We wanted to post a quick update relating to the techniques we discussed previously about monitoring land with CCTV, where we mentioned using a baby monitor. It seemed to create a bit of confusion as we also talked about it giving an effective way to challenge intruders in the act, rather than discovering any damage several hours or even days later.

For farmers, malicious damage can be a serious threat to livelihood, so investing in some affordable technology is a very attractive ways to protect your income. The problem is, as some people recognised, video monitors record to their memory cards, rather than beam the data miles to the farmhouse.

As land managers, there’s nothing more annoying that spending hours preparing your fields, only to return and find that someone’s been doing doughnuts in their car, or otherwise undone your hard work. We’ve been providing tips recently on how to keep watch over your area, even when you can’t physically be on site. For example, the use of cheap children’s bedroom cameras can be an affordable way to view your terrain on your computer, table or phone, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. It’s also great for monitoring the progress of things like the robot lawnmowers we discussed previously.

Learn more on our recent article about land surveillance.

It’s surprising how few people realise that the same techniques used by farmers and large land management companies can be used in small projects like domestic landscaping for gardens. Of course, there are limitations to how much can be directly applied – few people have gardens big enough to drive around in combine harvesters for example. However, if you think about the workmen who carry out grass cutting for local authorities, you’ll often see them walking around with machinery very similar to garden strimmers. That works very well when you’re simply looking to keep excessive growth under control – they turn to ride on mowers when things need to look a little tidier, much like you’ll be looking for out in the back garden.

Now, it’s not only grass that you find in the average family garden, so we’ll leave that for now and return to it in a moment. There’s also shrubs in flower beds, water features and more, and on more affluent estates you’ll increasingly find the play equipment that used to be reserved for pub beer gardens for the kids to entertain themselves, as it can now be installed fairly affordably, in the low four figure range. All of this if for a future update though, where we’ll talk in much more detail about what to plant where, how to maintain a home vegetable patch and much more.

So, let’s return to the matter in hand, and that’s lawn care. Most of us have mowed a lawn or two in out lives, and consider it to be a necessary evil of owning a home with a garden, essential family living perhaps. One thing that experts agree on across the industry is that the secret to a healthy and thick lawn is regular care, which means keeping it to a healthy length. A well kept lawn will often mean you need to spend less time on the tough jobs like weeding and moss killing, so regularly mowing at a good length is vital. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not a case of the shorter the better either, that only applies up to a point. The blades of grass keep it hydrated, that’s why mowing under the heat of a midday summer sun will likely result in a brown or yellow tinge in an hour or two, and certainly before the day is out. You may also have noticed that the colour returns to a beautiful green very quickly with rain (assuming you’ve not killed it off with sunburn!), so that should be a clear illustration about how volatile and vulnerable short grass can be. On the other hand, a wild growing garden will take a lot of sun hours to take away the green glow, but it’s tough to get under control again in the short term, and mowing will often reveal that it’s become very uneven in terms of coverage across the garden.

So, what’s the solution? We all have very busy lives, and it can be hard to find the time to mow twice a week, particularly if there’s a large front and back garden to tend to. Well, technology may now have the answer. For a few hundred pounds (well, few might be a stretch, probably six or seven hundred is more of a reasonable estimate), you can now be the proud owner of a mower that mows without you! The technology has raced forwards in the last couple of years as you’ll see in this robot lawn mower review website. Their top choice is the Flymo 1200r (http://www.robotlawnmowers.org/reviews/flymo/1200r/) which is echoed in forums and reviews across the internet, and that’s encouraging for many buyers due to the well known Flymo brand.

When considering the cost, it can initially seem prohibitive, but you need to look at it in terms of the time savings. If you’re normally mowing the grass a couple of times a week for an hour at a time, that’s probably around 50 hours a year spent mowing, so a £600 price tag will soon seem more attractive over the long term, especially as you’d expect a robot mower to last at least five years and probably ten or more. Even at five years, that’s 250 hours of mowing time saved, isn’t your time worth more than £2.40 an hour? That’s not the only consideration though.

