At breakfast in the Farmers Club in London this morning I spoke to an egg producer who supplies ASDA and Tesco's. Yesterday he had been to see ASDA buyers who had agreed to increase the prices he would be paid to just about cover his higher feed costs. This morning he was going to see the buyers at Tesco's and was confident they would agree to something similar. He was happy that he was being fairly treated and I was surprised and pleased for him.
The same cannot be said for many pig producers according to a senior pig politician I also met at the Club. The build-up of pig numbers on farms because of F&M restrictions is being made worse by increasing imports from Denmark and Holland who seem able to supply cheaper sides thereby improving retail margins. The highly developed and economical processing and marketing sectors in those countries is well known, of course. But they must, surely, be paying more for feed, just like UK producers, so how can they undercut the UK to such an extent? However they are doing it the situation on most UK pig farms is extremely serious and will get worse if prices don't rise substantially.
The third person at the Club with whom I discussed such matters was a senior NFU man who had just returned from the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool. On the train he had sat next to a prominent conservationist (who had also been there) who spoke of widespread concern among "greens" at potential loss of habitat as a result of the abolition of set-aside. The NFU man had explained the brutal facts about current lack of profitability of grazing livestock. F&M and now Bluetongue had wrecked the economy of production and now the high cost of feed was the last straw for many. He had asked the conservationist to try to influence the food trade to pay more for beef and lamb. Because if returns don't improve, he said, there will be no animals to graze our countryside and every acre of grass capable of growing arable crops will be ploughed. And that, he emphasised, would be far more serious for wildlife than the loss of a relatively small area of set-aside.