plant or that particular animal again. What would be the repercussions and if you can't actually get more volunteers? Well, for us at the moment, we're just ticking over, keeping the place open. So if we don't get more volunteers, then what's going to happen is slowly but surely that the area here will become overgrown. You won't be able to see all of the buildings, the paths will overgrow. So when you look around the area here, all of this is being cleared up by us so that you can see what's going on. It's a big site as well, so that's quite a job. It is a big site, and we have to pick the jobs that we're going to do because of we're such a small group of volunteers. Really our main aim here is to preserve this heritage for our future generations, so that's why we need to encourage more people to come along. Clannaman at Clineworks Volunteer Bob Cotta. A tale of both escape to the country and farm diversification now. When Gareth Griffith Swain's parents inherited a farm in Weinvowring Gwyneth, he decided to upstick from his life in London and to take his interest in all things mushroom to the next level. Two years later, and Funky Foods has pioneered a method for raising a range of exotic mushrooms. And the company, which now has four staff, has been so successful in growing the lion's main mushroom used as a gourmet meal ingredient that a supermarket chain recently featured their product in its stores. These are exotic mushrooms, the white button mushrooms, the chestnuts, etc. They're grown on compost in the dark, like people think. This strain of mushrooms is not the same. These are what we consider exotic mushrooms. These are grown on lots of sawdust that we then supplement with other ingredients, and then they're put in this environment. They're affected by the light, the humidity, the temperature. So we just monitor all of that, keep it above a certain humidity, keep the lights on 12 hours on, 12 hours off, and then keep the heat up as well, just to give them the optimum growing conditions. Can we go in there? Of course we can, yeah. So when we walk in, it's rack after rack after rack of these sawdust blocks. They're all wrapped up in cellophane, and then popping out of them are the lion's main mushrooms. And I must say, they don't look like traditional mushrooms, to me. They look like the sort of fungus you see growing on fallen trees and things. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they're called what you call "sacrificic mushrooms". So, yeah, they grow on rotting wood, essentially. And basically, that's what we're doing in these bags. We're kind of recreating how they would grow in nature. In nature, they would grow off hardwood. Well, that's why we only use hardwood sawdust. If we were to use softwood or something like that, then the process wouldn't work. And essentially, what these blocks are, is basically just like a tree trunk or something like that, that we've kind of packed into this bag. I mean, in nature, this could potentially take years to fruit like this. Here we can, you know, we can turn these around in two weeks. And when are they ready? Because looking at the various blobs of fungus that are growing on the different blocks, that's the lion's main bit. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, you know, a lot of mushrooms that we're used to seeing in supermarkets, they have, like, gills underneath, that's the way in which they release their spores to reproduce. But the lion's main, they produce these long spines in which the spores are released and that's how they reproduce. But, yeah, that one at that stage is ready to go. When they're a bit bumbly like this, they need longer. But that will form into the kind of long, icicle hairs that you can see, and then they're ready to come off. And those icicle hairs are what you want. Yeah, you can take the whole thing off. The hairs are good because in the gourmet, if you fry them up, you can, like, get them nice and crispy and they create, like, a nice bit of texture. You know, it's a bit of shows in there. Like, it looks impressive and when you bring it to the table, like, it looks cool. It's like an industrial kitchen set up in here. Yeah. The harvest there, what we do is, it's a very simple one to harvest. You can literally just pop it off like that, you know, and then it comes off with a bit of the substrate there, which you obviously want to cut that off like that. And there you go. And this bit left there. Yeah, they can have that as well. Yeah. Chop that off and chop that off. But yeah, and there you go. That's your lion's mane. You've got this machine here. Just show me how much, how that works. This is a commercial dryer, essentially. Basically, it will lose 90% of its weight. Very high water content in the lion's mane. And how long do I have to stay in this dryer for? About 17-18 hours. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for all time. You know, it's got to be cracker dry. It's got to be, can't be too much moisture in there. Otherwise, it basically will just soften within hours. Like, yeah, it's very susceptible to absorbing moisture in the air. If it's not properly dried, then you've got problems. You produce these blocks of sawdust. They're inoculated with how many different types of exotic mushrooms do you have in the blocks? We do maybe seven or eight different strains. And of all the seven different types that you have in the blocks, you only actually produce yourselves one. And that's the lion's mane mushroom. So lion's mane is a really interesting one. It's a gourmet mushroom, but it's also treated as a kind of medicinal mushroom as well. Which is quite unusual because a lot of the medicinal mushrooms, they taste terrible and they're not like a gourmet product. You wouldn't put them in a stir fry or in a pasta or something like that. But lion's mane, it sits in this nice little place where it has all these