Food for Thought

The industry’s response to DEFRA's latest farm income figures has been lukewarm and rightly so.

The figures do show an increase in the Total Income from Farming and in average farm incomes. But when you look at the figures in more detail they are pretty dismal.

Average net farm income per cereals farm for 2006/7 is estimated at £27,900 but the figure for lowland grazing livestock farms is just £7,700 and the figure for hill livestock producers only £9,300.

FW's new Big Debate initiative, which asks whether wind turbines are a good thing for farming, has caught the attention of FW's arable editor Robert Harris. He writes...

People who think wind turbines are beautiful either have no empathy at all for our beautiful British countryside, or they are seriously myopic. Or perhaps they just have a vested interest in them.

To me, it seems to be the ultimate irony that, in the name of greenness, supporters of wind power are willing to see these turbines blighting the most breathtaking areas of the UK.

And we’re not just talking about the wild, windy uplands and islands, where they’ll be visible for miles around, a man-made structure poking its unnatural, symmetrical ugliness hundreds of feet above once unspoilt terrain. Any suitable lowland site that enjoys a bit of a breeze seems to be fair game, too.

If you want to see what other farmers think of the levy boards then it is worth wading through the results of the survey work that Accenture has recently carried out on behalf of DEFRA. It shows what people think should be the priorities of the new levy board and the six sector companies.

There are some common themes – farmers in every sector think that more emphasis should be put on consumer information and promotion. They also think far less emphasis should be put on activities around farm assurance schemes.

The following post is written by Richard Allison, editor of Farmers Weekly's sister magazine Poultry World:

Wander down any high street in the UK and ask shoppers to name a poultry company, the most likely reply will be Bernard Matthews followed by “bootiful.” It is one of the biggest success stories of the poultry industry with its wholesome, family image.

The company has single-handedly transformed turkey into an everyday dish, not just something for Christmas.

Also unique is the fact that Bernard Matthews has maintained its own brand over the years while many others have disappeared, being replaced by supermarket own labels.

However, will the brand survive the avian flu outbreak? It raises the fear that the brand will be permanently damaged.

The following post is written by Richard Allison, editor of Farmers Weekly's sister magazine Poultry World:

“It’s a poultry problem, not a people problem.” That’s how an expert summed up the situation during a TV interview, after being asked: “should the public be worried by the avian flu outbreak.”

But judging by the media coverage, we are at risk of seeing an outbreak of consumer panic. And like the flu, it’s highly contagious.

The consequence of consumer panic is greater than the disease itself. So it’s up to poultry producers to reassure people not to panic and stop eating poultry by dispelling the myths.

People need the facts so that they can make an informed decision. It doesn’t help when you watch news reader after news reader use the phrase: “This is the same strain that has killed 160 people.” And then fail to put this into context.

The Soil Association's conference drew more than 600 people to Cardiff a couple of weeks ago. FW's deputy business editor Ian Ashbridge reflects on the message of peak-oil - and what society might look like in a powered-down world...

Do you switch off the light when you leave a room? Turn the TV off or leave it on standby? Do you wash clothes at 30 or 40? Buy local food? Compost your kitchen waste? Grow your own veg?

Well, you'd better start - and even then it might not be enough.

It's called climate change. Or global warming. Or we-can't-overlook-this-thing-any-more. And if that wasn't enough, a growing number of people believe we are at or very near "peak-oil" - the year when oil extraction peaks and fossil fuel stocks start to decline rapidly.

Because the Soil Association isn't just about organic food and farming anymore. Director Patrick Holden believes the "second chapter" of its work lies in working to equip society for a post-fossil fuel age.

He suspects future generations will look back with incredulity at the twentieth century - the time when we squandered the accumulated energy resources of 150 million years of planetary evolution in a few decades.

It sometimes seems as if there is never any good news for the farming industry. But today there is – if you are in Scotland.

The Scottish Executive has announced that it is going to introduce legislation forcing all catering outlets to declare the country of origin of the beef they serve.

With one in five people regularly choosing to eat out, rather than stay at home and cook, it is an important step forward.

Research shows that country of origin is important to the public when it comes to meat and many diners assume they are being served domestically-produced beef when they are out, even when they are not. Now they are going to know.

Farmers Weekly technical editor Charles Abel spent yesterday at the Sentry Farming conference. And now he asks: Can we learn from the East?

