Food for Thought

FW business editor Andrew Shirley has his say:

Prince Charles' recent criticism of fast-food business McDonald's highlights the food-health tightrope that anybody involved in the farming industry has to walk at the moment.

And it seems even those, like the prince, who have repeatedly championed British farmers, can sometimes slip off that rope.

On a recent visit to Abu Dhabi, which apparently has the second-highest incidence of diabetes in the world, the prince suggested that banning the burger seller might help the health of the Gulf state's population.

However, love or loathe its food, McDonald's is a major buyer of milk and livestock from British farmers, and losing such a major customer would certainly be bad news for the industry.

Perhaps his comments were meant as a throw-away line and more importance was attached to them than he meant, but the media quickly latched onto them and gleefully levelled charges of hypocrisy at the prince.

It turns out that some of the products sold under his own Duchy Originals label contain more fat than a McDonald's Big Mac.

The health of the nation is more and more under the spotlight, commenting on it can be a very dangerous business.

Cars affect us all, particularly if you're living in more remote areas. And that's very common for farming folk.

A petition on No.10's website against road pricing - a Labour plan to deal with the fact that there are now some 7 million more cars on the road since it came to power - has received 1.8m signatures.

Top Gear's Richard Hammond tackles the PM in a podcast.

As a farming person who needs a car, I wonder if you think road pricing is fair. It certainly doesn't seem to be a system that can account for differing levels of need. It seems to me to be a one-size-doesn't-fit-all policy.

It's just another Labour tax to "invest" in solutions.

But listening to the podcast, sounds like the PM is back-pedalling to me. "The idea that you are going to come forward with some policy [without it going through an election process]...it's not going to happen like that," says the PM. "The idea is to engender a serious national debate about what the options are so that people can study them."

So when everyone says "no", you'll can the idea Tony?

DEFRA's latest statement on the Norfolk avian flu outbreak saying that it believes the outbreak "is exclusively a Bernard Matthews Holton problem" brings mixed blessings to the sector.

For Bernard Matthews, it's yet more negative news. You can't help feel sorry for the company that defied the powerful supermarkets and retained its own "bootiful" brand while competitors gave in and switched to selling products under the supermarket's own brands. But the irony is that the Bernard Matthews brand may prove to be its downfall, as consumers associate it with the outbreak.

In contrast, for free range producers, the DEFRA statement that "there is no evidence of H5N1 anywhere in the wild bird population" comes as a relief. The fear was that the virus had established itself here on British soil in the wild bird population, putting many flocks at risk.

But don't start celebrating yet, this month sees the start of the spring migration. Let's hope we see no more of this virus this year.

When the French do farm shows, they do them really well.

Take for example SIMA which opened yesterday and runs until Thursday 8 March at France's national exhibition centre at Villepinte, north of Paris.

The numbers are staggering: It covers 22ha (54 acres) and attracts nearly 200,000 visitors and more than 1300 exhibitors from 39 countries.

Ian Ashbridge writes from France's mammoth SIMA show:

In keeping with the vastness of the Paris SIMA event, global machinery giant AGCO chose the occasion to cosy up to Europe's farming journalists in the style that only a global presence - and a strengthened Titanium cheque-book - can do.

Filling journalists with expensive food and wine is a press strategy as old as the hills, but must still be an effective one. Straight from the show, we were whisked away in a convoy of immaculate white coaches to Le Pre Catalan, an exclusive hotel in the leafy Bois de Boulogne park where Paris's elite live in shaded seclusion and - it's rumoured - anything goes.

Posted by senior arable reporter Andrew Blake:

It's charlock! That was my immediate reaction on seeing this picture and many similarly yellow fields when driving through the west midlands last week.

But it's not. This winter's extraordinary weather has seen many crops which escaped the odd frosts think it's already spring so they've been flowering like mad.

The big question is how should these crops now be managed?

Unsurprisingly one fertiliser company is warning that they could soon run out of nitrogen if they haven't had any of the bag stuff yet.

With so much more effort now going into raising UK yields of this key crop it's a fresh challenge to all those clever commentators out there.

This picture of a field at Fakenham in Norfolk was taken by Mike Thompson of N W Agronomy Ltd on 3 March 2007.

