CSM EDITORIAL
Farmers play a pivotal role in the United Kingdom, contributing significantly to the nation’s economy, food security, and environmental sustainability. Their tireless efforts and expertise in cultivating crops, raising livestock, and managing agricultural operations are essential for the wellbeing and progress of the nation. Farmers make indispensable contributions to the nation’s social fabric: through their dedication and expertise, they ensure a constant supply of nutritious food, support local economies, conserve natural resources, and maintain the unique landscapes that define the identity of our land. Recognising and supporting the crucial role of farmers is essential to sustain the agricultural sector and foster a prosperous and resilient nation.
Yet British farmers across the land are unhappy and agitated. Meanwhile their European counterparts from Holland (main photo) to Germany to France have taken to the streets to protest – bringing their tractors and trailers with them to block roads. Some Scottish farmers were out in force protesting just this week.
So, what is going on?
First, costs are spiralling. Farmers have faced steep rises in the cost of everything from fertiliser to wages and the energy used in production since the pandemic. Many farmers have left the sector altogether due to financial pressures. According to the National Farmers Union (NFU), 5% of dairy farmers left the industry in 2022. Half of fruit and veg farmers fear going out of business over the next year. There were estimated to be approximately 103,900 farmers working in the United Kingdom as of the second quarter of 2023, compared with 111,300 in the previous quarter. British farmers have faced surging and fluctuating input costs from the war in Ukraine, the phasing-out of an EU-era payment system which helps sustain their income, and a spate of rural crime that police seem powerless to prevent or prosecute.
Second, the supermarkets are still squeezing farmers and not buying enough British produce. Food and farming groups have expressed their dismay at the wafer-thin margins being left for primary producers once everyone else in the food chain has taken their share of the cash. Margins across the whole food chain are tight but processors and farmers suffer unnecessarily when the lion’s share is kept by booming retailers.
Third, the Government has been all over the place with its policies, not allowing farmers to plan ahead. Three secretaries of state for DEFRA (Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs) in the space of a year have each had different approaches to the UK farming sector. The thought of a woke, townie-backed Labour administration on the way has many farmers pulling their hair out. The Australia and New Zealand trade deals left farmers feeling short-changed and angry with Boris Johnson. Recruitment these days is particularly difficult and the young, after a bit of a renaissance, are now thinking twice about agricultural training courses and farming apprenticeships because they see UK farms under so much pressure.
Fourth, the UK’s replacement subsidies scheme to the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, which saw direct payments made to farmers based on the amount of agricultural land they maintain, is unpopular. The new scheme pays farmers to provide public goods such as protecting nature and improving the environment. Ministers insist this will lead to a fairer system and help meet wider climate ambitions, but farmers are sceptical and say the application process is complex and impractical while take-up has been slow. Meanwhile, direct payments have been reduced and ended last year, replaced by delinked payments which stop completely in 2027.
From Jim Webster, a Farmer in Cumbria: To be fair to Defra, their consultation has been very hands on, dealing with ordinary farmers as much as possible, and they do seem to be listening. The application process is complex, but far less complex than previous schemes such as mid-tier which was an utter nightmare. Take up has been slow, but certainly for livestock farmers it is very difficult to find any options in the SFI where the cost of the changes, in lost income, is less than the money the government promises to pay you to do it. Slightly more long term but a lot of the problems can be laid very firmly at the door of those MPs who tried to block Brexit and we had the farce of a government unable to do anything in Parliament. I was involved with various National Parks and others who were working with Defra on ‘tests and trials’. The problem was Defra might want a twelve month or two-year trial, but it could only release money up until the next commons vote, because if the MPs got Brexit cancelled, then all the money Defra was spending on setting up an alternative system would be wasted and Defra staff would doubtless be censured for it.
