Opinion: We’ve got data, now we need transparency

I was unlucky when Google Earth photographed my house.

I was in the garden and my bald spot was vividly captured glistening in the sunlight.

My hair loss became a matter of public record. 

When I first started receiving emails on a dial-up modem, I never realised how invasive the internet would become. 

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Trust has been consigned to the history books, like penny farthing bicycles and Betamax video players, it has been replaced instead by truth.

Folklore v facts

Matthew Naylor is the managing director of Naylor Flowers and a Nuffield scholar.

Consequently, agriculture, an industry once led by folklore and tradition, is now driven by hard facts and recorded data.

We are undertaking a project with one of the supermarkets we supply with cut flowers.

The exercise is to make it possible to track individual bouquets back to where they were grown. 

While this is common practice in edible crops for reasons of food safety, it is not so common in cut flowers.

The concept is that our products will have a funny little graphic (young people call these a QR code) which customers can scan with their smartphones. 

This will lead them to images of things such as the majestic Fen landscapes in which the flowers were grown, the hardworking people who harvested them and perhaps even a photo of the sassy, vertically challenged and follically depleted mogul who orchestrates the whole chaotic process. 

Information sharing

Accountability is becoming an ever-greater part of farmers’ lives and I believe information sharing and our connection to our customer will only increase. 

Technology could quite conceivably make it possible for statutory bodies and consumers to see the chemicals we have used, the yields we achieved, the pests we encountered, the welfare of our staff and animals and possibly even how much tax we paid. 

Customers increasingly care about ethics and I expect before too long we will be expected to validate any marketing claims that we make.

Audits, happily, could become a thing of the past.

I hope, where supermarkets and large processors are concerned, this spirit of transparency isn’t going to be like one of those mirrored windows from a detective drama.

End to obscurity

It isn’t fair for our actions and intentions to be scrutinised while they strut around in the control room in obscurity.

We need the whole supply chain to be honest about how profit, responsibility and decision-making are shared.

The supermarket with whom we are working on traceability is once again asking us to tender new prices to keep our business with them.

Their purchasing decision for next year won’t come until months after I have already made critical financial commitments to field selection, seed and fertiliser purchases for 2017.

This leaves me in a very weak bargaining position each year. It is hard to feel properly committed to the future when you are constantly in fear of losing your contract. 

In the fresh produce sector, this constant re-tendering has created a culture of low confidence and an unsustainable spiral of decreasing prices and underinvestment.

The lead times are long for good farming; crop rotations and capital spending need to be planned years in advance. 

It is no longer enough for supermarkets to make general claims about British sourcing, we need specific commitments to farmers, which acknowledge the many years of planning and investment necessary to manage crop production and the environment. 

If consumers want the benefit of an ethical, stable, British farming industry then we need processors and supermarkets to step up to the mark and make fair, transparent, long-term commitments.