If you dislike the idea of intensive farming and the use of battery conditions such as these (due to be phased out by 2012) you may be interested in tonight's Costing the Earth on Radio 4 - 9.00pm.





Uncomfortable as we may be with intensive farming on welfare grounds, it nonetheless usually carries a significantly lower carbon footprint than more extensive systems. Tonight's Costing the Earth should be interesting.

If you want evidence that the Government isn't thinking, you may need to look no further than your nearest forestry commission wood.


Close to us, recently felled forestry is being left to regenerate naturally. This master stroke of management will provide decades of unproductive scrub at a time when the world needs timber fast. Not utilising forestry here (for environmental reasons) simply reduces timber supply increasing the price and the risk that yet more virgin rain forest is felled to satisfy demand. Crazy or what?

Any thought that the arable sector was in for a bumper period is receding fast as input costs soar. In less than a year fuel and fertiliser costs have doubled and now as the area sown to wheat grows, so the futures have fallen. Making money in agriculture is always a lot harder than it first looks.

After a decade of trying to rid UK agriculture of its productive ability, the government has finally woken up to its importance.


Worldwide, the rising cost of food is pushing millions into absolute poverty while at home the cost of the family shopping basket has soared.


"something must be done"


Unfortunately the rush to condemn biofuels is missing the point as yesterday's rise in the price of crude illustrates. Reserves of fossil fuels are declining fast and their use is contributing to global warming. Some when soon we are going to have to learn how better to harvest today's sunlight for our energy needs. Besides which, in the UK we hardly have a biofuels industry anyway. With the exception of British Sugar's bioethanol plant (a great use of sugar beet), UK manufactured biofuel is thin on the ground.


Sadly government thinking on agriculture continues to run decades out of date. In the 1980s we needed an environmental policy. In the 1990s we needed a biofuels policy. Right now we need a production policy - one that helps maximise the effectiveness of our land for food, energy and conservation. No sign of that however as the government continues to strangle the industry with red tape and reduce investment.


Given the long term trends of climate change, rising population, rising wealth, changing patterns of consumption and the need for biofuels, agriculture now needs to come centre stage in government thinking – critically we need a renewal in the importance of science. Out must go the tired anti-agriculture prejudice; lets make a start by investing in


production efficiency
second generation biofuels
wastes for fertiliser
genetic modification
diffused CHP


and our universities. Agriculture will play a huge role in world affairs over the coming decades. Let's hope UK agriculture is part of it.

Yesterday's demonstration by pig farmers at Downing Street marks a desperate attempt to raise awareness of the economic difficulties they are facing.


The reasons are not hard to see; soaring grain prices have destroyed margins and higher welfare obligations add costs that others do not carry. As things stand producers are giving up fast.


With UK self sufficiency in pork products at only around 60%, you would expect supermarkets to be keen to retain their UK suppliers and offer a bit more. But its not happening. And don't expect any interest from the Government.


If you think that the UK's best interests are served by having a domestic pig industry that offers quality meat produced under high welfare standards, then please write and say so to any or all of the following:


Mr Justin King
Chief Executive
J Sainsbury PLC
33 Holborn
London
EC1N 2HT


Mr Marc Bolland
Chief Executive
WM Morrison Supermarkets PLC
Hilmore House
Gain Lane
Bradford
BD3 7DL


Sir Terry Leahy
Chief Executive
Tesco PLC
Tesco House
Delamare Road
Cheshunt
Hertfordshire
EN8 9SL


Mr Andy Bond
Chief Executive
ASDA
Asda House
Southbank
Great Wilson Street
Leeds
LS11 5AD

Its easy to agree with the gist of Hugh’s Chicken Run and Jamie’s Fowl Dinners. Chicken are sentient beings and surely deserve to be grown in conditions akin to those the RSPCA espouses in its Freedom Foods Assurance Scheme. Lets face it we can all afford an extra quid for a chicken.


But hang on. It’s a £1 increase on a £2.50 bird which by my reckoning is a 40% increase in price. Try saying £1.60 for a loaf of bread and you’ll get the measure.


As a society we rear 850 million broilers per annum so at £1 per go we are talking about adding the better part of £1 billion to the consumer’s cost of food. And its not as if the £1 increase in price is going to give the farmer any extra profit which could be taxed and redistributed to society. Slower growing birds that require more space mean lower annual throughput for each building - 6 birds per unit of area compared with 10 conventionally. And per unit of meat there’s a need for more feed, more heating, more ventilation and more bedding. Production becomes a whole lot more expensive.


Welfare costs.


Can we afford it?

Well over 100 hectares of our farm were “in dispute” following a recent inspection by the RPA so it is with some relief that the latest letter finds us in the clear. Some fields are ever so slightly bigger, some the other way with a net difference of just 0.09ha. Overall that’s an error rate with a lot of zeros in it.


Its all beyond me to understand the point of all this micro mapping. Two centuries ago the Ordnance Survey started mapping everything to perfectly acceptable levels of accuracy. Hundreds of millions of pounds later we are no further forward. It's no wonder government finances are in a mess.

It may seem odd that at the conclusion of a year which has seen avian influenza, foot and mouth, bluetongue and poor profitability affect the livestock sector, that there should be reason to be cheerful for agriculture.


Of course it couldn't get much worse, but that's not the point.


In the space of a few summer months many crop (soft) commodities doubled in price. This was no speculative fever but the first step in a re-rating of agricultural produce that reflects rising worldwide demand set against a constrained supply.


Agricultural cycles run in decades; expect this year's changes as just the start. Agriculture is back.


