Opinion: We have to build the future we want, not pray for it
© ccestep8/Adobe Stock As I like to remind people, I spent my Covid lockdown designing and building a factory for coldstoring and processing fresh produce.
Occasionally, in nightmares, I remember the stress of that time but, with the benefit of hindsight, I can appreciate how it was necessary to create a future trajectory for our business.
It also taught me almost every do and don’t regarding construction. So much so that I’ve became a bit addicted to maintaining and improving things.
See also: Opinion – I might as well throw the fam calculator in the bin
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Since the factory became fully operational in 2022, I have been trying to bring all the other buildings and houses on our farm up to an equal standard.
Our farm assets, like many others in the UK, had been patched up with ad hoc, low cost repairs over the course of many years. We always took a cheap option with the idea that we could sort it out properly in a “good year” which never came.
When the penny finally dropped that you have to build the future you want rather than pray for it, my first job was deciding what assets we actually needed. And the next was getting rid of what we didn’t, either by selling, refurbishing or demolishing.
Over the past four years, we have spent a decent seven-figure sum and had a full-time building team uprating drainage, installing renewable energy schemes, rewiring and replacing electrics and refrigeration equipment, fitting fire systems, uprating insulation, rebuilding and widening roadways and refurbishing offices and staff facilities.
Now that this year’s drought is causing me a whole load of different challenges, I sometimes wish we were still looking at the cash we invested in a deposit account, but I’m keenly aware that without that investment we wouldn’t have a future anyway.
I share this story in the hope that Andy Burnham has got a Farmers Weekly next to his toilet and can read and reflect on it while he has time to himself.
It seems that recent politicians have treated the UK like lazy landlords managing an old terraced house; fixing things when a noisy tenant causes problems.
Painting over the mould, smearing mastic on the cracked toilet pan, supplying a saucepan to put under the roof cracks. Easy sticking plasters rather than purposeful but painful choices to focus investment on a vision for long-term security and prosperity.
The current drought, which is as serious as anything I have encountered in my farming career, has the potential to expose the weakness of this strategy.
You will be as painfully aware as I am that yields in most areas are pitiful, the countryside is dessicated, reservoirs are empty, farmers are desperate and it looks as though the vast majority of us will finish the year poorer than we started it.
It isn’t likely that European farmers, who have suffered even hotter weather, will come to rescue of UK consumers with a cheap and abundant food supply.
Current farm returns are insufficient to make the investments we need to mitigate against the weather patterns we now endure.
Water storage, irrigation, drainage, flood defences, temperature controls all cost huge sums of money, and without better returns the UK’s food supply we will be even more volatile and insecure.
A painful time for consumers and difficult decisions for retailers and politicians lays ahead. The time for bodged solutions and crossed fingers is coming to an end.