Editor’s View: Fear of reprisals is a rot in farming industry
© Tim Scrivener It’s not been a great week for the dairy industry.
A major probe into alleged breaches of animal welfare across more than a dozen Arla farms has posed fresh questions about on-farm practices.
As we reported back in the summer, the proliferation of cheap and easily hidden cameras mean that long-term surveillance of farms has become the default choice of activists opposed to animal farming.
See also: Arla launches probe into dairy welfare allegations
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All good farmers feel motivated to uphold the highest welfare standards on their farms regardless of whether big brother is watching.
And it is right that those who fall below what the law requires and their customers expect are held accountable.
Yet it is chilling that farmers across the intensive meat and milk-producing sectors must arrive on the yard each morning with the expectation they are being watched, especially if they are suppliers of high-profile customers.
Activists may say that if we have nothing to hide then we have nothing to fear, but this is to borrow the unpleasant language of dictators.
It is striking that these organisations that are committed to making farming more transparent are often reluctant to reveal where their money comes from – until you learn their paymasters are in the US, where farmed animals enjoy far fewer protections.
But the right to privacy is hard to argue for if the whiff of wrongdoing continually hangs over our farming sectors – they have to retain the trust of the British public.
And in the main they do, despite the best efforts of these well-funded activists, but the fight to keep it that way is continuous and will require more than sullen rebuttal when these issues arise.
It requires a regular reappraisal of which practices are defensible, and which cannot be explained away, with the current debate over whether to maintain CO2 stunning of pigs a case in point.
In dairy, fears have not been confined to bad publicity this week.
Freshways’ imposition of a 7p/litre farmgate price cut from December stunned its producers, particularly when they learned that many other buyers had managed to hold prices.
That will reduce the Freshways base price to an untenable 29.4p/litre – far below the typical cost of production.
By coincidence, the Agricultural Supply Chain Adjudicator, established by Defra to enforce fair treatment in farming supply chains, also published its second annual report this week.
The watchdog operates across the UK, with its powers – currently limited to enforcement of best practice in the dairy and pork sectors – expected to grow.
Yet it has received just one formal complaint in 12 months, with its report repeatedly highlighting that producers are reluctant to raise any issues they may have for fear of potential reprisals from the businesses they supply.
That is a rot at the heart of our industry that should leave people simmering with anger – and yet no one appears to have an answer as to how it can be resolved.
If we really want to clean up agriculture, it will take scrutiny of the dirty work that can happen in boardrooms, not just farmyards, to deliver an industry we can be proud of.