The floods are hitting farmers really hard...

[WendyWeber]

...I hadn't even thought of that before. Crops badly affected, livestock drowned, no feed for the rest...BBC report

Very

You can buy £1.20 for 4 pints of organic milk from Sainsburys. Some of the branded milk is £1.50/£1.60 for the same. Would the supermarket still get a sale from selling their milk at £1.40?, probably yes, therefor giving the chance to give the farmer an extra 5p/pint. If they did put the price up, they probably would give the farmer less and have even more profit.

Apart from the milkman - where can we buy milk that the farmer gets a 'good cut' from?

Lostmykeys - a fellow farmer's wife here. I started reading some of the threads out to dh - who said he was surprised that there was support as he feels completely screwed most of the time - not getting a fair price for what he produces. The old 'you never see a poor farmer' still crops up from time to time, but most people (not the posters on here, and I second the thank you ) have no idea what it's really like, just pre conceived ideas, which may have been true 100 years, or even 50 years ago, but certainly don't apply today

Oh expat you are fab! Bloody second homes, with people that find you amusing as you seem to be an original peasant. My dh and I laugh at them, not with them. THey forget that we are intelligent educated individuals and not straight off the hills!

It would be simplistic to say ... from the farm.

But current health & safety legislation (and a whole raft of other bollocks) would make it impossible for a local farmer to sell his milk straight from the cow.

Still feel strongly about mills as well. Why can't we bring windmills back - one in every village? They look beautiful and they make bread.

God, sometimes I hate the way the world is now.

'This farmhouse has HUGE potential for conversion. On the market for just £1m, the outlying buildings can be purchased separately for a snip at £2m, perfect for that 'granny house' or for your nanny and servants quarters.

TESCO put the farmer whose family had been here for 3 centuries into bankrupcy after making his life a misery for the 5 years he hung on (alternate story: the farmer's bastard lanlord squeezed him out of the tenancy his family held since 1400 by increasing his rents and refusing to carry out essential maintenance so he could see off the bits of his estate to fund his hotel project in Dubai AND his coke habit), but his loss is YOUR gain!'

Furball, not sure where you can buy milk from without ripping off the farmers. My milk man can't compete and charges 44p a pint. Still support him though. Monkeybar, for once my dh has seen a positive side to MN and was impressed by the tones of the threads too.

And even if it was true 100 years ago, what the hell is wrong with profiting from your labours?

Furball - we're not dairy either, my uncle in law gave up dairy a few years back as he was getting LESS for the milk than it was costing to produce it. No business can permanently run at a loss. But then you get people saying they don;t see why they should pay more for milk because it would just be making the rich farmers richer (er, no)

People who say 'you never see a poor farmer' are also usually the ones whose kids think ketchup counts as a serving of veg.

The worst are people who start harping on about subsidies, loss of hedgerows and wild birds, they are stuck in an eighties mindset that sounds right, completely unaware of what goes on these days.

What they have is land. Land doesn't pay the bills.

It doesn't pay the bills, but people seem to think you should sell some if times are hard, not realising that some farmers rent a lot of land and have that as an overhead in addition to everything else.

Because the fat cat second/third/fourth home owners like hedgerows and thatch and all things twee to look at when laundering money gets tiresome.

Most farmers I know are tenants same as I am.

They also like to buy up every bit of land that comes up for sale around them, offereing above the market value to extend their estate, and then have wild shooting parties with thier city chums.

'You never see a poor farmer' - such complete bollocks. The twats who trot that one out don't ever see a farmer anyway.

and Expat - 100% agreement with every post you've made on this thread.
I'm an advocate for fair-trade, but I think British farmers deserve a slice of that pie, too.

Complete bloody madness - we train a nation to work in call centres and shops, flogging cheap crap from China, and we decimate our own manufacturing and farming industries.

Desiderata - unfortunately it's not a small minority of urbanites who don't understand where food comes from.

The whole nation has been turned into supermarket-dependent zombies! We actually talk about regulating supermarkets as if they were essential public services instead of one of many retail options. People are getting to the point that they don't know how to shop any other way.

Local organisations are protesting about supermarket planning, yet in most areas there's no support because the local population is OVER THE MOON if a Tesco Express opens in the next street.

They still think it's the cheapest way to shop and have no idea of the impact the supermarkets have on UK food producers and independent retailers.

Apologies for the rant. Phew! Back to my glass of wine...

Good response Suebaroo, I'll have to remember it for the future when someone pulls that comment at me or dh.

You're right, brummie. I made an understatement at best.

I live in Somerset where generally speaking, people know where food comes from, and most people I know would pay more. They seriously would.

Yes, that was an excellent post, SueBaroo.

SueBaroo - you've hit the nail on the head with the fair trade comment - British farmers are trying to compete with food from countries where restrictions are not so extensive in terms of chemical usage etc. I'm all for cutting back on harmful things, but we end up importing food that has been produced using chemicals that are banned in the UK (but are cheap), so the imported food is always going to be cheaper - our price has to then go down to be competitive. It seems mad and incredibly unfair to make it to import food that doesn't meet the production standards of home grown food.

Am trying to resist responding to the Shambo thread that has just been started.

What in the name of worms is Shambo?

The bull who lives in a Welsh monastry and has TB. Go to the BBC website, plenty of coverage there. Lots of action as it was sacred to the monks and local authorities demanded that it be slaughtered.

I have responded.