A fixed post, pointed at your quarter acre, all year.
Not a tour of the farm. One camera, one fence post, one framing, from the day your patch is drilled to the day the combine takes it. The interest is entirely in the fact that nothing moves for weeks and then everything does.
The patch cameras.
Four posts covering all twenty-eight patches. Two more go up when the grid extends into the Brash Tops.
Live
Fixed, 24mm, facing north-west
Curdle Hill, east post
Live
Fixed, 24mm, facing east
The Barley Block, track post
Last frame
Fixed, 35mm, facing south
The Bottoms
Live
Fixed, 50mm, facing the hedge line
The hedge, bridleway stretch
These are the same cameras as the ones in Gawping. A patch does not buy you a private feed; it buys you a monthly still from the post that covers your ground, and a marker on the frame showing which part of it is yours.
What a camera on a field is actually for.
It is not for watching. Almost nothing happens in a wheat field on any given afternoon, and anybody who tells you a crop camera generates daily engagement has not sat in front of one.
It is for the archive. Twelve stills from the same post, one a month, is a genuinely arresting thing to look at in August — bare earth, thin green lines, a solid green sheet, waist-high grey-green, and then gold, and then stubble. Nobody who has not farmed has seen that sequence properly.
So the product is the sequence, delivered at the end, plus a live feed on the four days a year when something is genuinely happening: drilling, spraying, harvest, and baling.
Your patch, twelve frames, one year.
Drag through the season on patch B2. Every frame is from the same post at the same focal length, which is the entire reason it works.
Scroll to run it. 1 / 6
When the camera is actually worth watching.
| When | What is happening | How long it lasts |
|---|---|---|
| Mid-October, one afternoon | Drilling. A tractor and a drill, up and down, for about four hours. | Half a day |
| Early May, one morning | The flag-leaf fungicide. A sprayer at 24 metres, very fast, very early. | An hour |
| Any dry day in August | The combine. This is the one everybody watches. | Three to six hours |
| The day after | Baling, and then carting. The field empties and the season is over. | A day |
| Every other day of the year | Nothing whatsoever. Grass-coloured rectangle, weather. | Eleven months |
What the camera cannot do
It cannot show you your patch in any meaningful isolation, because a quarter acre inside a forty-acre field looks exactly like the rest of the field. We put a marker on the frame showing where it is. We are not going to pretend the boundary is visible, because it is not, and a fake overlay would be worse than an honest marker.
The record behind the pictures.
Every event on your patch, hashed and in order.
