Editor’s View: In praise of arable’s persistent optimists
© Tim Scrivener “Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.”
This was the phrase that sprang to mind amid a stampede of emails from lobby groups on Wednesday (15 October), taking credit for the extension of Countryside Stewardship.
Celebrating a sticking plaster – albeit a fairly large one – says a lot about the progress of English farming policy. I’m sure many of the 5,000 eligible farmers will be glad of their share of the £70m.
See also: Defra grants one-year CS lifeline for 5,000 farmers
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Last week in this column, I noted a few bright spots in the gloom that covers much of the arable parts of the country.
This is clearly another – a lifeline for some businesses that will already be feeling a cashflow squeeze as they tackle smaller crop incomes and face many bills to come.
Yet gloom there is, as evidenced by farm management company Velcourt pulling out of one-fifth of its contract farming arrangements (CFAs) by harvest 2027.
By virtue of dealing with so many landowners and having its accounts displayed for all to see in Companies House, it is confronting in public what many other smaller businesses will have to deal with in private.
So at first glance the CFA model appears under severe strain, but is that the case?
Word reaches me that landowners who Velcourt has seen fit to walk away from will not be short of other partners to get in bed with, even though the market is supposedly in the doldrums.
And contractors should, after all, be able to cover their labour, power and machinery costs from their first charge – so why are they losing money?
Looking at the market as a whole (rather than Velcourt specifically) it seems there is still no shortage of Tiggerish optimists that tender ultra-low bids to get work and gamble on getting a decent divisible surplus at the end of the season to bail themselves out.
This is clearly a lifeline for some businesses that will already be feeling a cashflow squeeze as they tackle smaller crop incomes and face many bills to come
Does this matter? It’s certainly not the job of landowners to caution a consenting adult who is willing to risk working for a loss from doing so.
Indeed, there are still some in our industry who are excited by a dash of the doldrums, as columnist Matthew Naylor notes in this week’s Opinion section.
In a missive that will rouse the spirits of those nursing ambitions to grow, he says it is only an economic downturn that prises assets from the hands of the complacent and the privileged, and redistributes them into the hands of the committed and the capable.
Boom and bust is a cruel business to those who are unwittingly dragged down by someone else’s high-stakes gambling – I am thinking of the trail of unpaid bills they often leave behind them.
But beside that, three cheers for those who are still willing to push their chips in even at times like this. The industry would look a lot darker without them.
I started this column with a phrase made popular by JFK.
Let’s end with one from Shrek… I can just hear some folk repeating the words of Lord Farquaad: “Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make.”