Many of us use mowers that collect the grass into a container, to empty into our garden waste bin or bag up and take to the tip. These robotic automatic mowers, on the other hand, mow so regularly that they leave the clippings to mulch down (mulch being a posh way to say naturally break down and disappear back into the ground). This is actually a huge benefit, as when you dispose of the ‘waste’ in the bin or at the tip, you’re also disposing of nutrients in the clippings. By allowing them to return to the soil, you’re going to be allowing your lawn to benefit from them all over again.

If you just leave the clumps of grass behind from your normal mowing activity, you will likely end up with piles of rotting mess in time, but the robot mowers mow much more regularly than you’re likely to, so they leave a much finer residue. This makes the breaking down process much faster and near invisible to the human eye, which is much more likely to be acceptable on your lawn.

So, save time and end up with a healthier lawn, for less than the cost of a gardener for a couple of months. It seems like a straightforward decision to us!

The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) is an Act of Congress that has determined U.S. policy on immigration for almost thirty years. Also known as the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, the IRCA was enacted on November 6, 1986 under the Reagan administration.

Background

The IRCA came as a response to the pressing problem of illegal or undocumented immigrants in the United States, which were then estimated to number more than 3 million. The law was supposed to put an end to illegal immigration by providing a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants while discouraging future illegal immigration by enforcing both internal control and border protection.

What happened instead was the opposite of what the law intended; in the past two and a half decades since IRCA, the number of unauthorized immigrants has soared from 5 million to more than 11 million. Today, many people remember the law for the loopholes it was beleaguered with and the amnesties that were granted starting with the first 2 million plus undocumented immigrants.

When the law was first introduced, it did not immediately get the approval of the House and the Senate Judiciary Committee but there was a strong and continuous lobby by civil rights and human rights advocates who brought up the constant possibility of discrimination and abuse against undocumented workers. In addition to this lobby, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposed sanctions against employer and growers lobbied for leeway in the matter of hiring foreign labor.

Provisions and Salient Features

One of the outstanding features of the law was that it criminalized the act of knowingly hiring illegal immigrants and established stipulated punishments. It introduced the I-9 form, which employers filed to attest that all their employees had presented documentary proof to show their legal eligibility to work in the United States.

The rationale behind this was that it would make employment more difficult for illegal immigrants and would discourage and eventually reduce undocumented immigration. However, sanctions only applied to employers with more than three employees who did not make enough of an effort to find out if their workers indeed had legal status. Later, employees were relieved of the obligation to verify the authenticity of their employee’s documents. In addition, the phenomenon called subcontracting entered the labor scenario and many employers were able to do away with the chore of checking their employee’s immigration status.

In summary, the act was passed with the following salient features:

• It required employers to attest to their employees’ immigration status.
• It became illegal to knowingly hire or recruit unauthorized immigrants.
• It legalized certain seasonal agricultural illegal immigrants.
• It legalized illegal immigrants who entered the United States before January 1, 1982 and had resided there continuously with the penalty of a fine, payment of back taxes and admission of guilt. About three million illegal immigrants were granted legal status.

The Economic Impact on the Labor Market

The IRCA’s restrictions on employing illegals did not succeed in discouraging people from entering or staying in the United States without the legal documents to do so. Employment opportunities continued to attract people outside of the United States although this was often done through a subcontracting agreement where a U.S. citizen or resident alien would contractually agree with an employer to provide a specific number of workers for a certain period of time to undertake a defined task at a fixed rate of pay per worker. This removed liability from employers and allowed growers their source of foreign workers.

Assessment of the Law

As immigration reform is discussed today, it is worth looking back to the last major legalization program in the U.S. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) provided 2.7 million undocumented people a pathway to citizenship and penalized employers who knowingly hired those without a legal work permit. However, after it failed to solve the problem of illegal immigrants, the proposed bill today is going through a protracted legislative process because nobody is willing to commit the same mistakes.

A look at the desirable site of Kings Langley:

An overview of the BSc (Hons) Rural Land Management qualification by the Royal Agricultural University:

We’re looking at in depth land management in the coming weeks on this site, ranging from large scale agricultural uses to small spaces like back gardens and how to maintain the turf outside the family home.

We’ll be bringing you our expert features from our team of specialists, like our resident farming professionals who are used to preparing land for animals, to companies that supply and lay gardens for house builders at a high pace and turnover.

Keep checking back for our updates, as we’ll be making regular improvements to cover more and more areas of interest!