Opinion: I might as well throw the farm calculator in the bin
© Adobe Stock How are you feeling about Tony being forced to give up his Angus suckler herd on The Archers?
They aren’t profitable so Helen wants them gone. Tony is miserable about it, but he’s miserable about everything.
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About the author
I’m on Helen’s side. I also make business decisions cold-bloodedly based on numbers.
That’s why we record and scrutinise our expenditures and outputs so carefully.
Ordinarily at this time of year, we are implementing a meticulously planned workload – the drilling programmes are in place, the seeds are in the store, the machines are ready for action and everything is underpinned by a cashflow projection based on known input costs, contracted sale prices and committed volumes, all with long-standing customers.
I know that sounds hubristic. I’m not saying it always goes to plan. Hell, it never goes to plan; that’s what keeps me in employment.
The point of having the plan is that we can measure our actual performance against something meaningful and make adjustments as we go rather than gormlessly driving the bus straight over the edge of a financial cliff when unexpected things inevitably happen.
But 2026, though? Seriously? How do you build a spreadsheet for this sort of shitshow?
Plans require at least some wider certainties or stability.
This year, I might as well hurl the calculator into the bin and use Rachel Riley’s random number generator from Countdown.
It feels that, to survive, we need to steer the business with our gut not our head for a bit.
We started 2026 with improbably low orders for what we grow.
The supermarkets were being extremely cautious about consumer demand for British summer flowers, and they feared wasted stock.
We felt they were under-ordering and, entirely out of character, our gut told us to grow 20% more flowers than we had contracts to sell.
Then the Iran conflict sent air freight costs soaring and created fertiliser shortages for hydroponically grown flowers in Africa. The market changed.
Since we started drilling on 1 March, our order book for the summer has grown substantially – in farming terms, by 150 extra acres of production than we had planned.
It has been extremely difficult since Brexit to get seeds, plants or bulbs at short notice, so we have been given an urgent and complicated jigsaw puzzle to build of fields, seed stocks, machinery and workforce, and the pieces keep changing in size.
This is the reason I enjoy working with fresh produce.
It’s lively and you can turn a small business into a big one if you are agile and customer-focused in times of change – this is much harder to do in traditional arable crops.
I remain positive because no other frame of mind is going to get us through the current challenges.
Caution is only a strategy for farmers who were born wealthy and who don’t have a large workforce depending upon them for their livelihood.
My gut is also telling me it is strikingly counterintuitive that, at a time of war and energy crises, the demand and prices for most sectors of home-grown farm produce are as low as they are.
We have established that I am neither a gambler nor a sentimentalist, but the numbers suggest it won’t be this difficult for too much longer.