- Location
- Cornwall.
Richard Haddock is a farmer and farm shop owner in Churston, South Devon
I have been described as a lot of things in my time but I notched up a first this week.
I was attending an event where the speaker was a BBC producer who is involved with the Wildlife Unit. As such you might expect him to know a bit about rare and exotic breeds.
But I was somewhat surprised when he announced that there was an endangered species in the room – and point to me: a British farmer.
The reaction from the rest of the audience was somewhat stunned. After the initial laughter, that is. My reaction? Well, gratitude in a way. Gratitude because you don't normally expect middle-class, urban media types to have their finger on the pulse of rural life. But this one did. And the information that was feeding back to him was somewhat disturbing.
But, of course, totally accurate. British farmers are becoming an endangered species. As endangered as any species will become if it is starved of what it needs to live on. In the case of farmers that's income plain and simple. And the inescapable fact that there isn't enough of it at the moment.
Not for milk, not for meat, not for fruit and vegetables. Fair enough, there may be a modest amount of income trickling in to help them survive from day to day - just. But that's no way to carry on, particularly when there's a growing debt mountain towering over them: borrowings in the dairy sector have risen by more than £1 billion in the last two years, and when you start talking in terms of billions in relation to a relatively modest segment of the industry it gets very scary indeed.
And a hand-to-mouth existence doesn't generate any spare cash for investment: investment in new buildings, equipment, IT systems, stock – all the things that are essential if a farming enterprise is to survive and flourish.
That BBC producer was absolutely right. British farmers are becoming an endangered species and given the speed at which British agriculture is declining I am beginning to wonder seriously – and without the merest degree of alarmism – who is going to feed the nation in the future.
We currently produce only 50 per cent of our own food requirements, a proportion that has been declining steadily for some years. Put in stark terms we are only producing enough food to feed the nation until the end of June, or roughly mid-day on Wednesday. For the rest we have to rely on whatever we can source elsewhere in the world.
And we had a taste of quite how precarious that situation can be when Spain was hit by bad weather in January and suddenly the supply of salad crops dried up and desperate restaurateurs were paying £5 for a lettuce.
This is not a situation anyone should be comfortable about. God forbid that we should have another animal health epidemic in this country – though given our sieve-like border controls it's entirely possible that another disease will be imported. But should one strike us where would our meat come from?
How has this situation come about? Simply by supermarkets keeping prices down to keep their customers happy. By relying on the fact that farmers are getting a baseline subsidy from the EU so they can scrape by on prices that would have looked scandalously low ten years ago.
The public has already had one unpleasant taste of what happens when you keep prices forced down: people start substituting horse meat for beef. If the support of subsidies is suddenly withdrawn and retail prices remain screwed down then many more corners are going to be cut and the quality of our food is inevitably going to suffer – always assuming of course, that there are enough members of our endangered species still in business to produce the basic commodities in the first place.
Richard Haddock is a farmer and farm shop owner in Churston, South Devon
Credit: devonlive.com