Cheers to Jeremy Turney the new Farmers Weekly Machinery Dealer of the Year. Mr Turney triumphed in the competition run by FW and Promosalons UK the company that promotes the SIMA Show being staged in Paris this week. Jeremy of Turney-Agriforce is a Case IH dealer, based in Bicester, Oxfordshire. He was nominated for the award by Andrew Mahon, farms manager at Charlton Farms, Banbury. According to Andrew, Jeremy shows superb commitment to supplying the best dealer services that he can both in terms of parts supply and maintenance.

US accusations that the French are a nation of "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," following criticism of Uncle Sam's foreign policy, were never designed to win friends and impress people in the fifth republic. But distinctly chilly relations between the two countries could be warming, at least when it comes to farm policy, judging by a visit to one of Europe's leading farm shows SIMA staged just north of Paris this week.
"In terms of farm support, Paris and Washington are on the same wavelength - they want to support farmers but Brussels and London to do not share that view."

FW's deputy machinery editor Charlie (Cathal) McCarron has been chosen as a Nuffield Scholar. Here he gives an account of his trip to Calgary, Alberta which was the venue chosen for this year's Nuffield Scholar International Briefing:

The first thing that strikes me about Canadian farming is the sheer scale and vastness of the land.

Traveling through Alberta was quite an eye opener for myself, particularly so when you consider that when someone is farming a 50ha farm at home, he is the envy of his neighbors indeed.

One of the first tours we experienced was at the Agrium fertilizer plant in Carseland. The company has been doing some development work with a new product known as ESN (Environmentally Sensitive Nitrogen).

The environmental pressures placed on farming today are immense and it seems that Canada is getting about as tough a time as farming in Ireland. We are currently implementing a new nitrates directive at home and ESN could play a role in our fertilizer application in the future.

We were privileged enough to visit a Hutterite Colony farm as part of our tour. The way these people choose to live may well be scorned upon by some people, but there are lessons that we could apply to our own lives.

It was a stark removal from the TV and computer game orientated world we seem to live in these days.

The Colony farm was spotless, the milking parlor was without doubt the cleanest ever encountered by anyone in our group. This was a dairy inspector's dream farm.

Ian Ashbridge's comments about being wined and dined by AGCO provided a sneaky insight into an area that we journalists don't often comment publicly on.
As someone who has pounded the machinery beat ever since the Ford 5000 was a youngster and attended more off-roader launches than you can shake a leather-covered gearstick at, I'm always struck by the difference in wallet power between the ag machinery firms and the car ones.

Time: Yesterday lunchtime.
Location: SIMA show ground, Paris.
Situation: Desperate.

It was no good - I needed sustenance and I needed it quickly. Tired of tramping the 22ha (54 acres) of showground and shouldering my way through the tens of thousands of visitors thronging the machinery and livestock lines, I needed reviving and soon. I found the answer in that classic French dish tartiflette.

At last, confirmation that at a diversified farming industry generates a thriving economy - in France at least. It comes from the SIMA Show, Paris, which ends today, out of the mouth of Jean-Paul Papillon of machinery exporters' association SYGMA.
It is France's highly diversified farming structure, spanning large-scale farms in the Paris Basin to the small hill farms of the Massif Central that has encouraged French machinery manufacturers to produce diversified farm equipment, he told me. And that wide range is paying off in terms of rapidly rising export sales.

Ever wondered what farmers in Africa complain about? Well, having worked with both large and small-scale farmers in East Africa, I can tell you it's exactly the same as here - the weather's never right and prices are too low.

There is a big difference of course. If the grain market here slumps, we might have to tighten our belts but our kids won't go hungry.Too much rain in the UK might mean a washed out harvest, but it won't be life or death - in Africa it could mean just that - we've all seen the pictures on the TV.

I'm Farmers Weekly's Business editor and next Friday (16 March), I'll be going back to Africa to visit The Gambia, one of the world's least-developed countries. I'll be looking at a project run by UK charity Concern Universal that aims to create a reliable income for local farmers and provide them with a sustainable future.

I'll also be asking Gambian farmers, politicians and academics how subsidies for farmers in the world's richest countries could be harming those in the poorest.

