If you can't feed a country, you haven't got a country.

[Castle Farm]

Do we really need strawberries outside a natural growing season ?
I live in Herefordshire and there are acres of polytunnels Ugly isn't the word for it.

Everyone who can get off their arse and do a days work should be drafted into a land army, not sitting around doing drugs and drink and playing video games to clean up the state we have allowed it to get in.
Why we pay these leaders of our country I don't know..Couldn't run a pee up in a brewery

 

[llamedos]

The ignorance and arrogance of those who have and never will face unemployment is astounding.

 

[renewablejohn]

Should have thought about the critical role the small market gardeners do in feeding this country before excluding all under 5 hectare from support. A mere 16000 farmers.

 

[Henarar]

FFS.
Are strawberries, blackberries and blueberries essential to sustain life?
I say good riddance to the EU and big business that has killed off all the little diversifications that sustained holdings up and down the land.

Something in this I spose what good to the country is a huge business that employs foreign workers short term and then they take the money back home, I spose they pay some tax here ? what else

 

[Henarar]

Should have thought about the critical role the small market gardeners do in feeding this country before excluding all under 5 hectare from support. A mere 16000 farmers.

are you one of them ? if so with a forum name like you have I suspect you get your share

 

[DocPhil001]

A lot of employers like to employ farmers sons, as at least they have a good work ethic..

my youngest brother just signed up for the army and the guy doing his assessment said he would like more farm kids joining because they work hard and are made of tougher stuff!

 

[dstudent]

brits have been told that the futures lies in highly paid jobs which you get by going to uni and then you get sit in a nice warm office, working with your hands and doing a dirty manual job is considered second class, and now JC wants to give everyone a free pass to uni

I think or what I ve seen latley is that nowdays you got to have a degree for everything, when once an NVQ or some similar qualification would do, not anymore, look at nursing and social care. Especially if you want to advance in a more managerial position, and want to earn more, experience should count for something. and as things are I believe everyone should be given the chance if they so chose, otherwise it only perpetuates an unfair elitist and class system IMHO

 

[Steevo]

Should have thought about the critical role the small market gardeners do in feeding this country before excluding all under 5 hectare from support. A mere 16000 farmers.

Maybe so, but I doubt that losing £1k a year was critical to their business. If it was, I'd suggest their business wasn't as viable as it might have been for the long term.

 

[Ffermer Bach]

It's all very well saying "just get the abritish people without jobs to do it" but how exactly are we going to do this? I'm not convinced most of the abritish unemployed are even capable of doing many of these jobs properly even if they were made to.

All that will happen is these companies will move production overseas if they can't get the workforce here.

I read a very interesting book, called i think the welfare trait, explaining how our welfare system encourages traits that cause people to become unemployable, and the small tweaks that could be implemented to make our welfare system encourage employ ability characteristics. The author was not allowed to talk at a university (not sure if it was the oxford union), because his views were "upsetting" to the students. He said that the most important thing to be employable is, conscientiousness and reliability, followed by being able to work well with others, and finally skills, but without out skills a reliable worker who people like to work with would always have a place in a job, even if they are unskilled.

 

[rob1]

I think or what I ve seen latley is that nowdays you got to have a degree for everything, when once an NVQ or some similar qualification would do, not anymore, look at nursing and social care. Especially if you want to advance in a more managerial position, and want to earn more, experience should count for something. and as things are I believe everyone should be given the chance if they so chose, otherwise it only perpetuates an unfair elitist and class system IMHO

I think we should have free uni courses for some degrees, medical ones especially and maybe engineering and science, IE the ones that benefit society but those mickey mouse ones such as art/media etc then people should pay for that, which they would only do as now when they earn a decent wage, no one has to pay upfront so cant see why the current system stops the "non elite" goimg to uni. Another that would help would be to get the courses done far quicker, my wife was working as a midwife had three kids under 9 a useless husband and still did her health visiting degree in a year , yet now its a THREE YEAR course like most others, my son did a grapic design course in three years and said he could have condensed it into around nine months

 

[dstudent]