What future farming? How about an 86,000ha integrated farming business? That was one stark image to emerge from Wednesday’s packed Sentry Farming conference near Cambridge.

This monstrosity of a farming operation is managed by a Brit and backed by Russian oil tycoons (see Crops 10 Feb). Each of Agrico’s farm units in southern Russia spans 10,000ha, with 150ha fields, low-cost labour and the “Mother of all machinery toyboxes”, including 90 tractors, 90 combines and 11 self-propelled sprayers – all brand-spanking new from John Deere.

Crops are established at the rate of 284ha/hour, and harvested at 240ha/hr. It’s ugly to look at, but yields well and best of all is cheap. Milling wheat yields at least 4.5t/ha, well up on Russia’s 1.8t/ha national average, and costs just £205/ha to grow, covering everything from seed to depreciation, labour and finance.

It’s not a unique enterprise. Investors around the world reckon farm commodities are a rising market, on the back of surging demand for biofuel and food, and are creating colossal low-cost businesses to pursue the anticipated rewards.

So what’s the message for UK farmers? Head east? Hardly – the hassles are immense. Beware the onslaught? Hopefully, not, if we can differentiate our produce. Emulate the pioneers? Yes, almost certainly. Their mantra is clear – scale matters.

UK farmers have just one chance of competing head-to-head, and that is through a whole new round of collaboration. Those who think UK farming has already done its restructuring should maybe think again.

Useful links:

Agrico
Sentry
John Deere

Boris Johnson is on typically good form on his blog, defending good old Bernard Matthews and his turkeys. Have a read! Brings a smile to a Friday morning.

The poultry industry is putting great effort into reaching out to consumers to reassure them that poultry meat and eggs are safe to eat. We’ve seen several poultry farmers on the TV and it’s a credit to them that they are prepared to face the media.

But their hard work is being partially undone by the government’s mixed messages.

We have the Food Standards Agency reiterating its advice that poultry meat and eggs are safe to eat, posing no risk to human health.

It explained that even if virus is present in meat or eggs, several factors will contribute to preventing or limiting its effects on people. First, the virus is easily killed by cooking. Second, even if it is still present after cooking, the virus is destroyed by saliva and by gastric acid. And there are very few receptors in the gut that allows the virus to enter the body.

But then you had the chief scientist David King saying that he couldn’t rule out having to withdraw turkey products from supermarket shelves as a precautionary measure if they found that contaminated meat had found its way into the food chain.

The result is a mixed message. It’s this inconsistency that puts doubts in consumer minds at a time that they need reassurance and leadership from a joined-up government.

Those of you who follow the activities of Farmers Weekly can't fail to have noticed our food miles campaign last summer. It's been an incredible journey and suddenly now everyone is talking Food Miles - Tesco and M & S for example have all 'bigged it up' in their recent corporate announcements.

Now it seems flowers are under the same scrutiny. A Telegraph report on 10 February quotes government figures suggesting the average bunch of flowers has flown 33,800 miles.

Makes you think what the environmental cost of Valentine's Day must be.

Of course there are flowers that grow in the winter without the need of a hothouse, but I guess the variety of colours and smells is rather limited.

So what about moving Valentine's Day to the middle of the summer when our own flowers in the UK are in season? I'm sure the 'canonisers' may have something to say about it...but somehow I feel another campaign coming on...!

FWi is in the news again. Barely a fortnight after breaking exclusively the news that the government is to be sued over Foot and Mouth by a group of pig swill feeders, now The Guardian newspaper has picked up on the goings on of the UK's leading farming site.

"Farmers take online bull by the horns" it headlines its article in today's paper. "With 11 forums, some including more than 20,000 posts, as well as blogs and podcasts and a specialised farming search engine, the site has come into its own..."

But don't think we're stopping there. The FWi team has ambitious plans for the site this year, including a new forum platform which, while long promised, really is now only weeks away...

The last load of Yorkshire sugar beet was yesterday delivered to British Sugar's York plant.

The final 29.5t load was sent in by Helperby grower Richard Spilman, whose family have been growing the crop since the 1940s.

We’re a fairly mellow lot at Farmers Weekly, but each of us has a few issues that get us ranting! Here is a selection from senior arable writer Andrew Blake…

Can anyone explain why TV and radio weather forecasters suffer so much verbal diarrhoea?

Why do they seem unable to utter the word “towards” without prefacing it with “as we head”?

Why do they insist on telling us that the rain will move “its way”?

