Is British farming facing an existential crisis?

Humble Village Farmer · May 10, 2023

I suppose we've all got our survival plans in case things don't improve.

It's possible things could suddenly change for the better, but what's needed is a fair share of the retail value for the farmer.. I don't see the corporate food system giving that up without a struggle though.

Clive · May 10, 2023

The Seeker said:
From what I gather simply saying ok I’ll plant trees now show me the money , I know two land owners who gloated how much money they will make yet I still see no trees

CSS and SFI offer real alternatives to food production and are paying right now

CSS margin is better than wheat at current crop / fert price

Clive · May 10, 2023

DrWazzock said:
I wouldn’t worry. There will always be ag production here in the U.K. but my take on it is that it will shrink back to the more productive land. The grade three hare, that’s always been a struggle will find other uses.

i think we will eventually see max production incentivised on the best land but environment / natural capital incentivised on anything less than best

i’m not al all convinced that much of the land we farm today will grow food in the future BUT i do think we will continue to derive income from it …….. maybe more so than from food production even ?

MrNoo · May 10, 2023

Humble Village Farmer said:
I don't see the corporate food system giving that up without a struggle though.

Especially with the NFU doing what it does, I always find it ironic when Battersby is on Twitter or quoted somewhere saying farmers need more for their produce and yet on the other hand she's perfectly happy to shaft them for a few thousand a year extra via RT which imports simply don't have.
My grandfather always told my father that farmers would just become park keepers and how right he was. We will become countryside attractions, much like animals in a zoo

Clive · May 10, 2023

MrNoo said:
Especially with the NFU doing what it does, I always find it ironic when Battersby is on Twitter or quoted somewhere saying farmers need more for their produce and yet on the other hand she's perfectly happy to shaft them for a few thousand a year extra via RT which imports simply don't have.
My grandfather always told my father that farmers would just become park keepers and how right he was. We will become countryside attractions, much like animals in a zoo

nfu are so far up their big retail and corporate sponsors backsides they have completely forgotten who they are supposed to represent

amazes me how completely blind so many seem to be to this and continue to pay them 10’s of millions in subs year

DrWazzock · May 10, 2023

The thing that bugs me most is that we had to manage without neonic seed dressings on OSR because U.K. government banned them. Fair enough, if that’s what people want here we will do it. But every other year now I’ve lost my crop of OSR before it even got started and even when taken to harvest yields are considerably reduced. OSR should be trading at £600 within the U.K. today to make up for the big disadvantage we face. But no, they are letting in foreign OSR produced using neonics which is keeping the price nearer £300 a ton. So it’s a world market when letting cheap produce in but it’s the full force of U.K. regulations when you are growing it here. It’s that kind of hypocracy that makes me much less inclined to “feed the nation”. When I see RT inspectors turning away boat loads of foreign imports because they have used neonics which are illegal here then I’ll be believe that we as U.K. farmers are treated fairly and I’ll make an effort on food production but while double standards and hypocrisy are the order of the day then frankly why should I bother?

Clive · May 10, 2023

DrWazzock said:
The thing that bugs me most is that we had to manage without neonic seed dressings on OSR because U.K. government banned them. Fair enough, if that’s what people want here we will do it. But every other year now I’ve lost my crop of OSR before it even got started and even when taken to harvest yields are considerably reduced. OSR should be trading at £600 within the U.K. today to make up for the big disadvantage we face. But no, they are letting in foreign OSR produced using neonics which is keeping the price nearer £300 a ton. So it’s a world market when letting cheap produce in but it’s the full force of U.K. regulations when you are growing it here. It’s that kind of hypocracy that makes me much less inclined to “feed the nation”. When I see RT inspectors turning away boat loads of foreign imports because they have used neonics which are illegal here then I’ll be believe that we as U.K. farmers are treated fairly and I’ll make an effort on food production but while double standards and hypocrisy are the order of the day then frankly why should I bother?

exactly - UK farmers are playing in a casino where the deck is openly stacked against them

DrWazzock · May 10, 2023

So we can’t compete because of U.K. regulations and NFU RT imposed costs.
So we’ll grow less here and take even more from the taxpayer to produce less food.
So we will rely more heavily on imports which can only see food prices increase and security reduce long term.
Cracking master plan that.

gatepost · May 10, 2023

Clive said:
i think we will eventually see max production incentivised on the best land but environment / natural capital incentivised on anything less than best

i’m not al all convinced that much of the land we farm today will grow food in the future BUT i do think we will continue to derive income from it …….. maybe more so than from food production even ?