I think we should have free uni courses for some degrees, medical ones especially and maybe engineering and science, IE the ones that benefit society but those mickey mouse ones such as art/media etc then people should pay for that, which they would only do as now when they earn a decent wage, no one has to pay upfront so cant see why the current system stops the "non elite" goimg to uni. Another that would help would be to get the courses done far quicker, my wife was working as a midwife had three kids under 9 a useless husband and still did her health visiting degree in a year , yet now its a THREE YEAR course like most others, my son did a grapic design course in three years and said he could have condensed it into around nine months

I agree on many of the points you raised, however it does become elitist when you have a young person from a poor family who has to make the decision to go straight to work to feed cloth and put a roof over their heads and help support their family or spend 4 years incurring massive debts and live in abject poverty.
Also consider this tertiary education is free or at much much lower costs than here in the majority of European Countries, this creates a clear disadvantage for young people in the UK entering the job market

 

[Robigus]

I haven't read Jay Rayner's article but many of the worlds strongest economies run on imported food so the basic concept is fatally flawed.
If there ever was to be a global food shortage it is the richest that would get it where ever it was produced.

 

[rob1]

I haven't read Jay Rayner's article but many of the worlds strongest economies run on imported food so the basic concept is fatally flawed.
If there ever was to be a global food shortage it is the richest that would get it where ever it was produced.

sadly that is true,but as we have seen this last couple of weeks wars/terrorism and cyber attacks could make getting it here the problem

 

[renewablejohn]

are you one of them ? if so with a forum name like you have I suspect you get your share

Yes I am one of them but what does my forum name have to do with anything.

 

[renewablejohn]

Maybe so, but I doubt that losing £1k a year was critical to their business. If it was, I'd suggest their business wasn't as viable as it might have been for the long term.

No but when your competing with the rest of Europe who manipulate there schemes to protect small farmers so that everyone has a living wage on the first few acres than a lower rate per acre on the rest of the land it makes for a far more robust farming structure than the slipper farmer of the UK getting paid just for acreage. Just think if that 1k was 15k how beneficial that would be to our small farmers.

 

[Hindsight]

I think we should have free uni courses for some degrees, medical ones especially and maybe engineering and science, IE the ones that benefit society but those mickey mouse ones such as art/media etc then people should pay for that, which they would only do as now when they earn a decent wage, no one has to pay upfront so cant see why the current system stops the "non elite" goimg to uni. Another that would help would be to get the courses done far quicker, my wife was working as a midwife had three kids under 9 a useless husband and still did her health visiting degree in a year , yet now its a THREE YEAR course like most others, my son did a grapic design course in three years and said he could have condensed it into around nine months

Some of those mickey mouse degrees lead to a lot of folk who create things (design / films / music / advertising etc etc) that the UK sells abroad as well as locally to generating considerable economic activity - pays the taxes that allow government to pay farmers a social payment!. Last time I thought about this I took this to be a benefit to society as well.

So a doctor / engineer pays no fees but a world class designer who studies design and ensures Jaguar LandRover stay a world beating company pays. Hey ho. I concur though on possibly reducing the time of courses. .

 

[rob1]

Some of those mickey mouse degrees lead to a lot of folk who create things (design / films / music / advertising etc etc) that the UK sells abroad as well as locally to generating considerable economic activity - pays the taxes that allow government to pay farmers a social payment!. Last time I thought about this I took this to be a benefit to society as well.

So a doctor / engineer pays no fees but a world class designer who studies design and ensures Jaguar LandRover stay a world beating company pays. Hey ho. I concur though on possibly reducing the time of courses. .

I know what youre saying but how many world beating design jobs are there ? And they earn mega bucks so can easily pay the fees, yes I know they pay a lot of tax too,but there are hundreds each year that take these course and never get a job in that field. I would sooner that the government paid for far more training for apprenticeships and things like plumbing, building and electrics, skills that we are short of and pay good money

 

[Hindsight]

I know what youre saying but how many world beating design jobs are there ? And they earn mega bucks so can easily pay the fees, yes I know they pay a lot of tax too,but there are hundreds each year that take these course and never get a job in that field. I would sooner that the government paid for far more training for apprenticeships and things like plumbing, building and electrics, skills that we are short of and pay good money

Maybe - but it is a rich tapestry of courses and opportunities that is required not some myopic view that all Arts course are left leaning loons / wasters. I apologise in advance if this offends it is a generalisation not a personal comment about your earlier post. But there does appear some sentiment along these lines on this forum.