Exciting news! The "godfather" of Farmers Weekly - David Richardson - has started blogging on FWi. See what he has got to say for himself on David's Digest and give him some feedback...

The news that David Richardson is blogging has got me thinking. Who else in farming is blogging?

Here are some I've come across:

DEFRA secretary David Miliband
EU farm commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel
The ReallyWelsh.com blog
Wiggly Wigglers
Farmer Jake

Remember Major Major's father in Joseph Heller's magnificent Catch 22? The more government support he received not to grow alfalfa, the more alfalfa he didn't grow and the richer he became. I was reminded of that reading an article in The Times today "EU loophole allows city "farmers" to reap millions in subsidy harvest."
It alleges people who live in cities are making vast profits out of an EU loophole which allows them to claim farm support without owning land or going nearer a farm than watching the TV show Emerdale.

Everyone seems to have been talking about the Great Climate Change Swindle that was on Channel 4 last week.

So DEFRA secretary David Miliband has now responded to the claims made in the programme on his blog.

Did you know that today is National Agriculture Day in the US? That may not be remarkable in itself, but here's something that is - there are apparently 22 million people involved in agriculture in the US. Just trying to picture an ag industry that big is pretty mind-boggling. Think of the lobbying power of that many people too.

The World Bank wants the US to cut its tariff on ethanol imports: That's the subject of a recent post on Simon Robinson's excellent Big Biofuels Blog, writes FW deputy editor Mike Stones. It refers to mounting pressure on the US to remove its 54 cent per gallon duty imposed on imported ethanaol. Yet US energy secretary Samuel Bodman pledged only recently to retain the duty despite international opposition. "No one in the administration is looking to end the tariff ore subsidy prematurely (certainly not before the end of 2008), " he is reported as saying. So much for free trade in the Land of the Free.

A latest trend in the online space is 'social networking', a system that allows users to create and develop friendships in the online environment.

This may sound a little dry, but sites such as Facebook and Myspace allow you to catch up with existing friends and make new ones with people who have similar interests

By Andrew Shirley

A strange, exotic dialect. The squeal of a beaten-up taxi's brakes avoiding certain death. Powerful Afrobeat music blasting from the stereo.

The sounds of Africa surround me and memories of this fantastic, yet exasperating, continent where I spent five years of my life, come flooding back.

By Andrew Shirley from The Gambia

Cornflakes with warm milk to the blaring soundtrack of the ubiquitous CNN, waiters and staff from supposedly the most violent continent in the world gasp in horror at footage of two hoodlums in the US beating up a 100 year old granny.

A typical African breakfast. At least, it seems, in the hotels that cater for the growing number of Europeans looking for some winter sun and possibly more in the Gambia.

The St George's Tavern is just down the road, right next to the Irish bar. I feel right at home, but it's not the Africa I really want to see. I've already passed on eggs for breakfast.

The words from Paul O'Hagan, Concern Universal's West African Director, still ring in my ears. He says most of the eggs in the Gambia are imported from Holland, thousands of miles away.
And some aren't in great shape by the time they arrive here.

In fact, there's a lot of surprising stuff that's imported here. Rice from all over the world when more could be grown here, cooking oils when there's a huge amount of groundnuts that could be processed into oil, vegetables from Europe that could undercut produce grown on the doorsteps of the hotels importing them.

And the eggs, the eggs all the way from Holland. It strikes me as ironic. The same week that the Farmers Weekly reader rages because her latest Waitrose is stocking sugar from cane, not home-grown beet, I am in Africa where desperately poor, really poor farmers are being undercut by farmers in the EU and US.

A contribution from livestock editor Jonathan Long:

Anyone watching last night's episode of Animal Farm on Channel Four will have noted the appearance of a group of Belgian Blue cattle. Now I'm no great Blue fan, largely because of their historic poor locomotion and calving difficulties, but I know a good beast when I seen one.

And in the main, the modern Belgian Blue, with its improved walking ability and easier calving, is fundamentally a sound animal with the potential to produce plenty of lean beef, exactly what the modern consumer wants. The result of many years of carefully orchestrated selective breeding, the same thing every livestock farmer practices every time they plan a mating.