Which is what happened in the 30s, land around here (as my dad used to tell me at length) was nothing but gorse anthills and rabbits, which you could have for 6p/acre, it was broken by stock, and then has grown grain ever since, however nowt to say it won't revert if the maths don't stack up

Clive · May 10, 2023

DrWazzock said:
So we can’t compete because of U.K. regulations and NFU RT imposed costs.
So we’ll grow less here and take even more from the taxpayer to produce less food.
So we will rely more heavily on imports which can only see food prices increase and security reduce long term.
Cracking master plan that.

it’s not what we want to hear as uk farmers but truth is what we produce make’s little to no difference re price or availability

shortages have been caused by supermarkets and their destruction of profitable supply chain - they do that to all suppliers regardless if they are uk or not, they are ruthless and desperately need regulation

it makes (perverse) sense for our food to be mostly imported and certainly offers governments the easy road to to meeting climate obligations

but it’s a nonsense when you are just exporting problems elsewhere as we all know

DrWazzock · May 10, 2023

Essentially what the U.K. government and NFU want is food grown to higher than world market standards at higher than world market costs but with but no price premium. That just doesn’t work as a business model.
I’m actually quite happy to keep on trying to grow OSR without neonic seed coatings but only if there is a price premium to allow me to afford to do so.
DOES THIS MESSAGE EVER GET THROUGH TO THE POWERS THAT BE?

Bossfarmer · May 10, 2023

Clive said:
i think we will eventually see max production incentivised on the best land but environment / natural capital incentivised on anything less than best

i’m not al all convinced that much of the land we farm today will grow food in the future BUT i do think we will continue to derive income from it …….. maybe more so than from food production even ?

what happens years down the line when all this environmental land with blocked drains and weeds/low PH suddenly gets the payments stopped,

this enviro craze is just a fad like the vegan nonsense, theyll discover in a decades time its making no benefit in fact doing more harm if were importing the food from abroad with a much larger footprint, then the narrative will change, politicians always need a new angle or narrative

global warmings not really a problem, global cooling though.....people forget weve only been recording temperatures for a few hundred years, all this panic is exaggerated, science shows there have been many periods of severe global cooling to the point the population has been almost completely decimated someone should tell greta

neilo · May 10, 2023

Wow. 16 posts before the NFU was mentioned, and 24 before RT came into it. You guys are slipping.

The decline of UK Ag is a systemic, government derived problem going back decades. Unfortunately, I don’t see it changing without a major shock to the system (as WW2 was), and will likely get worse while government, and those that vote it in, believe that everything should be led by the market.

Clive · May 10, 2023

neilo said:
Wow. 16 posts before the NFU was mentioned, and 24 before RT came into it. You guys are slipping.

The decline of UK Ag is a systemic, government derived problem going back decades. Unfortunately, I don’t see it changing without a major shock to the system (as WW2 was), and will likely get worse while government, and those that vote it in, believe that everything should be led by the market.

would this happen in France ?

no getting away from UK farmers lack strong/ effective leadership and without it they have no chance

Humble Village Farmer · May 10, 2023

neilo said:
Wow. 16 posts before the NFU was mentioned, and 24 before RT came into it. You guys are slipping.

The decline of UK Ag is a systemic, government derived problem going back decades. Unfortunately, I don’t see it changing without a major shock to the system (as WW2 was), and will likely get worse while government, and those that vote it in, believe that everything should be led by the market.

The problem isn't caused by the NFU, it's just that they haven't been any good at acting in the best interests of farm businesses, but still cost those businesses anyway.

Can you imagine a new occupier of a farm, just getting started and saying "right I must put £1000 towards the NFU for my new business"?

