To tell you how fucked UK agriculture is?

[eatsleepfarmrepeat]

God I just feel beaten this evening, I’m a farmers wife, I work in a professional role which pays well (thank god) we have two young children and I’m just DONE.

My husband is on his arse. This years harvest is so relentless, wet weather means it’s a real smash and grab operation, the heavy machines are running on wet ground and we’re just burning diesel trying to dry wet crops.

I’ve just escorted the combine from the field up to the yard (because it’s raining, again) and for about the fifth time this harvest I’ve been flashed at and given the wanker sign. I mean, I get it, it’s a big bit of kit, it takes up the whole road but honestly escorting is the only way to get them home safely and how the fuck do you get it from A to B without it going on the road? We’re not waggoning class As or having some recreational rave, we’re just making food.

We grow cereals which are either milling wheat for bread (which will be problematic this year due to the drop in proteins and the unfavourable harvest because of the weather) feed wheat for animal feed, oil seed rape for biodiesel and barley, for beer. The new green agenda means our subsidies are being replaced by taking good arable land (which makes up 24% of the country) out of production. This is why there is a shortage of eggs, the commodity price is being pushed and egg producers are not being paid the cost of production by supermarkets so they are importing, from countries which are not held to the same (necessary) animal welfare standards which the UK industry operate under.
we produce high welfare free range chickens. They retail for £10+ but our contract with supermarkets has them in at £3.24 per bird - imagine trying to operate on those margins with food and energy bills being what they are. In addition the UK market is absolutely flooded with Thai imports of cheap shit mean which again falls far below our own mandatory animal welfare standards - we just cannot compete.

ironically a lot of our feed wheat will probs go to vivirgo/e sos for energy crops. Literally thousands of litres of diesel burned producing something to go into a power plant and be sold as green energy for the lithium heavy teslas of Britain.

in the last decade we have planted 100acres of woodland, created four new wildlife ponds on the farm and drilled artichoke and wildflower shelter belts to enhance wildlife and pollinators on the farm.

I keep thinking we would be a million times happier (and better off) if we just sold out of the partnership and started again, get out of this shit, spiralling industry where the general public seem to think we’re trying to kill them and simultaneously fuck the countryside at the same time, go have a nice life where my husband isn’t hampered by stress and the never ending pressure of his arsehole father who got fat in the 70s where they used shit hot chemicals and decimated any balance of wildlife. This year is hard but with the commodity prices falling again against an increasing fuel and labour and fertiliser bill I just wonder what the fuck we are doing it for. Any trade off with the lovely holistic life the kids have is countered by stressed out parents.

we’re an island. We need food security, and we’re being paid to fallow productive acres which is already having a knock on effect to other food markets. Why are we so short sighted? We can afford to be virtuous with our farmland as a nation by offsetting but the outcome is that we’re outsourcing our footprint to these poorer nations like Thailand who are picking up our production slack and selling their chicken into our country at a criminally low value. It’s batshit.

People are so politically tribal they’d rather see food production plummet than hear anything against their beloved Labour

It’s totally ridiculous. That level of ire at someone’s livelihood because of how they vote. Because it doesn’t match their wants.

Their policy appears to be to destroy rural areas by building everywhere. Truly terrifying.

I live near a proposed solar farm development (2500 acres, the largest in Europe), the majority of which will be built on prime agricultural land. The developers have tried to claim that they’ll return the land to agricultural use when the farm comes to the end of its natural life in 40 years, but I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw them.

Its so short sighted to take such a large area of growing land out of action when we are already so vulnerable to food insecurity.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-suffolk-65066125

I find that worrying in and of itself if I'm honest. People blindly voting through tribalism (no matter what colour they vote for) rather than policy is how we end up screwed over.

Unrelated to the thread I was having a chat with someone about politics and they declared themselves a Tory hating lefty and on probing their actual personal views came out with a lot of things that were Tory policy not Labour. I didn't point this out though!