To suggest, as last night's program did that selective breeding, a centuries old practice and the only way of improving livestock genetics, is a form of genetic modification is laughable. Without selective breeding the modern world would quite honestly starve. Be it cattle, potatoes, wheat or pigs, they've all been bred to produce food efficiently and economically.

The implication that because the bulls featured were having semen collected for AI they were unable to breed naturally was also a joke. Thankfully, the program's sceptical host Giles Coren was balanced by biologist Olivia Judson, who put a convincing, reasoned and sound argument for selective breeding.

That Belgian Blues were the chosen rather than any other breed is no doubt due to their heavily muscled appearance. However, anyone suggesting selective breeding is a form of genetic modification could quite happily have picked on any other breed and implied the same of them.

By Andrew Shirley from The Gambia

Visit a farm in the UK and you might get a cup of tea. Visit a farm in The Gambia and you'll often be entertained by a riot of drumming and dancing dervishes.

Sometimes the hypnotic beats are just for fun, but often they are performed to get across a particular message, like public health or a new irrigation technique.

By Andrew Shirley in The Gambia

Beer. One noun that pretty well sums up life for many at agricultural college in the UK.

Hard physical work and the chance to really improve your life. Studying at a Gambian farming college.

Treading a foot-powered water pump for hours on end under the blazing sun is not on the curriculum at home. Here it is par for the course. And there's not a pint to be seen.

Ask any teacher why they do the job and they'll tell you more or less the same thing - that there's something tremendously fulfilling about imparting knowledge to enthusiastic pupils. And when that child goes away with a clearer understanding of the way the world works, you feel as if you're really achieving something.
What has this to do with farmers? We're not suggesting you open a school on the farm (although a few people have done that). But what you could do is think about taking part in this year's Open Farm Sunday bash on June 10.

By Andrew Shirley, FW's man in the Gambia

Goose bumps prickle my arms despite the midday sun burning my mad dog skin.

Not the tell-tale signs of a malarial fever, but the realisation that some of Concern Universal's work is really paying off.

This morning some of us debate whether aid really works, whether we really should be here at all. Nobody is sure.

Now I know - in at least some cases - the answer is most definitely yes.

I've just had a funny turn in the local branch of Morrisons supermarket. I was loitering around the cooking oils section (as I sometimes do when things are quiet on the mag) checking to see whether they were stocking British cold-pressed rapeseed oil.

By Andrew Shirley from The Gambia

The Gambia civil service's former farming chief shows me his new egg-producing unit that would not look out of place in the UK.

Trained as an economist at Birmingham University, this man knows his stuff. And he knows that imports of cheap European eggs are hurting the country's economy.

Tourist hotels no longer touch them because of the risk of Banjul belly for their guests, but locals can't afford home-grown eggs and have to take their chances.

A lack of local feed means poultry farmers depend on expensive imports and this means they can't compete with the dodgy imports.

However, Mr Sompo-Ceesay hopes to use his economies of scale and build his own feed mill. Eventually, he reckons he can supply over half the local egg market.

Every 12 seconds another fly-tipped fridge, freezer, settee or other rubbish is dumped in our countryside, writes FW deputy editor Mike Stones. Nearly 2.5m incidents of unlawful rubbish dumping were recorded in the year to April 2006. And the cost to local authorities, let alone farmers, was just under £100m.

They are stark statistics and it's time to call a halt to the cost, to the inconvenience and to the grief. That's why Farmers Weekly is backing the Countryside Alliance's new campaign Fly-tipping - scrap it.

By Andrew Shirley from The Gambia

Dried fish, rotting vegetables, fresh vegetables, herbs, spices and some things beyond description. Screaming hawkers and bargaining customers.

I wanted to experience the smells, sounds and sights of Africa again and today I get my wish in an overpowering sensory explosion.

Farmers Weekly's parent company, Reed Business Information, has challenged all the magazines in the building to come up with a video related to the sector we work in.

FW's - very funny - entry shows machinery editor Nick Fone getting stuck in some mud on one of his machinery tests. Why not take a look and add your comment on YouTube.

And our rivals - including the people on Travel Weekly magazine, for example - have videoed themselves singing the Wham classic Club Tropicana....

