Foot-and-mouth Crisis
Farming has been in crisis for several years now. This latest crisis is only speeding up the process. If you have anything to say about farming please email a message.
Emails I have had from other farmers
I'm sorry i've been too busy to do more with this. there have been lots of comments and I will try soon.
Taken from one of the farming emails
listening to the news etc it all seems to be about going
back to small
farms and local produce organic etc, which is what all of the Sward
group
and even before we have been fighting for but nobody listened, I was
invited
to a Maff dinner through my tourist board connections 18 months ago
with Lord
Donaghue, after his day at the races to see what the westcountry was
like
he insisted that all little farms were totally inefficient and to be
disposed
of. It seems impossible to get through that we all know where our animals
go what they eat etc. Tony Blair said last sunday we need to look at
things,
it seems impossible to get through that the normal people know where
things
are going wrong and want to be traditional farmers but are powerless
to get
through to the right places.
From someone working with farmers as a book keeper
Dear Jo Rider
I have worked as a bookkeeper for many years and
count several farmers and ancillary businesses among
my clients, over an area of Devon and Cornwall.
I have been aware of disquiet among the farming community
over the way that animals are transported for slaughter. The
farmers I work for have tended to move from farm to local
slaughter houses. The worry was over welfare, but the enormous
risks in moving animals without any proper disease control has
proved to be the really hidden cost, which the whole country will
now have to bear. Those that say they are vegetarians are not
going to come through unscathed - we may find we are all going
to be competing for the same carrots!
I hope that long term the realisation that farming is about close
and loving contact with the farm and stock is going to have to be faced
by our government. The average size of a farm in Poland is, I am
informed, 17 acres. Even on the continent there is, I understand,
a tendency to smaller units. In farming big has never equated
with efficient. Russia found that collectives did not do as well as
the small man lovinly tending his acres.
I am glad that you have a "discussion" under way - I hope
that
my comments are of interst.
This is something James wrote in December 1999.
"I got invited to a working dinner with Lord Donoghue, then an Agriculture Minister, about a year ago (for a reason I haven't yet fathomed, unless I was the token organic farmer who happened to be nearest to where he was staying). Among other things, the evening revealed that (a) the government has no policy on Britain's food security (so if some natural or man-made catastrophe affects world food production people here will just have to go hungry) and (b) the government is not going to help educate people that 'you get what you pay for' (i.e. if you want cheap eggs, you get battery cages plus antibiotics).
Farmers find it difficult not to sound as if they're ungrateful for all the subsidies, etc, etc. The fact is that the subsidy system started because the then government had a cheap food policy and decided that the simplest way of subsidising food was to pay the farmers rather than the retailers or consumers. That seems to have started everybody off down what has become a very slippery slope, i.e., expecting to pay less for food than the real cost of production. Yes, other parts of the world can produce food more cheaply than we can but that means prairie-farming, hormones, low animal welfare standards, no conservation and so on, which the British public (rightly) doesn't like. And yes, farmers haven't always helped themselves as we have allowed ourselves to be picked off one by one by the five large chains which control 80% of food sales in this country. (We hear so many stories about the absolutely iniquitous way that supermarkets treat their suppliers that we won't go near them now.) But the fact is that, with each day that passes, another farm or two goes out of production, a few more acres return to scrubland and we become ever more dependant on supplies of imported food, which is often inferior and sometimes downright dangerous. If the government realises this it isn't letting on. Or, as a leading farming journalist put it recently: "What the government does not want to see continuing is directly subsidised food production, recognising that the public no longer finds this acceptable. What it also wants to encourage is high-volume, low-cost commodity production that can compete on world markets. Someone somewhere does not yet seem to have made the connection that this directly contradicts all the cosy ideals about greener farming." "
He wrote this in December 2000
I am writing this in Singapore where (a) I am pursuing the "second job" which the government says most, if not all, farmers should undertake in order to keep their farms afloat (and food cheap), and (b) the sun is shining, which makes a very welcome change from the unremitting rain in England that has put many homes (and farms) under water in an entirely literal sense (including parts of ours).
Certainly it has not been an easy year for farming in England (an understatement, most of my neighbors would probably say), but I'm not sure that anywhere else is faring much better. BBC World had a piece last night about the plight of farmers in China (they are producing more than enough food for the population but are being undercut by cheap imports), and the US government is spending vast amounts of money propping up its farmers because they are not getting enough for their produce. And yet there are still millions of hungry people in the world. It is hard to make sense of, though it is equally hard not to be very cynical about the profit motive (and lobbying power) of the fewer and fewer, and bigger and bigger, companies which increasingly control the supply chain on both sides of the farmer. The sort of spurious arguments bandied about at the (fortunately) failed WTO talks and the lack of leadership in evidence at the (not so fortunately) failed climate talks leave one distinctly unimpressed with the qualities of those whom we have elected to govern us. On the purely agricultural front there is endless talk about farmers being "efficient" (it sounds rather like motherhood and apple pie, though is really code for "cheap food", whose necessary corollary is public health disasters like BSE, low/non-existent animal welfare standards and lack of concern for the environment), but no-one ever mentions food security; it just seems to be assumed that we, in the developed world at least, will always have enough food - a degree of hubris which I hope we are never called to account for.
I'm not sure where that last paragraph sprang from. Farming has put us so much more closely in touch with the realities of life (and death), as well as the understanding that we are totally dependant on things which are altogether outside our control (from the weather to minute nematodes), that it is hard to stop once you start!
It's been a year of mixed fortunes. Lambing went well until we started putting the ewes and lambs out, when the rain began and wouldn't stop. We ended up bringing them all back inside. (I heard one farmer in Durham, who lambs out on the hills, say that the rain was so terrible that, unless he got to a ewe within 10 or 15 minutes of her lambing, the lambs would be dead.) During the "summer" we grew plentiful quantities of grass and made some reasonable silage and (in the one week that the sun deigned to show itself) hay as well. This is what the animals are now munching their way through, even if it doesn't have the nutritional quality that one would like because of the lack of sun. We had a nice batch of calves born in June (a couple with some assistance needed, but all live and now thriving) and, biggest relief of all, we had a clear TB test last month. TB is becoming such a problem, particularly in the South-West, that the mantra of "the Krebs trial" is looking increasingly likely to be overtaken by events, viz. the total collapse of the UK dairy industry. How, or perhaps I should say why, people are continuing to produce milk when they are being paid less than the cost of production, is a mystery. One neighbour of ours told me recently that he is paying his bank £3,000 a month for the "privilege" of being allowed to continue milking his cows. At the moment everyone's problems are being compounded by the weather. Round us most winter corn has yet to be sown and, since it will be a waste of time doing so after about the end of January, I begin to fear for next year's grain harvest as seed for spring sown varieties will be in very short supply.
