- Location
- Hereford
There are too many trying trying to make a name for themselves in talking protests up but when you really look into it they aren't really sure what they are protesting about.
Farmer protest in London, read the comments !
- Thread starter Henery
- Start date
- Location
- South Notts
‘Farming Britain’ are organising the protest in video I put up against unfair imports . My main question was ‘who are farming britain’? They seem to exist on YouTube but I can’t find a website for them stating their claims?
- Location
- People's Republic of South Yorkshire
Intresting that Attenborough admits he knows little about farming, yet happy to say cows causing climate change...Interesting article by Patrick Holden.
farming adviser: ‘Attenborough is wrong about livestock – it’s not the cow but the how’
Organic farmer Patrick Holden on the important role livestock can play in sustainable agriculture – and why we need to change the way we eat
Emma Gatten, ENVIRONMENT EDITOR13 March 2024 • 7:00am
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The Government needs to do more to help farmers, says Holden CREDIT: John Lawrence
It is rare to hear farmers bite the hand that feeds them. The ire of protesting farmers in recent weeks has targeted cheap imports, green policies, and government regulation they say is destroying their livelihoods.
But Patrick Holden, one of the pioneers of organic farming in Britain and advisor to King Charles, says their anger is misdirected. The true problem is a race to the bottom among supermarket giants that has left small family farmers on their knees.
“Farmers are pawns in the game,” says Holden, who is also the chief executive of the Sustainable Food Trust. “They are victims of a system that we are all responsible for.”
“The system of food production is parasitic on farmers,” he says. “If you are trying to have a price war with your competitors, the only place they can extract any more costs from the system has been farmers.”
Demand for cheap food and the rise of discount supermarkets such as Aldi and Lidl has driven down profits so that only the “big boys” can afford to compete, he says.
“The farmers either intensify and enlarge, or they quietly give up. We’re seeing the demise of small family farms because they’ve just had all the life sucked out of them by low prices.”
“It is sort of cultural cleansing by price,” he adds.
I meet Holden in Pangbourne in Berkshire where he is recording a podcast with Iain Tolhurst, another stalwart of the organic scene. Dressed in a navy rain jacket, sensible boots and shirt, Holden looks like someone you would pass on a gentle hike in the Peak District.
On the way to lunch we stop at a local cheese shop because Holden is curious to see whether they stock Hafod, the cheddar made on his farm in Lampeter, Wales. Although Holden, 73, is still an active farmer (“I’m in it for life. It’s a great life”), it is his second wife, Becky, who does much of the milking, alongside two of his eight children who are currently living at home. As the head of the SFT, a big part of Holden’s day-to-day life is trying to persuade people that we need to heal our relationship with the land that produces our food.
Holden with his wife Becky CREDIT: John Lawrence
In 1995 there were more than 30,000 dairy farms in Great Britain. As of April last year there were just 7,500, a 75 per cent reduction. At the same time, intensive pork and poultry farms, which hold upwards of 40,000 birds and 2,000 pigs, have been on the rise, growing 7 per cent between 2017 and 2020 alone.
Meanwhile the industry is undergoing its biggest transition since the Second World War, as EU-era subsidies are removed and replaced by a new system that pays farmers for delivering public goods, such as tree planting and improved soils. It is the specific shape of these proposals that have brought anger among Welsh farmers to a head in recent weeks, with around 3,000 demonstrating outside the Senedd last month, following in the wake of demonstrations in Europe where farmers have laid siege to Paris.
In its latest survey tracking opinion among farmers, the environment department found only 6 per cent of English farmers fully understood what the vision was for the future of farming. A further 5 per cent said the post-Brexit changes would force them out of the industry.
Holden – who has farmed for 50 years – says he has been insulated from the industry’s pressures only by making a “reassuringly expensive cheese” from his 65-strong dairy herd on the land he first set up as a commune in 1973, and his day job at the SFT, which he co-founded in 2011.
“You take the cheese out of it and we would be a statistic. We would be one of the farms that has given up.”
Among ordinary farmers, criticising the supermarkets has been seen as almost a taboo because of fears they could be “delisted”, removed as a favoured supplier by the big four, or the wholesalers and processors that act as middlemen in the supply chain.
“The story behind our food is hidden for a good reason. Because if we knew that story, we might not want to buy the food,” Holden says.
Take the fact that intensive free-range chicken farming has been allowed to proliferate, particularly in Wales, nearly doubling in size since 2011, and has been blamed for an ecological “death spiral” on the River Wye, where colossal levels of nutrients from manure are choking off aquatic life.
