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.

(Cheaper housing would help though, that’s true).

Thank you for your messages, I know I’m a very glass half full this evening.

what can you do? Support local - buy from butchers and farm shops, not the chintzy ones but even now a lot of smaller farmers like us are selling from farm gate. In our case it’s much less than our supermarket contracts but much more than they pay us so I think it’s a deal striking both balances. The supermarkets have most farmers by the bollocks so local stock lists really really help. Some like the co op will stock local sections as well.

we need to campaign for more regulations on the grain market. Farmers sell grains on contract to grain traders and we agree a percentage moisture - quite often we test on site, it’s 14% moisture, it gets to them “retested” and it’s 16% and we get a £3/tonne reduction. Completely unregulated and unchallenged, we pay the haulage both ways. Some of the big farmers have taken them to court but it’s so corrupt and shit, that has to be a priority. It’s criminal, that causes us the most heartache in the autumn.

There of tenant farmers around with nothing to cash in, too, especially in Yorkshire and further north

I am a farmer's wife and a professional myself. My poor dh harvesting and not back home until midnight for the past couple of weeks. Due to the rain he has lost a lot of money talking about thousands of pounds. When I have been in the tractor with him amazing the rude gestures he gets for doing his job. Kindness would be good as people would struggle without food xx

hourly basis will balance at less than £5

We struggled to make that, we both now have additional jobs plus the farm full time. I was born here, my DH is a second son, if we had less family connection and any sense we would have left years ago.

I’m a Land Agent from a non-rural background which gives me a reasonably unusual perspective! I don’t think the majority of the country are aware of what farming entails or you get people like @CallumDansTransitVan who have absolutely no idea what they are on about but ‘live in a rural area’, particularly when you account for all of the unpaid labour like OP escorting the combine.

I do not think there is a mismanagement of agriculture per se rather a misunderstanding, with no wish to understand it, of the rural way of life including farming. Take foot and mouth, Tony Blair over reacted to the situation on the say so of Prof Neil Ferguson of ICL and his computer predictions which were totally wrong, yet the livestock industry in the north of England was absolutly destroyed because decisions were made predominantly by people sitting in a city - the same Neil ferguson who used his computer modelling for covid. His F&M modelling were subsequently proven to be totally wrong, yet the damage was done.

We are an island who should be virtually self sufficient in food production be it arable or stock, yet we are not and there is a strong movement to stop livestock farming, build on arable land or build huge solar farms. Every parcel of land which is taken out of the farming chain only serves to increase food prices and availability.

Just like any industry there are people who know how to play the system, but like the OP, others posting and my family the majority are hardworking and actually love being farmers but as every year goes on, there are many who make it more and more of a difficult industry - from the general population, to all colours of governments and unelected bodies demanding changes when they probably have never set foot onto a working farm in their entire lives.

Well if the farming press are to be believed the Eastern Europeans have all gone post Brexit and the industry is now in complete melt down because no one else is willing to do that work? The people of Lincolnshire can have their jobs back...

I don't consider industrial pig units farming though, and they certainly aren't run by people the farmers down my local pub would consider to be one of them.

Im surprised working at a dealership you hadn't realised that nearly all machinery is purchased on tick with land as a guarantee.

It's quite common for farm kids to have fancy 4x4 cars because their car is often both a huge part of their entire social life and usually shared by several family members, again bought on tick.

agree with keeping up with the Giles aspect though, hard not to want to keep up with the neighbour when often for weeks on end that's the only social contact you have with the outside world.

All the farmers round our way are Tories, they surely have voted in this lot of loons and therefore are sadly reaping the awful chaos.

Got back from Normandy two nights ago. Gigantic tractors working in french fields until midnight and then police escort (clearly french like their farmers more than we do) for tractors in convey late at night down country lanes.

We need to stop importing cheap shit from the rest of the world and try to supply more o our own needs. Our balance of payments is crap and has been for decades so at some point we will have no choice because it makes us poorer and poorer every year that we import more than we export.

Surely what needs to happen is the pressure needs to be exerted upwards not downwards. Everyone pay the workers at the bottom fairly. Everyone insist on a fair price from supermarkets. Everyone cultivate sales relationships with other avenues such as local independent butchers and farm shops of nearby farms if you don't have one yourselves. Getting the products to the customers at the fair price that many customers are willing and able to pay, so you are running a profitable business, and taking the supermarkets out of the equation if they will not pay fairly for the products.

The workers control the means of production.

Many farmers are asset rich, buildings, equipment and land, but very cash poor.

Not disputing that but someone who is asset & cash poor will often see someone asset rich as better off.

When we put out an advert for workers nobody wants to work so hard for such low pay. It's catch 22, people don't want to work in a job that's such hard work for low pay, but farmers profits are shit so you can not afford to pay a decent wage.

If you can get a job that is less hard work & pays more why wouldn't you.

We don’t pay enough for food and clothing and we pay far, far too much for housing. Imagine how much healthier the country would be if we weren’t siloing all the wealth in property-we’d be dynamic, innovative, fun. Farming would be a good job.

Yep it would be so much better if that money was going into others things as opposed to landlords & banks. We've fucked the economy because it's been all about housing for decades now. Many people didn't notice their wages were going backwards because house had doubled in value or whatever, now interest rates aren't at record lows & we have inflation people are realising how shit wages are.

Fascinating, I had wondered what was going on with the eggs.

Thank you for the insight.

I understand that comment, honestly I do. But, as a farmer, what is the alternative? Labour’s ag policy is absolutely fucking terrifying, they are only bothered about greening the country and building housing. I don’t even know who the leader of the lib dems is, I will look up their ag policy.

when we voted this government in, many years ago, they had a robust ag policy, it was well before brexit and life was frankly very different. We both voted remain btw. It was my dickhead in laws (the ones who got fat on the CAP in the 1970s+) who voted leave.

