Columnist David Richardson has been waxing lyrical in this week's Farmers Weekly about the joys of February conferences - and the "chance for malice-free mickey-taking" that they present.
They are very much part of farming life, he explains, and a crucial opportunity to catch up on recent developments, exchange business ideas and, of course, engage in a spot of banter with kindred spirits.
As agricultural journalists we go to our fair share of conferences too.
Unfortunately for us, they are usually more about work than pleasure and its pretty much "heads down", capturing those words of wisdom and then deciding how best to present them for a multi-media audience.
My recent trip to the Sentry Conference at Chilford Hall, Cambs was a case in point, with six excellent speakers taking to the podium during the course of the day...
It has to be said that many of the themes were pretty familiar. Food security, climate change, resource depletion and the claim that there will be 9bn mouths to feed by 2050 were mentioned by most, if not all of the speakers.
To rise to the challenge, agriculture is going to have to become much more productive and society is going to have to become more accepting of new technologies, while paying more for what they eat.
As I said, familiar stuff. But it would be unusual to sit through five hours of debate and not learn anything new, and several things got an asterix in my notebook.
The first was the extent to which food waste is an issue. I always knew things were pretty bad in the Third world, but the claim by German economist Harald von Witzke that 40% of yield is lost before the crop is even harvested was a shock, as was the fact that another 30% is lost post-harvest due to poor infrastructure.
And I knew we were pretty careless in the so-called developed world. But the claim by Mark Price of Waitrose that in the UK alone we throw away enough food to provide 60m lunches every day was as shocking as the figure that total food waste comes to £12bn a year - about two-thirds of the value of total agricultural output.
Another thing that struck me was the suggestion by Patrick Wall, former chairman of the European Food Safety Authority, that food traceability is flawed.
During the Irish dioxin crisis a few years ago,the audit trail for bits of pig pretty much ground to a halt in Poland, where the meat was mixed with bits of pigs from other parts of the world before being exported all around Europe - including back to Ireland. Knowing which country, let alone which farm, a particular pork pie or sausage came from was nigh on impossible
Even more shocking was a picture he put up of a whole breaded ham. Produced in Germany for the prime Christmas market, analysis had shown that this seemingly single piece of meat was in fact made up using meat sourced from Chile, Canada and Ireland!
Other interesting snippets included:
• The USA exports 30% of its agricultural output and Barak Obama wants to double this in the next five years.
• The current area of agricultural land available to produce food amounts to just 1ha for every four people on the planet.
• The area of GM crops now being grown in the world is the equivalent of the UK, France, Germany, Ireland and Belgium put together.
• There are only 13 abattoirs left in the whole of the USA.
• Over 200,000 people a day go for walks in the British countryside.
This week I'm off to another conference - the NFU's annual conference at the NEC. Leadership elections aside, let's hope it's as interesting as the Sentry Conference.
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Total income from Farming in Wales up 60%. Any comment? There's no news article online.
Hi Gravata,
Yes, I noticed the Welsh farm income figures came out last week and, in fact, we did cover it on FWi at the following link http://www.fwi.co.uk/Articles/2010/02/19/120011/Welsh-farm-incomes-on-the-up.htm
My very brief comment on it is that this is very much a reflection of the product mix of Welsh farming, with beef cattle and sheep trading at relatively firm levels during 2009. The weakness of sterling has undoubtedly helped, especially in the boost it has given to direct payments and hill supports. But the rise in income per person employed in Welsh ariculture is more modest - about 7% - and within these figures there is bound to be a huge variation, with some businesses doing well and some businesses struggling. Dairy farmers will be in the latter category.