Or the fact that around half of our dairy comes from cows that live permanently in massive sheds, and will never touch grass, according to industry estimates. Or the hundreds of miles our animals are forced to travel before they are slaughtered, often with long waits at either end, because of the demise of local abattoirs as supermarkets enter into contracts with the bigger players.
Holden says he is “telling on himself” as much as his fellow farmers here. “Some of our dairy cows end up in London restaurants. But the rest will sell to a haulier who will take them to an abattoir somewhere. The truth is I don’t know where they end up, and that is part of a system that makes everything anonymous, including to the farmers.
“We can’t ignore it any longer, that farming is a central part of the problem,” he says.
Making a 'reassuringly expensive cheese' has helped keep Holden's farm afloat CREDIT: John Lawrence
What he is keen to do is lay the blame in the right place. “I’m not denigrating the farmers. It’s not their fault. They’ve been led down this path by a combination of policy and economics for decades. They’ve been sacrificed on the altar.”
What has been lost in the move to intensification is the kind of mixed farms that the SFT and other proponents of the rising “regenerative” farming movement advocate returning to, which combine grassland, grazing livestock and crops on a rotational system.
Holden knows he is something of a difficult interlocutor to persuade farmers, still being considered a “wacky” figure in the industry.
One of four children born to a family of Balliol scholars and Anglican missionaries in south London, he attended Dulwich Hamlet Primary School and Alleyn’s, which counts Nigel Farage among its alumni. His mother worked at Bletchley Park and then became a social worker, and his father was a child psychiatrist. With no farming in his blood, it was only when his father got a job at Stanford University in California that he started to think more deeply about the land, eventually setting up a rural commune in Wales.
“My parents were very sweet, actually, when I decided to become a farmer,” he says. “They were of a generation that will never be directly open about their kids. But Dad did say to me once, ‘I’m proud of you.’ That meant a lot.”
Determined to farm with as little impact on the land as possible, the commune soon realised they would struggle to turn a profit. Instead, they decided to turn their new “organic” approach into a selling point. “It was a means to an end really. Survival in what was a very difficult economic time.”
Both of Holden's sons, Harry (left), 19, and Ben (right), 21, dropped out of university to return to the family farm CREDIT: John Lawrence
But if he remains something of an outsider in farming, Holden has won friends in high places along the way. In the 1980s he was asked to join a group of experts to help King Charles, then the Prince of Wales, set up his own organic holding at Highgrove, which became the Duchy Originals brand. He has remained a friend and adviser to the King ever since, and is in touch with him regularly.
“He’s highly intuitive and a bit of a visionary in his contribution to fostering a new understanding of our relationship with nature. We’re not separate from nature, we’re part of nature.
“His promotion and his advocacy, before he became King, especially of sustainable agriculture, but also in many other fields, is remarkable. I think he is a leader for our time.”
In 1995, Holden took charge of the Soil Association, the organic standards body, and oversaw an increase in annual sales from £50 million to £2 billion during his 15 years in the role. Since then, sales have lagged at around 2 per cent of the market.
“The whole organic project has been misunderstood and stalled because of this distorted economic system where the polluter doesn’t pay,” he says. “And the other people aren’t having the polluter-pays principle applied, because everybody’s addicted to so-called cheap food, which is dishonestly cheap.
“If you say to yourself, I can’t afford to spend more on food, I think that is completely legitimate for probably about 20 per cent of the population. And for that 20 per cent, that’s what governments are for. The other 80 per cent of us who can afford to spend less on something else, that’s what we should do.”
The challenge may be easier for Holden, who eats mainly from his own 300 acre farm, than for the rest of us trying to navigate the endless labelling in our weekly supermarket shop.
Holden: 'Farming is absolutely part of the problem. But it could become part of the solution' CREDIT: John Lawrence
“I think you’d recognise our family’s diet as being a diet that you’d want to eat,” he says. There is unsurprisingly “shed loads” of cheese, milk and meat almost every day, including “the most delicious sausages I have ever eaten”, from their own pigs that have just been sent to the local slaughterhouse. Livestock, he says, has a vital role to play in regenerative agriculture, helping to feed the soils.
“Why are so many young people going vegan? I think they misunderstand the importance of livestock in sustainable farming systems,” he says. “And they intuitively sense that the meat and other livestock products which supermarkets sell probably have a very poor welfare story behind them.”
But he believes that the message of the important role that livestock can play is getting missed because of public figures such as David Attenborough, who call for us to eat less meat because of livestock’s impact on the climate.
“David is a national treasure and I wrote him a letter recently to ask if he would be prepared to get involved in the discussion about sustainable agriculture.
