Chris Rundle: The Red Tractor means not a jot – though it has more credibility than badger protester

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Staff Member
A lot of self-congratulation goes on at the NFU conference so it was refreshing to see it get poked in the eye by Justin King of Sainsbury's.
Challenged to explain why his stores didn't stock goods bearing the Red Tractor, he gave it to them straight: because it doesn't imply quality or add any value.
It is, he said, a 'low bar entry' scheme and one which doesn't excite him, his company or its customers. Couldn't have put it better myself.
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One of the many areas that the NFU has neglected during the eight-year presidency of the arrogant, autocratic Peter Kendall is marketing, nothing less than you might have expected from a simple commodity grower steering the ship.

Having introduced the Red Tractor concept – actually a scheme you have to buy into, rather like acquiring a meaningless 'Duchy Originals' seal – the union seems to have decided that was it and nothing further was required.

In fact, the Red Tractor has repeatedly failed to register highly on the consumer awareness scale. Few people can tell you what it means other than that the products it is on might be vaguely British – though technically it can still be applied to imports as long as they are produced in compliance with Red Tractor standards.

And that's about as far as it goes. So Justin King is right. It says nothing about quality – because quality is not a criterion.

While Peter Kendall has spent the last eight years with his fingers fixed firmly in his ears, the value of the Red Tractor has been eroded.

If the NFU wants to see how to run a food-quality scheme, it should send a delegation over to look at how the French run their Label Rouge, or any other of their regional branding.

They demand the highest standards. Livestock producers, for example, have to stick to specified diets and husbandry techniques, are subject to unannounced inspection and can be summarily deprived of their accreditation (and the 10 per cent or more premium that goes with it) if found to be in breach.

All of which rather tends to make the Red Tractor look like a battered 20-year-old model with a cracked windscreen, a knackered gearbox and three flat tyres.

So there I was exiting the National Farmers Union conference in Birmingham, slightly older but certainly none the wiser than when I had entered the place five hours earlier, when my ears were assaulted.

And assaulted is not too strong a word, for that is indeed what I experienced. The noise came from a group of the Badgerite Brotherhood assembled outside and attempting to 'engage with' (as I believe the expression is) delegates.

A somewhat futile exercise as it happened because at that very minute those delegates were down at the collective trough in the bowels of the building. Undeterred, however, the Friends of Brock were doing their best, via a loud hailer and assorted non-electronically-assisted shouting, to convey their message, the gist of which was that farmers were a bunch of murdering thugs.

I looked around. No farmers had actually emerged to confront the demonstration, which was being watched by ten or so members of the West Midlands constabulary. But in their absence and in the interests of fairness I felt some kind of balancing statement was due.

I pondered, for a moment or two, what particular phrase to use. "Layabouts!" would have bounced off like a pea hitting a Sherman tank. "Get a job!" had a bit more clout and was certainly snappier than any formula designed to express my outrage that this collection of ignorant, misguided and offensively loud-mouthed protesters was being afforded the luxury of being able to spend the day in a pointless demonstration thanks to benefits provided in part via the tax I pay on my pension.

So instead I opted for a high-volume "Cull the badgers!" – the three words calculated to cause the most offence.

Only to be ordered: "Keep that noise down, sir" by Plod, the words delivered in a tone implying that it was my first, final and only warning.

I'm not quite sure what offence he might have thought I was committing. The old catch-all law used to refer to "behaviour whereby a breach of the peace might be occasioned", but to my way of thinking all semblance of peace had already been breached by the unwashed oik with the loud hailer, who was being allowed to continue breaching it with the full blessing of the law.

Oh well, I reflected, it is only Birmingham. You can't really expect an urban copper to comprehend the complexities of the bovine TB issue. Or, for that matter, to have any sympathy with farmers, whom he probably regarded as looking far too wealthy and well-fed.

Then I thought of my dear and much-missed mother-in-law who, when anyone was guilty of a crass remark or thoughtless behaviour, would sigh: "What do you expect from a pig but a grunt?"

There is nothing new about butchers being accused of offending public decency by displaying pigs' heads, pheasants and other identifiable stock-in-trade in their windows.

Several years ago, I was buying meat from my own butcher when a family of holidaymakers passed by, took one look at the carcasses in the window and, their features contorting into expressions of disgust, dragged their children away before they could be traumatised by the sight.

It was the level of reaction you might have expected had the window contained an array of lurid porn magazines.

So full marks to Suffolk butcher John Sawyer, who has refused to give in to bullying and threats by a small but noisy minority and has reinstated his displays after initially deciding to withdraw them. As John says, if people don't like dead animals, they don't have to look.

I detect the hand of the Militant Vegan Tendency in this nasty, vicious and bigoted campaign carried out under a spurious cloak of 'protecting' those of a sensitive nature.

Of course, the fact that we have lost thousands of independent butchers as a result of ruthless undercutting by supermarkets (a trend Tesco has described as 'progress') means that happening on a display of dead animals can come as a bit of a shock to some people. But it is no more inappropriate for a butcher to display carcasses and heads than it is for a fishmonger to display fish.

The problem, fundamentally, is that we have now produced two generations who have never been taught cookery in school and so who find the whole business of handling meat distasteful. They can just about steel themselves to pick up and cook the ready-cut, packaged bits and pieces the supermarkets sell, but the whole experience of going into a proper butcher, discussing requirements and seeing one's selected purchase cut to order is a foreign country to them.

The majority of consumers don't even like to think of the connection between dead animals and meat.

Which, of course, is how the nation ended up eating horse when it thought it was getting beef, and turning into the fattest country in Europe.

The farming community will shed few tears over the abrupt departure of RSPCA chief executive Gavin Grant.

He seems to have been using the RSPCA as a stepping stone to further his own political career. Under his leadership it has switched focus from an agency dedicated to preventing animal cruelty and ill-treatment to one running highly-visible campaigns.

The worst example of this came when the RSPCA threatened to 'name and shame' farmers involved in the badger culls, which placed it in the same bracket as 'animal rights' extremists.

Grant has also been castigated for squandering hundreds of thousands of pounds privately prosecuting hunts, though in this instance I have some sympathy with him.

In the days when it was the police who decided who to put in the dock, there were often 'public interest' prosecutions – cases where there was not necessarily enough evidence to guarantee a conviction but where the publicity would at least let people know what the accused had been up to.

Now, the Crown Prosecution Service is reluctant to begin without guarantee of success.

Which is why the RSPCA has taken it upon itself to do the job on so many occasions. The problem is many of the donors who have been shovelling in the £100 million it receives annually expect their money to go on cats' and dogs' homes and making sure farm animals are cared for – not lining the pockets of fat-cat barristers.

Article re-posted courtesy of the Western Daily Press

The original article can be read here:

Read more: http://www.westerndailypress.co.uk/Chris-Rundle-Red-Tractor-means-jot-ndash/story-20760859-detail/story.html#comments#ixzz2v61OEjQu
 

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

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As reported in Independent


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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