Fifth, Farmers are fed up to the back teeth of forever getting it in the neck from armchair townie luvvies of the shrill Packham and Monbiot variety who bang on about the desperate need for overnight Net Zero and other policies with unintended consequences. They try to force rewilding on the UK (which will achieve precisely nowt for global temperatures) – rewilding is subsuming farms and putting unbearable pressure on farm communities and other land managers such as gamekeepers (particularly those operating in national parks). These outlying, bungalow-minded dog-whistlers use their social currency to pelt farmers with various brickbats, claiming that British farms are massive polluters … townies lap up their pronouncements because they do not know any better when they should be asking pertinent questions like, “why not buy a chunk of land the size of Britain in South America or Africa and rewild that?” or “have you asked the Indians or the Chinese to rewild?”
Monbiot went as far as calling farmers ‘public enemy number one’ – quite an achievement to paint the half a million working on UK farms as less loved than Al Qaeda.
The drive for net zero is one that farmers are engaged in but there is a speed they can live with and there’s an obvious disconnect between eco-warriors’ unrealistic emergency plans and farming realities, making farmers highly suspicious that the green brigade just want their land. In any case UK farmers are exemplary in the drive towards sustainability: UK agriculture as a whole contributes a mere 10% of the UK’s Greenhouse Gas emissions – not taking into account farms’ ability to also act as a sink. British livestock production is among the most sustainable in the world; 85% of the water consumed by UK sheep and cattle falls as rain on abundant grass – which the UK’s temperate climate is perfectly suited to growing. This grass makes 90% of the feed consumed by UK cattle and sheep. Our carbon footprint is 2.5 times lower than the global average, and our methane emissions have dropped by 10% in the past 30 years. British farmers have never been more environmentally proactive, in recent years planting 10,000 hectares of wildflowers and planting or restoring 30,000km of farmland hedges yet the eco-warriors never stop carping knowing 4 in 5 Brits lives in towns and are disconnected from farmers and farms.
Sixth, farmers feel they lack sound representation. While the NFU and CLA occasionally put up a good fight, other countryside bodies seem too close to Government, are ‘yes men’ MP conveyor belts, or are too inward-looking and achieve far too little. British farmers are some of the most conservative and stoic people on the planet yet even they are being driven, in this perfect storm, to protest. The feeling of having farmers’ backs that the countryside groups should have been engendering has not been forthcoming. Farmers have given up on representative bodies and replaced them with Facebook and WhatsApp groups where farmer energy roars and they feel they get heard.
Finally, farmers feel underappreciated. Do people abuse their mechanics, doctors, nurses or postmen? Farmers provide a critical service and are key workers. They put food on Britons’ plates. Without them our food security as a nation would be imperilled and the likes of Putin would be delighted. Yet farmers feel they are daily taking it in the neck from their fellow Brits, especially from the eco-loons and the (now declining) rump of vegans. Demand for help from charities specialising in aid for farmers, both mental and financial, is increasing. Farmer suicide levels – farming is a lonely task – are already sky high.
What will prevent British farmers from getting in their tractors and blocking the roads? What will keep the shelves of UK cities’ supermarkets full of fresh produce?
Cost stabilisation, sufficient supermarket-farmer pricing empathy, clear Government policy looking many years ahead, a sound CAP replacement, media appreciation (far left-wing eco-warriors putting a sock in it would really help), widespread appreciation of UK farm sustainability efforts (especially by the BBC), refreshed representation and public support like the nurses got during the pandemic – these are all solutions to problems which require a national mood change and more than just the government to solve.
During that pandemic, when the rich hid and the poor fetched stuff, the entire food chain – farmers, their suppliers, all the way up to the retailers – kept working. Perhaps people would like to stop and clap for them too?
The logo of the campaign group No Farmers No Food
More money, less price squeezing. More clarity, less government fudging. More nation state, less globalism. More farming, less starving. More Clarkson, less eco loons. More British produce, less foreign produce. More clapping for farmers, less sniping at farmers.
Back British Farmers, Dear Readers. Now more than ever they require fair reward, political backing and a big hug.
If they do protest, toot your horns out of love not anger.
Dominic Wightman is Editor of Country Squire Magazine – a publication which will always have British farmers’ backs.
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