And does anyone else regularly refer to the evening/morning “hours”?

Even the BBC shipping forecast, that last bastion of broadcasting brevity, occasionally comes under attack from one lady presenter who always adds a “the” before “wind”.

And while we’re on the subject, why do so many people (FW staff included) talk about “weather conditions”? The O & E dictionary defines weather as ‘atmospheric conditions’.

Another oft-seen nonsense, in my view, is “dose rate” – it’s either a dose or a rate.

And as for “quad-bike”! How daft can you get?

If you agree with Andrew, then you might enjoy his own blog Verbal Diarrhoea

A couple of week’s ago I interviewed a man called Stuart Burgess who has the job of lobbying government to make sure that rural communities are considered when they are policy-making (the interview is also in today's Farmers Weekly).

One of the issues he was talking about was rural housing - suggesting that nearly every village could cope with a development of between 6 and 12 affordable homes.

I live in suburbia, so this doesn’t really apply to me. But if I think about the village in which I grew up (which probably has about 100 houses) then I like to think I wouldn’t object to the idea.

If six to 12 houses are what it needs to keep a community alive and developing, I think it is a price worth paying.

It’s been a gloomy two weeks for the poultry industry and it’s easy to get depressed about the negative headline. But I was reminded yesterday of the real positive buzz in the egg sector.

I was one of three judges going through the many entries for this year’s British Egg Industry Council’s Egg Awards and as every year, I’m taken back by the high level of innovation in the egg sector.

Several entries caught my eye, including several ready-to-cook egg-based products, such as a ready-to cook omelette which comes in various flavours. Consumers simply open the pack, pour and cook. It's that simple: I believe it will prove popular as consumers spend less time preparing meals.

Then there was an egg line being promoted on environmental grounds by having a low carbon footprint. Egg boxes feature a picture of wind turbine and it states that the eggs are "from hens carefully reared using sustainable energy sources, such as wind and solar power." And with a feed mill close by to negate road miles, the carbon emissions of the poultry units are almost zero.

The pack also states that "1000 hens reared this way saves 60 trees."

I believe climate change and the whole green issue could become a significant marketing advantage. It’s certainly a means of differentiating your eggs from your competitors.

And if you are wondering who the winners are, you will have to wait until the awards dinner at the BEIC/NFU Egg Conference on March 22.

Richard Allison
Editor – Poultry World

David Miliband caused a hell of fuss at the start of the year when he said that organic food was no healthier.

But The Independent is carrying a story today which suggests that for some commodities you can't even say that organic production is better for the environment.

"The report for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs found "many" organic products had lower ecological impacts than conventional methods using fertilisers and pesticides. But academics at the Manchester Business School (MBS), who conducted the study, said that was counterbalanced by other organic foods - such as milk, tomatoes and chicken - which are significantly less energy efficient and can be more polluting than intensively-farmed equivalents."

The full report is here.

Just found this bovine TB blog and thought it looked really interesting. Seems to be written by six farmers from across the country.

Here's a post from deputy business editor Ian Ashbridge

I'm often mystified by how many farmers rubbish the idea of central grain storage. Can anyone help?

It seems to me the pros heavily outweigh the cons. Most grain storage on farms in this country is woefully out of date, hopelessly energy inefficient, is prone to packing up in the middle of harvest, and requires extra labour to run it. I can't be the only one familiar with the sight of a bigger pile of grain outside the shed than the one in it.

True, there's plenty of shiny stuff out there too. But at what enormous capital cost? Surely better to join one of the many co-operatives for a much more modest charge and let them have all the worry and hassle?

They can also dry it, treat it and blend it, and deliver it to the miller or consumer without a farmer having to drop everything because the grain merchant has arrived to sample it or there's a lorry sitting impatiently in the yard.

Sure, you can't grab the market price rallies when they come, as you could if it was sitting in your own store and you were marketing it yourself. But pool prices have been encouraging in the recent, darker years, and how much of those rallies can be lost in a screenings or rejections?

FW features editor David Cousins shares some good news:

You don't expect the stuff you learnt at school or college to be much use in real life, do you?

Quadratic equations, for instance - when did you last toss one of those into a conversation? Latin grammar, that won't impress on the 2006/2007 tax form.

But I have to admit that the agricultural marketing course that I did a hundred million years (well, 26) ago, at a college in a northern town famous for its bottled brown ale and humped bridge, is finally coming into its own.