Thats what the last labour government did. They've decimated the South East/East of England and turned it into a giant car park surrounded by Wendy houses.

People don't pay enough for food. In the 1950's food accounted for 30% of wages, now it's 15% and still people moan that it is too much.

I'm a dairy farmer, since the start of the year the price we get paid has fallen by 33%, so whilst it is true that teachers, nurses and doctors should be paid more I get mildly peeved by the strikes and relentless news coverage. We're currently paying to produce milk, hoping that prices go up.

The reality is that most people don't care where their food comes from as long as it's cheap and I don't blame them.

I don't need to buy milk, beef or eggs but when I try to buy pork or lamb it is a struggle to buy British. I bought a gammon ham from my local butchers at Christmas and when I got it home I was disgusted to find it came from Denmark.
British meat in supermarkets is not substandard, it's the same meat that is in local butchers, a beef producer with 300 cattle will not be able to sell that all to the butcher, so obviously it's going to supermarkets as well.

The UK has some of the highest animal welfare standards in the world so be reassured by that.

Some people moan about factory farms, we milk 80 cows, but they are housed, fed and milked in exactly the same way as cows on a farm with 1000 cows, the only difference is that we know their names.

Yes, British farmers are misunderstood and hated by many. We're rich, polluters, destroyers of the environment, rapers of animals, murderers of badgers and other wildlife and the world would be better without us. Our milk buyer makes us jump through ridiculous environment hoops. We have to put up bat and bird boxes and have insect habitats, if we don't we get paid less. This completely ignores that fact that all our barns are full of bats and our hedges rows are 3m wide on average and teaming with wildlife. But God help me if I don't put up a bat box.

Suicide rates in farmers is 3.5 times the national average and 73% of farmers have severe depression.

And breathe.

Fruit and vegetable farms that are crying about the loss of migrant labour annoy me. Labour which they work to the bone and have to cheek to charge them £60 a week to live in a communal battered caravan.

@Freedomfromguilt you have full robotic milking and house all year for 80 head of dairy cows? Really?

From an upland/hill farmer point of view there was nothing in there that gave us any confidence- lots about horticulture and a bit about dairy and eggs but absolutely nothing on beef and lamb.

There is increasingly a view that upland hill farms (the type seen on Our Yorkshire Farm) will be the government's sacrificial lamb for rewilding

There is absolutely no understanding about how each type of farming is a different organ of the farming industry. They don't operate in isolation and if you remove one type of farming it will have a knock on impact elsewhere.

The £350million wasn't a Tory policy it was a cross party brexiteer policy.

Significantly worse. Their prospects of diversifying parts of the farm are restricted within the terms of their tenancy agreements which may prohibit any diversification into tourism and even selling from the farm direct. I have a friend who was denied landlord consent to upgrade his butchery unit and add a small counter for on farm sales, so he cannot add value to his product in the same way as an owner occupier could.

rents are strong, a lot of farm rents are linked into BPS entitlements which are soon being delinked but I can guarantee the rents will not come down.

If it all does go shit side up, they can’t sell. They can surrender their tenancy, possibly their home and their only capital would be commodities and equipment, most of which will be on finance deals. Rents for an equipped house with a dwelling are between £150-£170 per acre for cereal land around here on FBT, £80-100 for AHA land.

I am aware that we are in a significantly improved situation than that of most tenant farmers. This was one of my points - if we’re broken this harvest, imagine how broken a smaller tenant farmer with no other income will be.

It is. And posters who would rather destroy livelihoods than people not vote as they do. Taking us all down with them and no food.

What a bloody stupid comment 🤬
If that were the case then many, many people would starve. subsidies kept food prices down so food was available for everyone.
We were tenant farmers, gave up the struggle nearly 30 years ago with no regrets. It was largely a thankless task then, it seems little has changed sadly.
I completely understand where you’re coming from OP, it’s brought back memories I’d suppressed.