Taking this point forward over breakfast of kippers (delicious) am just reading an article in yesterdays Times about Alt J. Not sure how up you an music but a very successful indie rock band formed in 2007 by four guys who met at Leeds University who studied Fine Art and English who openly say they went to study at Uni hoping to form a band. Look them up. They sell out stadiums around the world and sell music around the world - now is that better for UK economy than a farmer in Lincolnshire producing subsidised spring barley to pop on a boat to Saudi. (World's complex place)

Best wishes,

PS - Alt J have just released third album - looks good. Loads of work for designers / stage technicians when they tour the album - so Arts folks and also apprenticed electricians etc.

 

[Osca]

People need to be incentivised to do the work, and not incentivised to sit on their arse watching loose women.

That would start in primary school, inculcating the old fashioned virtues of a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, and doing whatever job fell to you as best you can.

My daughter - mid twenties - was just saying the other day how much she enjoyed berry picking as a child, and how she wished that sort of thing was still available here. We caught the tail-end of the old days, when big gangs of locals would spill out of the cities and spend the summer harvesting strawberries and then rasps, children in tow, paid by the punnet, cash in hand; a huge incentive, with the children learning that a bit of hard work means pocket money; except in the case of one particular matriarch, we'd got past the stage where you surrendered all you earned to The Family, to pay for next year's school uniform; but still, the berries sustained us through a few difficult years, when there wasn't much work around and childcare costs over the summer holidays made a regular job impossible.

There was plenty wrong with this, of course - not least that a few of those pickers would be moonlighting on benefits (please note, I wasn't one of them); add to that child labour and H&S; and the wages, however fast you picked, were generally crap - the rate set very low - it was the fact that it was piece work that kept you picking - you felt you'd get onto a good dreel in a minute and just fly, but in fact we would usually be getting below minimum wage. Yet this made for some wonderful summers and I am glad we got to experience it and that my daughter remembers it so fondly.

A couple of summers ago I looked again at berry-picking - it doesn't seem to exist as it used to. Wages have improved tremendously - guaranteed minimum wage now - no more piecework. The advent of polytunnels has made for a much longer season and steadier job, unhindered by weather; no more days when you want to earn but cannot (but no more glorious summers in the open air). H&S demands proper facilities - no more doing what the bears do - (though to be fair, most places I worked had a toilet; but time was money and it was a long walk away). And no kids - so no work available for that large part of the old workforce, young mums with children, as even the improved wage will not cover childcare. In fact no jobs for locals at all - a captive workforce of usually young Eastern Europeans, living on farm.

It isn't laziness that prevents local people taking these jobs - it is the whole infrastructure surrounding them. Local people used to do this work and do it well; but now the system prevents it.

 

[Osca]

Also, one thing about that article that really annoys me - the author is trying to screw some sympathy out of us by talking about the workers' on-farm village and it's home comforts; the access to internet, the Tesco's deliveries and the little flower gardens. So, how did that get past the planners? You try and put a single caravan on a small farm and see what happens; the suspicion is that it is the thin end of the wedge; that it will become a permanent dwelling and on the strength of that, the Planning Department will order you to remove it. I just read recently of a smallholder up here who produces lamb and I think beef from her own holding, has just put in for planning permission to live on site and has promptly been told instead, to clear the site and remove all shelters, vehicles, FENCES and GATES despite agricultural status and clear - if small - business credentials. Yet a whole semi-permanent village can creep in in support of a big business and the planners lie down and roll over to have their tummies tickled? And the public, many of whom will have had their own planning battles, are supposed to sympathise because it has run it's course and may now need to go? (Not that I think it will).