Happy New Year

I blogged some time ago about the dangers of sharing data with the Government through its Whole Farm Approach. Not only is its data protection statement completely inadequate, it is important to understand what happens over time.


Today’s Government initiative to collect “helpful information” quickly accumulates large quantities of commercial and personal data. In due course the scheme is replaced, officials move on, a new department takes over and nobody is quite sure what was important. An official request comes in from a “partner organisation” that doesn’t really need to know, the data is submitted in its entirety without protection, its inadvertently published and once out becomes a matter of public record.


The small matter of the loss of 25 million personal records (mine and my children’s and perhaps yours too) by HMRC doesn’t therefore come as a huge surprise; we have become culturally complacent about data in the digital age. If Inland Revenue procedures are so lax as to allow a lowly official complete access to copy and distribute the child benefit database, what hope the security of our data elsewhere?

Yesterday on The World at One, Professor Lang clearly articulated what we in the industry have been saying for some time; we need to start thinking about supporting a productive agriculture in the UK. Its not just that the days of cheap food supplies are coming to an end, the days of secure food supplies are becoming threatened.

Climate change coupled with rising demand for agricultural commodities for both food and energy are putting huge pressure on supplies. It is good news therefore that the Government is looking into the question of food security although it remains to be seen whether Defra's thinking has advanced since its recent paper

“Food Security and the UK” published December 2006 and about which I have already commented.

Here it argues that self sufficiency is unimportant and that free trade in foods will always provide us with food security. But what if that food is not available? Surely a reasonable degree of self sufficiency is a prerequisite to food security?

According to recent analysis by the BBC’s “Costing the earth” and The Times, farming is partly to blame for this summer’s floods. Apparently:


• farmers have been draining their land
• trees and hedgerows have been dug up
• soil has become compacted by heavier machinery
• the wrong sort of cultivations are being undertaken
• tramlines are acting as gullies for rainwater
• livestock numbers have increased


- and all of these are contributing to flooding. Its pretty damning stuff except that its complete nonsense.


Farmers have been draining their land since Roman times, but there has been no recent increase - quite the opposite - poor profitability has prevented essential maintenance.


Hedgerow length has been increasing for the last 15 years and there is now more woodland in the UK than at any time in the last 1000 years. Unmentioned there are also hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland in environmental schemes and set-aside – all of which are beneficial for flood management.


Soil compaction is largely a problem of the past. When the great mechanisation of agriculture began in the 1960’s, tractors used narrow tyres that did cause compaction. Tractors may be bigger now but the tyres they drive on are dramatically bigger. Today’s low ground pressure tyres cause minimal compaction.


With a few exceptions, fields don’t get cultivated in May and June. This is the period when crops are in the ground and growing most vigorously, utilising more rainfall than at any other time of year.


Tramlines of course still exist in fields. But whereas 12 metre spacing was the norm 20 years ago, the average now is probably over 24 metres – in other words they are less than half the problem they once were.


A quick check at livestock numbers in the farming today section of this site will show that over the past 15 years livestock numbers have declined markedly. This has been particularly so in southern areas (generally drought prone) that were badly hit by the flooding.


Easy as it is to try to blame agriculture, the analysis doesn’t stack up. If you get as much as 5 inches of rain in a day, and over the summer period the rainfall breaks all the records – its going to flood.


Soggy work!

Yesterday the BBC’s “You and Yours” discussed the Green Belt.


The Natural England representative on the program said that he was happy to see biodiverse greenbelt but, wanted less of it where it was monoculture agriculture.


For the agency that’s charged with knowing England’s natural environment, the representative seemed somewhat ill informed - monoculture agriculture died out in the 1980’s. Still maybe this is what we should expect.


So let’s not reflect on a prospective UK population of 70 million, tumbling self-sufficiency, nor on droughts, floods, failed crops and soaring world food prices brought on by population growth and demand for biofuels; No: let’s just hope that somewhere else in the world there’s space for productive agriculture that has sufficient surplus to meet our food needs.


Has it really come to this?

In recent days I have received some long and clear, automated messages on my answerphone from Defra advising me of our status in respect of Bluetongue and Foot and Mouth. This is most welcome communication and a big step forward for disease surveillance and biosecurity. Full marks!

The first fields of long term set-aside around us have now been ploughed up and are ready to return to arable cropping.


Set-aside has been much maligned for distorting the marketplace and encouraging farmers to grow weeds. Whatever the criticism, over time a small part has become usefully biodiverse with much more providing rough habitat that has encouraged insects, mammals and birds. Whilst this was a by-product of a market control tool, it is nonetheless disappointing that Defra and Natural England have been unable to quickly put in place an environmental scheme that could capture some of the gain that has arisen.


As set-aside ends it is noteworthy that:


Farmers produced environmental gain out of something that was never supposed to produce any, and having produced it for free, the Government wasn’t prepared to pay to save it. Defra are happy to squander hundreds of millions of pounds on consultants and ludicrously bureaucratic systems for “micro-managing” every square inch of the countryside through the RPA yet they are unable to fund the tiny cost of preserving key habitats in arable areas.


A poor record. Par for the course.

Confirmation that Bluetongue disease is circulating in East Anglia has cast a new shadow on the livestock sector with ruminants unable to move out of the protection zone – an area embracing most of the south east from Lincolnshire to Sussex.


This disease could be ruinous with stock losses and movement restrictions making some livestock farming impossible until a vaccine becomes available next year. Even then it may be months before production is able to meet the backlog of demand. In the meantime we can only hope for the prompt arrival of a hard winter to control the midge population to prevent further spread of the disease.