For agricultural marketing skills, which in those days were considered a bit like quilt-making or origami - nice, but nothing to do with the real world - are now coming into their own in a big way.

What's really brought this home is talking to six oilseed rape growers who have transformed themselves from commodity producers into cutting edge culinary rapeseed oil producers.

Farmers are generally reckoned to be bad at marketing, but these guys are doing a great job.

This oil is terrific stuff and knocks olive oil into a cocked hat on health and food mile fronts but it's a new concept that has to be sold hard.

The Danish pig industry has long believed that showing people around abattoirs is a good thing in that it helps improve understanding of where their food comes from and the high standards to which they operate.

But are we ready for that kind of approach in the UK?

Well, a new TV show called Kill it, Cook it, Eat it due to screened on BBC Three from Mar 5-7 is going to put that to the test.

Over three nights, food journalist Richard Johnson, butcher John Mettrick, slaughter man Steven Mettrick and chef Rachel Green will bring together two moments the public have separated: the death of an animal and the consumption of its meat.
 
An invited group of guests will watch the team slaughter and butcher the animals - then be served a variety of cuts.

FW's deputy arable editor Mike Abram has his say on NRoSO points:

It really doesn't say much for the National Register of Sprayer Operators (NRoSO) scheme when even the National Farmers Union President, Peter Kendall, is suspended from it for not getting enough points to remain a member.

While that might be a temporary blip through Mr Kendall's oversight in not claiming all the points he was entitled to when attending events with NRoSO points attached, it prompts an important debate about whether all this points gathering is really necessary.

Does anyone really believe that because Mr Kendall hasn't gathered his 30 points that he is any less capable of spraying in an efficient and responsible manner than he was three years ago?

As one poster in our forum elegantly said surely the major qualification to be a member of NRoSO should be to hold the PA1 and PA2 sprayer qualifications?

You could argue why is there any need to collect points on top of that? After all, you only take one driving test to drive a tractor or car, and it's not like car or, especially, tractor technologies, haven't changed over the years. Are sprayer technologies changing so quickly that sprayer operators need this level of continual training?

It strikes me that yet again farmers are being asked to jump through far more hoops than is really necessary. A national register is definitely worth having, but the current points system is simply not working, and needs a complete overhaul.

If a level of continual training is really necessary, surely attendance at a single, standard update training course once in the period of membership should be enough to demonstrate best practice is being followed?

Pure entertainment! As a Top Gear fan, Sunday nights are always something to look forward to.

But yesterday evening's show was a real treat...if you're into farming that is.

Watching Clarkson, Hammond and May make a total hash of switching on, let alone manoeuvring, their three tractors in the Top Gear car park, and later ploughing - if you can call it that - a 25-acre field on NFU president Peter Kendall's farm, brought home just how easy the UK's skilled tractor drivers make it look.

Having learned to plough some years ago myself, I'd like to think I'd have made a better job than the BBC trio, but I reckon I'd be a bit out of practice, though I doubt if I'd have resorted to dynamite as the guys eventually did.

"How fast do you plough? - Our ignorance about farming was a little embarrassing," Clarkson noted.

"How hard can it be to make petrol from Crops?" he asked.

Well judging by their attempt, a lot harder than they thought.

With Hammond rigged up to a plough which Clarkson described as "Battlestar Galactica", the three presenters went on what an old golfer at my club describes as, "manoeuvres".

Hammond quickly broke a shear bolt on his "Star Ship Enterplough", Clarkson took out a telegraph pole, and May, taking on drilling duties, dumped the entire bag of rapeseed upon setting off on his first bout. "You've done the whole bloody lot - twenty-five acres into 25 inches," Clarkson opined.

Meanwhile Hammond took a detour to buy lunch, upsetting the burghers of Ashwell as he blocked the main street with his Quadtrac before "filling up" at the local garage. £1,127 for diesel? That certainly dwarfs my mileage claims!

Back in the studio May, with a certain degree of predictability, joked: "I had to go back and do it through the night [re-drill the crop] until my seed was planted evenly into every furrow I could find."

Well it was all in the name of entertainment, and although the "set-ups" were somewhat obvious, particularly if you know anything about agriculture, it's good to see farming make it to prime-time viewing.

One small problem: Doesn't oilseed rape get converted into biodiesel? Mmmm could be a problem if they're expecting petrol from the field next summer. Sorry to spoil the party chaps...