Steve Mills and his wife have one daughter. They previously owned two coffee/ice cream shops, currently operate an internet sales company and teach classes, but his primary job involves the paper industry worldwide. Hobbies and interests lie in gardening, photography, recorded music and of course, their pets.

An interesting look at farming and society in Great Britain during WWII

Posted Thursday, December 3, 2020, at 10:39 AM

Most of you know my interest and support of agriculture so you won’t be surprised that I ran across this 8 part video presentation of a realistic look at what farmers went through in Great Britain just before, during and even after World War II. The Wartime Farm

Each segment is about an hour long and since the language is foreign (British) :-) you can use the closed captioning but even they have some trouble with words so don’t rely solely on CC. Maybe view it during the network news. It is a darn site more interesting and less depressing.

Some of the farm equipment is familiar but I never knew there was a tractor that used a glowing ember from paper and a shotgun shell (minus shot) to start it. There are times I wish I had that option starting my own tractor.

Besides the agricultural side, they also discuss the social and what the farmer’s wife went through to make ends meet while trying to provide a reasonably tasty meal. Near the end they even discussed what the German family had to eat for bread because of rationing going on everywhere. Yikes!