Waiting for the first drive after lunch to begin, my gaze strayed past my fellow beaters in their Guardsmen straight rank. I took in the gently rolling landscape surrounding our haunt. This part of the world is a patchwork quilt; vast squares of emerald sugar beet and oblong, biscuity stubbles are stitched to one another by hedgerows. Lime-fresh rectangles of wheat and plots of dusky oilseed rape are sewn together by lines of birdseed and covercrop. However familiar this vista is, when autumn coverts and hedges shed their leaves and the full panorama is laid out, I still marvel at the scale of farming here. To make money out of the agricultural game, scale is a business necessity.
Red House Farm, near Bacton in the heart of Suffolk, is a prime example of farming
