Editor’s View: Fert shortage reveals cost of low confidence
© GNP In the ongoing debate over where farm policy should end up, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are each, in their own way, striving to do something new.
Apart from England, they are also striving to do as much of the old as possible, amid lobbying that favours a universal payment as well as optional environmental schemes.
And there is a chance that a universal payment may lie in England’s future too, if the whispers about Defra farming minister Daniel Zeichner’s admiration for the work of his Welsh Labour counterpart, Huw Irranca-Davies, are to be believed.
See also: Fertiliser shortage hits farms as spring demand picks up
Yet even if it does come to that, payments are almost certain to erode as government budgets get squeezed ever more tightly.
And while it is well known that a significant amount of farming businesses still rely on government funding to stay in profit, it is still difficult to quantify the size of the ripple effect that its loss or decline will have on food production.
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I have long been sceptical of the claim that funding helps keep food prices low, given some of our largest scale food producers in the pork and poultry sectors enjoy the least support.
However, this week’s story of the fertiliser supply shortage gave me pause for thought.
The scale of the problem appears to be down to a multitude of issues, including the much-mourned absence of domestic production and a lack of wet weeks to allow the trade to catch up with demand.
Importers have also been wary of buying large shipments, remembering the spring of 2022 when they bought supplies at the top of the market and had to sell at the bottom.
Yet alongside a decline in their own appetite for risk is a lack of farmer confidence to plan ahead – in part because of a squeeze on cashflow.
While a farmer with a thumping BPS payment in years gone by might have been happy to order a big proportion of the fertiliser in December, now they hang fire to see how crops come through the winter, giving the trade a credit and logistics headache.
There are hints of it in other sectors too.
This season’s higher-than-average milk production peak hasn’t prompted dairies to ponder emulating the Irish by putting on more processing capacity, but to call for more farmers to revert to costlier all-year-round production – the lower risk option.
Meanwhile, beef continues to break price records without any sign that farmers are willing to risk ramping up production.
However, nor does it seem like we are on the cusp of some catastrophic decline in the number of farming businesses where only the strongest will survive.
For many, small but continual tweaks to how they go about producing food, managing their business and tapping into the external funding that remains will be enough.
That is the ethos underpinning Transition Live, our on-farm event at the University of Leeds research farm on 8 May, where every panel discussion will be a led by a farmer sharing positive, practical insights about how they are adapting.
Visit fwi.co.uk/transition-live for more information. I look forward to seeing some of you there.