After a long wait and thousands of concerned looks towards the sky from both farmers and gamekeepers, the rain eventually came! A great relief for those fretting over cover crops. Fingers crossed it continues to be a good growing year.
The Sporting Agency office continues to be a hive of activity – Leo is flat out, putting together welcome packages for clients and much more. Meanwhile, Gordon and I are putting the finishing touches to the diary for next season. Though there is much work to be done and many trips still to finalise, there are still plenty of excellent days left out there, so get in touch if you would like to arrange something special for next season.
We couldn’t write a report without mentioning the ongoing General License issue. Slowly the government bodies involved seem to be acting appropriately – we hope a good number of you managed to submit your ‘evidence’ to DEFRA. The message to the shooting world, and indeed the entire rural community, should be simple – don’t panic, and certainly don’t do anything rash or controversial. Anger will only breed anger. As a community we must simply help common sense and hard facts prevail.
In other news we have recently completed the process of creating our very own video for the Agency which has been a huge effort from many members of staff and indeed a lot of external helpers too! We started filming in January and completed the final edit this week. All in all, we filmed for 5 days at locations ranging from Yorkshire to London, compiling over 6 terabytes of footage! Our music has been composed exclusively for the video, and William, our producer, has spent days, if not weeks, in front of a computer screen editing the footage. All for a 2-minute film! We hope that it will bring something new to the industry and we very much look forward to sharing it with you very soon - watch this space!
I suggest everyone dusts off the fly-fishing rods and heads to the river. In my experience it is the best way to pass the time whilst waiting for the shooting season to begin again in the UK. Just over 80 days until we kick off!
Regards
Ben Smith