By Andrew Shirley from The Gambia

Selling livestock at markets in the UK is getting harder as more and more rules and regulations are introduced.

In The Gambia, there's a striking absence of rules. Cattle bought from all over west Africa to the country's main market are slaughtered and butchered on site for a flat fee of about £5. Lairage is just 20p per animal.

But all animals bought to the market are checked by a state vet for serious diseases after slaughter. If the meat is condemned it's the buyer's problem not the farmer's.

By Andrew Shirley from The Gambia

Think you'll escape the curse of the mobile ringtone in Africa? Think again.

Gambians have been quick to adopt mobile technology and there is virtually nowhere in the country, even the remotest corner, where you can't get a signal.

We like to think we are invincible, but accidents do happen in farming.

In the past few days alone a 12 year old boy has been killed while driving a tractor and a man has fractured his spine while climbing into a grain silo.

Of course, we don't know the circumstances of these tragic accidents but they do make you think. Because if you talk to any health and safety person they tell you that many of the accident scenes they attend could have been prevented.

When the sun is out and there is work to be getting on with, it is far too easy to start cutting corners to save time. It's also easy to think of H&S officials as meddling bureaucrats that don't know anything about the reality of the job in hand.

But then again, what would you rather be - alive, well (and perhaps just a little bit behind where you would like to be) or another H&S statistic?

There's more guidance on the main fwi site (it was written a year ago, but it is still current).

By Andrew Watts, Food Chain editor

In the nine months since I became responsible for the Food Chain page in Farmers Weekly I have taken great pleasure in boring those around me with what are dull, yet peculiarly interesting changes in supermarket prices for food.

I can often be heard saying that, yet again, Asda is the cheapest supermarket, of the three surveyed, (Asda, Tesco and Sainsbury's) to shop at for our weekly basket of goods and that Sainsbury's is, nearly always, the dearest. (Although Sainsbury's efforts over the past year to realign its prices with those of Tesco have begun to see it compete ever stronger as so is no longer always the case.)

The more observant of you will also have noticed how supermarkets manipulate prices steadily upwards over a four to six week period only to drop the price the next week under a so-called "promotion".

But one item in particular really grates me; I wonder why we even bother to list it - bacon. Never, during my watch, has the price of eight rashes of unsmoked back bacon waved from its rock-steady price of £7.08 - it's exactly the same at all three supermarkets, week in, week out.

We've just had a nice estate off the Saab press fleet. Nothing unusual about that, except that this is the Biopower 9-5 estate which runs on E85, a mixture of 85% bioethanol and 15% petrol.

How did we get on with it? There's good and bad news to report.

If I was one of the 15 Royal Navy personnel being held by Iran, I'd be pretty worried at the moment.

Not just because of the obvious stuff - like being held against your will and forced to appear on Iranian State television - but because of who is in charge of securing their release.

Because if Margaret Beckett's track record at DEFRA is anything to go by then although she'll pledge to have them back within days, it will actually take months and you might find that she's happy with "the bulk" of them coming home sometime next year.

Of course, that's assuming the paperwork is all in order, the computer system doesn't "gum up" and her foreign office staff aren't too busy romping to get on with the delicate negotiations needed...

OK, I know I'm being facetious - and probably inappropriately - but the environment, food and rural affairs select committee report into the 2005 SFP crisis makes it clear that Mrs Beckett should never have got the job as foreign secretary.

She messed up at DEFRA and should have paid the price. Alas she didn't, and now she's centre stage sorting out a major international incident. Gives you confidence, doesn't it?

Now I'm not a big expert on Strawberries, but I had some UK-grown beauties for breakfast this morning and that seems pretty early in the year to me.

Some people blanche at eating things when they're out of season, but I reckon fruit and veg appearing at unexpected times of the year is now par for the course.

If growers here want to compete they're going to have to extend their growing seasons by as much as possible to battle the imports.

Three cheers for Farmhouse Breakfast Week which began on January 21. Organised by the Home-Grown Cereals Authority and backed by Food from Britain, this year's event sparked more than 1,000 media articles, valued at £3.3m, all promoting British breakfast ingredients.