We were forced off the tenant farm because the landlord had vastly over invested in machinery and couldn’t make the repayments. 4 months notice.
In retrospect it was the best thing to happen but a nightmare at the time.

@Flapjacker48 Yes, we have 2 Lely Robots milking 80 cows. Each robot should be capable of milking 60 cows each so we are over roboted, but when we looked at farms milking 120 on 2 robots we heard horror stories about breakdowns. If one of our robots is out of action for 6 hours, as happened about 2 weeks ago, it means that 1 robot just about copes and it doesn't take forever to catch up. During Foot and Mouth we couldn't sell animals and by the time restrictions were lifted we were milking 120 cows, we didn't have the robots at the time but that experience was factored into our planning. Currently we are under TB restrictions and are milking 97. We think that we made the right decision, even though it was more expensive.

When possible, March to October usually, our cows go out to graze for about 4 hours each day, this is the longest the herd can be away from the robots. As the farm is criss-crossed by public roads we have to escort them to and from fields rather than allowing them to graze freely.
Herds of over 500 tend to be milked through rotary palours rather than robots. I know of a few big set ups with robots going in and am interested to see how they work out. I also know of larger herds installing robots then replacing them with rotaries.

Farmers have a hard life. Thank you OP for this thread. I've been saddened by the negatively shown towards farmers. Their work is more vocation than job; and we will loose out enormously if all the smaller family farms end up needing to give up and find other careers.

There are serious environmental challenges to face, but transporting cheap low welfare (for both animals and the people who produce it) food halfway around the world is not the answer.

Nor is solar panels on productive farmland. There should be a massive investment on putting more solar panels on buildings instead. We should cover houses, offices, hospitals and shopping centre roofs before putting them on farmland

the crux of it is we’ve allowed house prices to run away eating up all our earnings which meant food has had to remain cheap.
if chickens had increased as much we would be paying £50 a chicken now (and that figured out of date)

the price if everything should have tracked house prices. Everyone had to live somewhere.

our food shouldn’t be subsidised, people should make a decent living growing food, people should make a decent living picking food. And people should be able to afford to eat.

it’s all so skewed now it’s un fixable without some serious pain somewhere.

Shit I’m sorry.
we rent our house and rent the premises for our family business.
I can’t imagine how stressful it was dealing with both at the same time

I thought as much, we rent and it’s precarious to say the least. Without the added insecurity of farming. farming is something you plan, months, years in advance. How can you do that with the insecurity of tenancy.

I live near hs2 and a lot of tenants have been screwed over. The owners get their money (eventually and after arguing) but tenants, just notice.

I haven't yet seen a bike that can tow a plough. Even with a horse it's a struggle, you usually need two just to get one acre done a day.

I'm sorry that the OP is having a bad year. Food security should be paramount; Covid should have illustrated that but clearly it isn't a big enough priority.

But my bigger concern at the moment is the environment. I've posted before about the lack of insects around nowadays which is very alarming. Even where family live rurally. And I can't help but blame excessive use of pesticides for this. I lived through the 1970s where hedgerow after hedgerow was ripped out to make space for these massive machines. Fertiliser run-off polluting rivers.

We have been decimating our wildlife for the sake of cheap food and it cannot continue. We are one species but need the whole biosphere for all to survive. So yes, we now need to give back some of that land to allow for diversity.

In O level Geography we learned about crop rotation and leaving fields fallow to recover. Does that still happen or is it just chemical fertilisers now?

With the way things are going someone needs to be brave enough to actually think about what we need to feed the country healthily but while also not damaging the planet.

Thanks. There seems to be really very little understanding of the land and agriculture at all within government - I recall the SNP had to have it explained to them that planting citka spruce on peat bog would NOT actually be a good environmental policy.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/nicola-sturgeons-forest-plan-could-harm-the-climate-5zqrkmw03

It’s almost like they might live rurally??