Farmers weekly 1974

Norfolk Olly

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
norfolk
Father in law showed me a copy he had. Working on the price of the magazine then to the price of cereals a ton of wheat today should be £1298 🤔
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You folk are always banging on about the price of X.

Only in the last 40+ years the number of people producing raw materials has sky rocketed and so supply has increased exponentially. Few commodities have experienced any real gains in the same time frame.

The reality is that Europe is a particularly carp place to grow cereals or oilseeds- being wet and humid they get diseases for a past time. What you actually want is a dry climate with very modest rainfall which would let you grow cereals with basically fudge all disease. Farmers across the globe are growing wheat with fudge all fungicide because their climate is more arid so they don't get as much disease.

Only in the peculiar subsidy driven system that is the EU has massive herbicide or fungicide spending been made economically possible. You tell an Australian/Asian or American cereal farmer what your annual herbicide or fungicide spend is and they would laugh in your face because to them spending near ÂŁ100/acre on chemistry would never ever pencil in a million years.

Much the same has happened worldwide to oil, metals and other commodities, whether hard or soft. The higher the market price the more players can enter the market. I've posted graphs before from FinViz showing the same.
 

farenheit

Member
Location
Midlands
You folk are always banging on about the price of X.

Only in the last 40+ years the number of people producing raw materials has sky rocketed and so supply has increased exponentially. Few commodities have experienced any real gains in the same time frame.

The reality is that Europe is a particularly carp place to grow cereals or oilseeds- being wet and humid they get diseases for a past time. What you actually want is a dry climate with very modest rainfall which would let you grow cereals with basically fudge all disease. Farmers across the globe are growing wheat with fudge all fungicide because their climate is more arid so they don't get as much disease.

Only in the peculiar subsidy driven system that is the EU has massive herbicide or fungicide spending been made economically possible. You tell an Australian/Asian or American cereal farmer what your annual herbicide or fungicide spend is and they would laugh in your face because to them spending near ÂŁ100/acre on chemistry would never ever pencil in a million years.

Much the same has happened worldwide to oil, metals and other commodities, whether hard or soft. The higher the market price the more players can enter the market. I've posted graphs before from FinViz showing the same.
The ÂŁ75 a hectare you spend on fungicides is the biggest variable between us and an Asian farm? There are some much much larger variables. Regardless, the extra yield we get in our temperate climate more than makes up for it.
 

Pennine Ploughing

Member
Mixed Farmer
Aye now then,
1974 you say, that was not a good year for Champagne due to weather,
An MF 135 would of been about 12tons of wheat, a 185 about 16 ton of wheat
And a new combine about 24 ton of wheat
@ ÂŁ1298 a ton today would make 135 @ ÂŁ15,576, a 185 @ ÂŁ20,768, and a new combine @ ÂŁ31,152, so what went wrong there,
Interest rates on borrowing was 15% plus
And back then there was 4 times the farmers that there is now, all making a living,
So can someone explain this present day QUOTE of " economics of scale " that is widely banded about ?
Oh this "the good old days" of driving a cabless tractor if you were lucky, or sitting in a tin greenhouse, sweating no end with rubbish wetter that an Otters pocket, and sitting in a deep freezer in winter,, and 40 years on suffering from tinnitus, and can still hear the drumming of combine going now, mucking cattle courts out with a hand held fork, (no seat on that), pulling turnips by hand in the cold rain of winter, and even if there was some tractor work to do, your bell bottom trousers caught on the gear stick each time you got on the seat, for warmth in winter was a hessian sack over the knee's and side burns right down to the neck, and no passenger seat for the GF, infact not many with a GF, as they had to work back then, most had black and white TVs back then not that it mattered as most fell asleep after Coronation Street, everyone passed time with there neighbours, a radio was found in the house and not the tractor, same for a landline phone, crop of hay, could be 20000 bales all to hand ball into the barn, and then out again over winter but before you could bale hay in the afternoon, the morning was spent hand hoeing turnips till the dew was off, potatoes hand picked off the ground, and swilling into trailer was hard if a few pickers, sowing corn with a 8 foot drill, after being ploughed, and harrower, oh and can you remember the picking of stones by hand to cart off the fields, then there was sheep to sort throughout the year on top,
Good old days, ya can fecking keep them, not only would you not get staff today to do all that lot, none on here would want to do it,
So today it bigger tractors and equipment, faster and cover more ground, has to have air conditioning, radio, CD, AND GPS, so able to surf the net or social media while working, and yet again the "economics of scale " is the way forward,
Yet it seems the "scale of non economics " would be more fitting
 

