Editor’s View: Packham is blind to farming’s improvement
Chris Packham © ZUMA Press/Alamy Stock Photo This week’s criticism of Clarkson’s Farm by Chris Packham was typical of the petulant mewling of a certain very small segment of the anti-farming lobby for whom nothing will ever be good enough.
It brought me great joy. The fact that he is upset is yet more evidence that farming has won the battle for the hearts and minds of the public and it’s not even close.
What upsets him the most is the more you show people the reality of the farming industry, the more positive they get. That is what they cannot stand.
See also: Chris Packham’s Clarkson’s Farm remarks spark backlash
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They don’t actually want to participate in the ongoing work of building an ever-better agricultural sector. They want to stand on the sidelines and throw rocks.
Meanwhile, farmers plod on. Not perfect – far from it – but incrementally improving year on year in the teeth of incredibly financially challenging circumstances.
Just look at the pig sector – the subject of our lead story the the magazine this week (17 July edition).
Producers are suffering an incredibly difficult financial situation at the moment with many businesses making losses and some even being served notice.
This will be undoing the rebuilding work accomplished since the even larger crisis of 2021.
Two major profit challenges in the past five years and yet in the last decade producers have also delivered a remarkable 72% cut to antibiotics usage – vital work that must continue to preserve the lifespan of these precious drugs.
Similarly for crop growers, through a combination of regulatory changes, financial incentives and wider adoption of integrated pest management, there has been a decline in total weight of pesticide products applied to crops.
While this is shallower, clocking in at a one-third reduction since 1990 (excluding sulphuric acid), recent reductions in insecticide use are the latest example of an industry willing to adapt when the risk-reward balance is tilted in the right direction.
This is typified by Martin Caunce, one of our Arable Insight farmers, who this week each run through their plans for the next cropping season.
He is stepping up his use of variety blends as one way of managing without fungicides or insecticides across the farm to unlock an additional premium for the crop through direct selling it with an on-farm partner business.
In beef and sheep, we see great strides being taken in vaccine uptake, despite problems with availability, as ever-more farmers increase their focus on preventative health care.
Data in the AHDB’s Beef and Lamb Environmental Roadmap, published this week, reveals a 24% increase in overall cattle vaccine doses between 2011 and 2024, while sheep foot-rot vaccine use increased by 53% between 2012 and 2024.
Are any of these pathways to prosperity in isolation? Of course not.
But I think they are a few examples of how our industry is straining every sinew to deliver more from less, both for economic reasons and because it is the right thing to do.
Accelerating this will be the starting point for any new Defra secretary of state (perhaps the Labour Rural Research Group’s Jenni Riddell-Carpenter?) that may be in post by next week.
The battle for progress starts with winning hearts and minds.