medicinal benefits, but it also tastes really, really, really good as well. So yeah, we recently stopped in Aldi after winning a kind of accelerated competition, which was fantastic. So yeah, we were the first people to get lion's mane in some form into a supermarket retailer. And I just think we're kind of only scratching the surface with it really at the moment. And I think in the future, you know, it's not going to be unusual to see this at your local supermarket. Gareth Griffith's swain of funky foods mushrooming his business in Gwyneth and beyond. And staying on the subject of tasty offerings, a pop-up pasta ria has quickly gained a cult following for offering authentic Italian street food. Having won the Welsh stage of the competition, pasta and maneau will be competing in next month's British Street Food Awards. For chef Drew Robertson Jacobs, it's very much about the ingredients. He serves his home-made pasta from a tiny trailer currently located in Tland Granog in Caridigion. For the street food competition in Tlandalo, we made a crab linguini, which compromised of pasta, which was made on the morning of the event, then with freshly picked crab from Caramore, who are a sustainable seafood company from St David's. It also had a Grettian, which is kind of a little bit like sand fire, but it's more of a Mediterranean succulent, and that's grown in Pembrokeshire by my friend Adam. And then in the sauce we had mascarpone, chili, lemon, garlic and white wine. It's really a creamy, spicy, lemony dish, which really like gets you salivating. So very exotic sounding ingredients, but sourced locally. Yeah, exactly. I think there's such a wealth of amazing produce available in West Wales, which I think is really unique to that area. There's an incredible amount of seafood which doesn't really kind of put whales on the map, but I think it should, and I love to scream and shout about these ingredients. Darrow Street Food has become very popular of late, hasn't it? I wonder what makes you stand out, do you feel? There's a lot of people in street food who have come at it without a catering background, and I'm really all for that. People branching into hospitality, there's not enough people working in there. But I think it's really important to be able to take the produce from where you're based and to be able to tell a story through the food that you're serving, because in the UK there's a lot of different wholesalers, and you can basically travel around the UK with your trailer and buy exactly the same mass-reduced product and serve exactly the same thing anywhere in the UK, whereas what I'm doing is taking a bunch of ingredients that are incredibly specific to a single location and painting a picture of what that area tastes like. So our pesto prasale dish is just past the pesto, which seems really simple, but the basil we use is grown organically on the prasale hills, and the cheese we use on top of the dish is called dolwove, and it's made by a cheese producer whose sheep graze the prasale mountains. And so it's that kind of example which I strive towards. How long have you been cooking, Dero, and where does this passion come from? I'm in my mid-30s now, and I've been cooking since I was kind of early teens, really. I love taking time to host people and make delicious food. I don't have a direct link to Italian cooking, even though in the last few years I have worked there. I just feel like it's a very spontaneous way to prepare food. You don't use too many ingredients, it's not over-complicated, but you really focus on the quality of the ingredients instead of technical recipes. Your currently based inland granite, right down there in the car park or by the car park for people who know the area. Is it difficult to get a street food pitch these days? It's really difficult since 2020. There's obviously been a huge demand for kind of temporary traders occupying outside spaces. It does work really well, but the sites are often quite insecure, so for three or four years now I've only had been given a kind of six-month contract for each year, so that's obviously for the summer, for the tourist season, and then you don't know where you're going to be for the next year, so it can be quite nerve-wracking trying to plan and make sure you've got work for your staff and money coming in, so it's not easy. Well, hopefully it'll get a bit easier now that you've won this. What's on the menu today, Darryl? So we have our three classic ditches, the pesto procelli, which is a pasta pesto, a pomadoro, which is a rich tomato sauce, which was taught to me by my inherited Italian grandma, and a kachal pepe, which is just cheese and pepper with macaroni. Those three dishes stay on all summer, and then we have a daily special, which is the dish of the moment, and today it's a vongolé, which is a really famous pasta dish, normally made with clams. You can get it all over the south of Italy and on the coast that's really, really gorgeous, but we make our version with Welsh cockles, and it's another example of using the great ingredients that we've got on our doorstep. That does sound good. All the best with it. When is the next stage of the competition? So the winners from the Welsh Street Food Awards go on to the next heat, which is the 14th to 16th of September, and that's in Hackney in East London for the British Street Food Awards, and so I'll be representing Wales, along with Hillsburgers, who are based in Bracken, and yeah, I think we can win it. Let's hope so. That's Darryl, Robertson, Jacob, serving up a Welsh Italian feast in Tlan Grammog, and that's it for this week from me, Caroline Evans, and the country-focused team. Thanks for listening and stay safe. This is Jenna Jess from the Beauty Podcast Fat Mascara, and most comments can question me here from our listeners is about how to treat eye aging. 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