jd6420s

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Yorkshire
Aye now then,
1974 you say, that was not a good year for Champagne due to weather,
An MF 135 would of been about 12tons of wheat, a 185 about 16 ton of wheat
And a new combine about 24 ton of wheat
@ ÂŁ1298 a ton today would make 135 @ ÂŁ15,576, a 185 @ ÂŁ20,768, and a new combine @ ÂŁ31,152, so what went wrong there,
Interest rates on borrowing was 15% plus
And back then there was 4 times the farmers that there is now, all making a living,
So can someone explain this present day QUOTE of " economics of scale " that is widely banded about ?
Oh this "the good old days" of driving a cabless tractor if you were lucky, or sitting in a tin greenhouse, sweating no end with rubbish wetter that an Otters pocket, and sitting in a deep freezer in winter,, and 40 years on suffering from tinnitus, and can still hear the drumming of combine going now, mucking cattle courts out with a hand held fork, (no seat on that), pulling turnips by hand in the cold rain of winter, and even if there was some tractor work to do, your bell bottom trousers caught on the gear stick each time you got on the seat, for warmth in winter was a hessian sack over the knee's and side burns right down to the neck, and no passenger seat for the GF, infact not many with a GF, as they had to work back then, most had black and white TVs back then not that it mattered as most fell asleep after Coronation Street, everyone passed time with there neighbours, a radio was found in the house and not the tractor, same for a landline phone, crop of hay, could be 20000 bales all to hand ball into the barn, and then out again over winter but before you could bale hay in the afternoon, the morning was spent hand hoeing turnips till the dew was off, potatoes hand picked off the ground, and swilling into trailer was hard if a few pickers, sowing corn with a 8 foot drill, after being ploughed, and harrower, oh and can you remember the picking of stones by hand to cart off the fields, then there was sheep to sort throughout the year on top,
Good old days, ya can fecking keep them, not only would you not get staff today to do all that lot, none on here would want to do it,
So today it bigger tractors and equipment, faster and cover more ground, has to have air conditioning, radio, CD, AND GPS, so able to surf the net or social media while working, and yet again the "economics of scale " is the way forward,
Yet it seems the "scale of non economics " would be more fitting
I agree with you but a full stop every now and again wouldn't hurt. That is probably the longest sentence I have ever read!
 
Aye now then,
1974 you say, that was not a good year for Champagne due to weather,
An MF 135 would of been about 12tons of wheat, a 185 about 16 ton of wheat
And a new combine about 24 ton of wheat
@ ÂŁ1298 a ton today would make 135 @ ÂŁ15,576, a 185 @ ÂŁ20,768, and a new combine @ ÂŁ31,152, so what went wrong there,
Interest rates on borrowing was 15% plus
And back then there was 4 times the farmers that there is now, all making a living,
So can someone explain this present day QUOTE of " economics of scale " that is widely banded about ?
Oh this "the good old days" of driving a cabless tractor if you were lucky, or sitting in a tin greenhouse, sweating no end with rubbish wetter that an Otters pocket, and sitting in a deep freezer in winter,, and 40 years on suffering from tinnitus, and can still hear the drumming of combine going now, mucking cattle courts out with a hand held fork, (no seat on that), pulling turnips by hand in the cold rain of winter, and even if there was some tractor work to do, your bell bottom trousers caught on the gear stick each time you got on the seat, for warmth in winter was a hessian sack over the knee's and side burns right down to the neck, and no passenger seat for the GF, infact not many with a GF, as they had to work back then, most had black and white TVs back then not that it mattered as most fell asleep after Coronation Street, everyone passed time with there neighbours, a radio was found in the house and not the tractor, same for a landline phone, crop of hay, could be 20000 bales all to hand ball into the barn, and then out again over winter but before you could bale hay in the afternoon, the morning was spent hand hoeing turnips till the dew was off, potatoes hand picked off the ground, and swilling into trailer was hard if a few pickers, sowing corn with a 8 foot drill, after being ploughed, and harrower, oh and can you remember the picking of stones by hand to cart off the fields, then there was sheep to sort throughout the year on top,
Good old days, ya can fecking keep them, not only would you not get staff today to do all that lot, none on here would want to do it,
So today it bigger tractors and equipment, faster and cover more ground, has to have air conditioning, radio, CD, AND GPS, so able to surf the net or social media while working, and yet again the "economics of scale " is the way forward,
Yet it seems the "scale of non economics " would be more fitting
I think that's more 1964 than 1974. I worked on a farm then weekends and holidays. About 130 acres, 80 cows through a herringbone, self feed clamp and cows in kennels. Foraging on a DB 996 and I think Kidd in line forager. DB 880 for buck raking which also had loader. Ferguson TE20 scraper tractor.
He also had a full time man. The worst job I can remember was when the fertiliser was delivered in cwt (50kg) bags, or straw in little bales

There was far more community then and more respect and to use an out of date word, decency. As far as lack of computers and technology, what you don't know you don't miss.

I'll stop now getting all nostalgic :LOL: :LOL: n
 

bluebell

Member
And how much was a farm then? the biggest difference is the relation of cost of land and profit from it? take todays prices land growing crops over ÂŁ10,000 an acre, if you can find any to buy? farming up to the end of the 1970s was profitable? even the bad farmers made money? i remember talking to old farmers, their rule of thumb was first ton an acre paid all the costs anything plus was profit? that and generous grants, free advice from adas no paperwork etc etc?
 

jendan

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
Northumberland
Aye, and every time somebody bought a bit everybody in the pub 'tut-tutted' into their beer and said, "They must be bonkers, how can it be worth that much?"

Now we all wish we'd bought some, doesn't look so bonkers now, does it? :facepalm:
There was a huge increase in land prices between 1972 and 1974,as we joined the EEC,near 100%. At least there was around us.We missed out on a small 100acre farm in 1972 at ÂŁ30,000.The following year bought a similar one,slightly poorer land at ÂŁ72,500.Meanwhile AMC rates had gone up to 14%.
 

bluebell

Member
theres a documentary film on youtube, made in 1969 about the suffolk village of peasenhall where smyths seed drills were made, a farmer speaks about the fact that land price has gone over 200 pounds an acre and was grumberling?
 

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Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

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quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

read the TFF thread here: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/gfc-was-to-go-ahead-now-not-going-ahead.405234/
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