“He wrote a charming handwritten note back, saying ‘I would love to help but I don’t know enough about farming.’ Which is honest. But the people who have been writing his scripts have made him a mouthpiece for the one thing he’s got wrong, which is the livestock thing. It’s not the cow, but the how.”
None of Holden’s children, aged between 16 and 52, have shown an inclination towards veganism, although “they all mind about the story behind the meat they eat”. The family have just acquired 10 chickens to supply the many eggs eaten by Holden’s rugby-playing son Harry, 19, who has just returned to the farm after dropping out of Edinburgh University after one term. His older brother Ben, 21, has also dropped out of Glasgow University and is back in the family home.
'There's a whole generation of young people that are starting to think about farming in an interesting way now,' says Holden CREDIT: John Lawrence
Both Harry and Ben are now helping out on the family farm. His youngest son, 16-year-old James, who attends the renowned Atlantic College known as the “hippie Hogwarts”, has also declared his knowledge of farming to be “cool”.
“There’s a whole generation of young people that are starting to think about farming in an interesting way now,” says Holden.
He is keen not to dismiss the difficulty that farmers are currently facing, which are compounded by rising interest rates and input costs in the wake of the Ukraine war. But he dismisses the “no farmers, no food” slogans that have appeared at recent protests, particularly in Wales, where protesters have rejected the Government’s proposed sustainable farming scheme, which would require farms to maintain 10 per cent woodland and 10 per cent wildlife habitat to qualify for subsidies.
“It’s just a bit trite, isn’t it? The point is, what kind of farming story do we want? It’s got to be: no sustainable farmers, no food.
“Farmers are understandably confused and dismayed and anxious about the future because most farmers responded to the policy and economic signals of the last 40 years,” he says. “They have been locked into a system which they’ve assumed has been the right system for a very long time. And they’ve invested in it, and they’re defensive. A lot of them have borrowed a lot of money to intensify.”
“The Government shouldn’t back down on the farming transition, but realise more needs to be done to help farmers, who can’t improve the way they do agriculture if they don’t make money,” he says. “Farming is absolutely part of the problem. But it could become part of the solution.”
The answer, though, will require us all to change the way we eat, and what we expect from our supermarkets. For starters, we have to see “the end of cheap chicken. It’s over. People need to get used to the idea that they should buy quality food and eat differently. This transition is going to hurt us all. And we can’t leave it to farmers to take all the pain.”
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Nearly
Member
- Location
- North of York
Max Herdroom ?Max Headroom
- Location
- Northumberland
You’d have thought that someone like that would’ve come across the concept of carbon cycling
Exfarmer
Member
- Location
- Bury St Edmunds
Attenborough many years ago admitted he only reads the autocue
wanton dwarf
Member
How many times have you lauded the Green Party - yet when faced with the reality of Taxes on Inputs & Outputs, mandatory land use change & reduced livestock numbers - you STILL push the Green agenda.
Loon.
wanton dwarf
Member
Unemployed loons.
Who on earth has time to be on the internet this time of day ?
Oops
Whatever they are, they at least have the sense not to vote for the Green Party or Labour Party.
wanton dwarf
Member
Lunatic doesn't go far enough to describe someone who advocates taxes in inputs & outputs & land use change & reduced livestock numbers - especially IF you are a farmer in the first place
You are the asylum
- Location
- South Wales UK
Tractor Rally 2024 | Farming Britain | Farming Britain · Original audio
Tractor Rally 2024. Farming Britain · Original audio
www.facebook.com
- Location
- British Isles
Not sure what everyone thought are but I see some are on a go slow in Westminster but more importantly the bbc now got it on the front off the news page
- Location
- Durham, UK
Bbc will love it that anti brexit campaigner liz webster is involved
- Location
- West Suffolk
They’ve got some good horns
SiL Whatsapped a vid of his cycle ride home today..... one hell of a lot of Tractors.
However, there was no way they were holding traffic up.... London traffic averages about 9mph anyway!!
However, there was no way they were holding traffic up.... London traffic averages about 9mph anyway!!
- Location
- South Wales UK
@Bald Rick
Few threads going already.
www.facebook.com
Few threads going already.
Tractor Rally 2024 | Farming Britain | Farming Britain · Original audio
Tractor Rally 2024. Farming Britain · Original audio
www.facebook.com
Lincs Lass
Member
- Location
- north lincs
How many will get ULEZ and congestion fines
- Location
- West Suffolk
I guess they’ve been allowed to go today?
- Location
- South Wales UK
Coppers on Cardiff march were not taking any chances with their severe measures.
Lincs Lass
Member
- Location
- north lincs
You really think citizen Khan will let them off