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Monday 19 January 2015

Farmer

Oliver Cromwell spent the entire 1620s as a farmer at St Ives, but failed to establish himself. In 1631 he sold most of his land at Huntingdon and rented grazing land at St Ives.

When Sir Isaac Newton left school he followed his first choice of career- a farmer. He was once fined in the manor court for letting his swine trespass while he built water wheels in the stream.

George Washington was one of the first American scientific farmers. He exchanged letters with agricultural experimenters at home and in England. He imported plants, shrubs, and trees from many parts of the world. and tried crop rotation at a time when plenty of new land awaited men whose old lands were worn out.

Thomas Jefferson was a remarkably progressive Virginia farmer as well as statesman. He planted some of the first Brussels sprouts in America and was one of the first to set out pecan trees.

After Robbie Burns' father died, he leased the farm of Mossgiel near Mauchline East Ayrshire with his brother Gilbert. Working their noses to the grind, he and his brother paid themselves £7 per year each. It was not successful and the arduous farm work and undernourishment permanently injured Burns health, leading to the rheumatic heart disease from which he eventually died.

In around 1816 a Cape Cod, Massachusetts farmer, Henry Hall noticed that cranberries were larger and juicier where a layer of sand from the dunes blew over the vines. He used this sand layering technique for his cranberries and became their first cultivator.

Rudyard Kipling lived the life of a farmer at his Bateman's mansion, owning rich pastures and a fine herd of Sussex cattle.

President Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer. After his presidency Carter returned to Georgia to his peanut farm, which he had placed into a blind trust to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest. He found that the trustees had mismanaged the trust, leaving him more than one million dollars in debt.

The Archers, the world's longest running broadcast serial, was devised by the BBC for a practical purpose – to convey useful information to the farming community.

Many farmers love to attract barn owls as they are often better at reducing rodent populations than traps, poison or cats.

The rate of suicide among farmers in the US is three and a half times higher than among the general population, according to the National Rural Health Association.

While there are 2.2 million real farmers in the US, there are 80 million active Farmville farmers.

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