Historic wheat prices

Flintstone

Member
Location
Berkshire
And the reason it's not being branded as another big farming depression now?

Simple.

Because back in the 1920's, 80% of people were involved in farming and were directly impacted. Nowadays, it's less than 0.5%, and nobody cares because food can be shipped in from anywhere.

Or, we could just blame Tony Blair because he was a tw@.
 

Condi

Member
Way back when cost of production higher as more people required.

Food is now cheap to produce - what's really scary (for UK farmer) is that growers in Russia, Ukraine, Brazil, Argentina still making good money due to FX movements. European and US farmer not doing so well.
 

jackrussell101

Member
Mixed Farmer
My grandfather always used to say he could pay for my dad and his two brothers to go to boarding school for a year with one ton of wheat. Now the same boarding school is about £16,000 a year for each pupil so you would be looking at a wheat price of £48,000 a ton in today's money. Either the wheat price has fallen or private education has got a lot more expensive, or both!
 

jackrussell101

Member
Mixed Farmer
My grandfather always used to say he could pay for my dad and his two brothers to go to boarding school for a year with one ton of wheat. Now the same boarding school is about £16,000 a year for each pupil so you would be looking at a wheat price of £48,000 a ton in today's money. Either the wheat price has fallen or private education has got a lot more expensive, or both!
Ah apologies it was a term not a year!, still £16,000 a ton though!
 
Location
East Anglia
And the reason it's not being branded as another big farming depression now?

Simple.

Because back in the 1920's, 80% of people were involved in farming and were directly impacted. Nowadays, it's less than 0.5%, and nobody cares because food can be shipped in from anywhere.

Or, we could just blame Tony Blair because he was a tw@.
or Richard Body before Mr Blair?
 

martian

DD Moderator
BASE UK Member
Location
N Herts
I've just been reading a Joel Salatin book (Salad Bar Beef) in which he claims that roughly 70% of all the grain grown worldwide goes through multi-stomached animals (ie cows not humans) and goes on to say how much more sensible it would be if farmers stopped growing grain and instead put their land to pasture and grazed cattle, enabling them to eat that which they are best adapted to (ie grass).

70% sounds a bit high to me, but any figure over 10% would be bonkers. The trouble is that we have got too good at growing it and thus enabled the buyers to use it for many mad end-uses from biomass boilers to ethanol plants to concentration camps for cattle. The NFU line about needing to constantly up production in order to feed 9 billion people is obvious tosh, especially as the former USSR lands are only just now cranking up to half their potential, in terms of grain growing. What we as individual farmers can do is not obvious. But here we are looking closely at grassing down some of our less productive land for grazing animals and fertility building so that we can grow cheap grain again in the future. The high input treadmill is not going to get, or remain, profitable any time soon.
 

Michael S

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Matching Green
Way back when cost of production higher as more people required.

Food is now cheap to produce - what's really scary (for UK farmer) is that growers in Russia, Ukraine, Brazil, Argentina still making good money due to FX movements. European and US farmer not doing so well.

Surely the biggest financial disadvantage for European production is the cost of land which in most parts of Europe bears no relation to the output from agricultural production. In the countries listed land is cheap by comparison.
 

Iben

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Fife
Don't suppose anyone has a graph showing land values since the sixties?

Land values in Eu are very high (historically), although values in many countries around the world have increased greatly, like property values.
 

SFI - What % were you taking out of production?

  • 0 %

    Votes: 80 42.3%
  • Up to 25%

    Votes: 66 34.9%
  • 25-50%

    Votes: 30 15.9%
  • 50-75%

    Votes: 3 1.6%
  • 75-100%

    Votes: 3 1.6%
  • 100% I’ve had enough of farming!

    Votes: 7 3.7%

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

  • 1,292
  • 1
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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