J 1177 · May 10, 2023

DrWazzock said:
Just a few very expensive organic or specialty fancy breed eggs in Tescos Market Rasen last week. And it’s been like that for months. I hope the folk producing those eggs are seeing the benefit but I doubt they are seeing as much benefit as Tesco.
I actually woke up this morning contemplating stopping farming as I do quite often.
Why live a financially impoverished life when we could sell up and even a low rate bond would pay a better income?
For us here we were essentially finished when neonic seed coatings were banned or restricted to useless levels on OSR and beet. People laugh this off with blase optimism and denial but it was the defining moment of the reversal of arable farming progress in the U.K. We limp on but we face competition from cheap imports who still use these products and aren’t subject to many other government or even self imposed regulations and costs. With combinables prices now slumping back to prewar levels but produced with inputs bought at war time levels this year has seen us work for absolutely nothing. I am warned that my insurance bill for example will rise 25% this year to due to inflation of materials costs. And those kind of charges never fall again.
This kind of operating environment : high cost, low return, high regulation, continual withdrawal of actives available to our competitors is plainly and simply unsustainable.
If nothing changes we won’t be farming in two years time. We will simply run out of cash. It won’t be a choice. It just won’t be possible to continue farming for cashflow reasons.
There’s plenty of other things we can do though, so I’m not going to get despondent about it. We still have an asset we can sell or more likely use for other things. So this isn’t a “poor me” whinge, ( we are actually very fortunate), it’s just a frank and realistic assessment of farming prospects.

Your exactly right, if we are not financially rewarded for growing food we cant and wont, at the end of the day its a business.
The reality of the bps was it kept some margin in the job and padded out the lean years. With it gone decisions have to be made, now im a food producer at the end of the day but im not going to loose my assets over producing food at a loss.
Landowning farmers will be ok its the tennants that are in a more perilous position.

However it doesnt bode well for food security as im sure many are in the same boat. Trouble is the government seem to be completely oblivious to this.

serf · May 10, 2023

DrWazzock said:
So we can’t compete because of U.K. regulations and NFU RT imposed costs.
So we’ll grow less here and take even more from the taxpayer to produce less food.
So we will rely more heavily on imports which can only see food prices increase and security reduce long term.
Cracking master plan that.

That's about the long N short of it ...
What's the problem with that ......

neilo · May 10, 2023

Humble Village Farmer said:
The problem isn't caused by the NFU, it's just that they haven't been any good at acting in the best interests of farm businesses, but still cost those businesses anyway.

Can you imagine a new occupier of a farm, just getting started and saying "right I must put £1000 towards the NFU for my new business"?

I left the family partnership and started farming in my own right in 2012.
I joined the NFU and continue to be a member.
I also support the lobbying activities of the NSA and the TFA, oh and a tenner to the newest talking shop.

None of that is particularly relevant to the decline in agriculture we have seen over the last three decades though.

Henarar · May 10, 2023

Is it that bad ?
beef price is good, lamb not to bad.
fert coming down in price is a worry though.

Treg · May 10, 2023

There was a post on Facebook yesterday went something like this-

A large ship was towed into port with a engine problem, once docked a engineer was called for.
The Engineer arrived and spent 2 hours tapping the engine with his hammer, after the 2 hours he found the problem and got the engine restarted and the large ship could continue it's journey.
Several weeks later the ships owners received a bill for the work the engineer had done, the bill came to £20000 , the owners thought this was rather high and asked for a break down of costs.
The Engineer sent the breakdown of costs-

One hammer = £2

My experience of 20 years as a marine engineer = £19998

Now I think this applies to farming , there are members on here with amazing skills at what they do whether it's growing crops or livestock, making ice cream or bread , ploughing or drilling, harvesting or milking.
These skills aren't being paid for , the actual produce is hardly being paid for.
Agriculture in many ways is like a bank account, you can't always keep drawing from it, sometimes you have to make a deposit.
For several decades the world as a whole has being drawing from the bank account of Agriculture causing long term damage in so many ways , it's going to take several decades to restore Agriculture to revive a healthy planet and population, this will of course take cash and unfortunately at the moment governments haven't quite caught up with the situation, it's started to dawn on them but they will need to change their mindset completely.

Is British farming facing an existential crisis?

Member

Staff Member

Staff Member

Member

Staff Member

Member

Staff Member

Member

Member

Staff Member

Member

Member

Member

Staff Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

0 %

Up to 25%

25-50%

50-75%

75-100%

100% I’ve had enough of farming!

Share this page