Brexit was considered turkeys voting for Christmas as far as any farmer I ever spoke with.

Had no idea, sounds scary to be reliant on food sourced elsewhere- that’s going to end badly.

Saw a thread the other day about meat prices, people don’t seem to mind where it’s come from or how it was treated- so long as it’s cheap.

I'm gutted to read this, I try wherever possible to buy direct (and my eggs usually come from my boss' chickens).

We live rurally and have friends in farming, so we know how grim it is and do our best to shop accordingly, buying direct and shopping at butchers prices have done the same and gone up bit in my own experience No where near as much of a jump as the supermarkets, but supermarket one stop convenience trumps it yet again. I'm (40s) the youngest person by quite a bit that shops in my butcher, so he tells me anyway, and I believe him.

The Tories will always be more understanding of the rural population, unfortunately the current Tories are not Tories in any shape or form. As I said previously, governments of all colours couldn't give a stuff about the rural economy, farming or otherwise.

In simple terms with farmers bank balances getting lower and lower, whilst prices of almost everything they need increasing (thankfully feed prices do seem to be heading in a slighty better direction) even such things as the proposed ban on oil boilers in 2026 can cause issues. My parents, although not farming directly now, still live in part of the main farmhouse are worrying if the oil boiler cannot be fixed - where will they get the money from to install a heat pump and all the additional work required.

People can get into the details of farming such as subsidies, but no political party really understands, or wishes to, how decisions they think they are making as "good for all" actually impact a large proportion of the rural population, but when it comes down to it, certainly the stock farmers in the north would never vote for Labour after F&M and I agree with them.

Are you judging that on the signs in the fields or have you actually spoken to them?

Carrie Johnson and Zac Goldsmith between them have done substantial damage to the trust farmers had (misguidedly IMO) put in the tories through previous generations to leave the countryside to get on with producing the nation's food.

Coupled with the disaster that Brexit has brought to farming, very poor appointments to key government roles and I think there is increasing murmurs in the farming community that they have been shafted by the Tories.

one farmer putting Con signs in their fields next to the road does not by any stretch mean that all farmers in the area are Tory supporters.

I know of a farming family nearby who have Tory and Lib Dem signs up around election time. It's a well known joke down the pub that they don't even vote and would happily let Labour put a sign up too if like the others they made the effort to come and ask. Not sure the last Labour candidate for the area even knew what a farm was...

I understand OP. It's shit and you feel so helpless as there's almost nothing you can do personally other than plough unpaid hours into the farm and burn the candle at both ends.

We have such an attitude problem in this country as consumers. It doesn't matter where it's from or how awful the production, as long as it's cheap and in volume. People don't value farmers and their food because it's been so undercut for years. They'll buy the worst welfare imported meat on offer because it's cheap and they don't want to restrict themselves to not having meat every day. It's a huge entitlement problem.

Its the same with clothing and the textile industries. Why buy less but better when you can import tonnes of toxic shit from Shein and Temu?

Well done for posting OP, farming is brutal and most of the population don't understand that. My mum used to do the books for a horticultural business from when I was a child and my brother was a farm manager for nearly thirty years so I've always been on the periphery and seen how hard it can be. The supermarkets have dominated the market for decades, set awful prices and decimated the variety of crops bring grown. As a nation we should be able to have food security but we're so far off that it's scary.

We have such an attitude problem in this country as consumers. It doesn't matter where it's from or how awful the production, as long as it's cheap and in volume. People don't value farmers and their food because it's been so undercut for years. They'll buy the worst welfare imported meat on offer because it's cheap and they don't want to restrict themselves to not having meat every day. It's a huge entitlement problem.

Its the same with clothing and the textile industries. Why buy less but better when you can import tonnes of toxic shit from Shein and Temu?

I find it frustrating but there is a big wealth divide. I can afford to shop in the butchers, the local high street but not everyone can. My elderly neighbour buys really cheap eggs, should I judge her?

@eatsleepfarmrepeat i'm in mid lincs too. Good friends with the farmer in my village and also one a few villages over, who are both having a shitty harvest. I can hear the combine going all night long, and know the impact on his family (our kids are at school together) of the hours he is putting in.

As for the comments about cheap labour, when that was first happening I was running a business that used suppliers relying on landworkers. I also socialised with people running land gangs. As the older workers retired, younger locals were not interested in the work because it was cold/dirty/hours too long/too hard. Farmers had two choices - let the crops rot in the fields, or employ foreign labour. Yes there were shoddy practices, but post Brexit and a lot of that labour moved on there were acres of brassicas rotting in the fields because locals STILL don't want to do the work (despite all propping up the bar moaning about the Polish stealing all the jobs)

People have no idea of the reality of farming and the image of rich farmers is a bloody awful steroptype that needs breaking.
Bet everyone is happy to eat their bloody Dyson Strawberries all year round though - he's bought hundreds of acres of land, pricing other farmers out and the whole business is based offshore to avoid inheritance tax. That arse voted Brexit knowing full well it would screw farmers over, but not him....

Sorry OP, i've had a bit of a rant there!

wow. What an informative and eye opening post.
sending you lots of love xx

Also just came to say we appreciate you. We very much care where our food comes from and now buy in veg boxes containing uk veg and am hoping to do something similar for the meat we eat as well. High welfare meat and boring farming should be more important to more people!

I completely sympathise, I am from a farming family. My dad, grandas and most of my uncles were farmers. Now the only one of my generation that is in agriculture is my brother. His MH just seems to keep getting worse.

It is a profession that does not get the respect it deserves.