Peter Delbridge
Peter Delbridge
Peter Delbridge farms 162ha
(400 acres) in the Exmoor
National Park, near South
Molton, Devon. The farm is
mostly permanent grass,
classed as less favoured and
environmentally sensitive,
and all above 300m
(1000ft). It is stocked with
800 ewes, replacement ewe
lambs, 60 spring calving
sucklers and their followers
RECENTLY I have taken the attitude of sell what you can, when you can, so it was pleasing to receive enquiries from store cattle buyers.
The steers found a new home quite quickly. It did not come as a great shock that heifers were more difficult to shift.
While it may be relatively easy to sell a lorry-load of this or that privately, it will be interesting to see what is left on farm come December. I suspect it will be the odds and ends that in times gone by would find new homes via a market and probably through a dealer who would then batch them with other producers ones and twos into decent-sized bunches.
The other difficulty arises when fixing a price. I have not met any producer who likes paying commission, especially when one looks at 40 cattle and realises auctioneers will take one to sell them. But with no markets, the value of my cattle sold privately could be £20-£30 out. The sooner we get back to normal trading the better.
Lamb sales have ground to a halt. When they were drawn the price quoted was 150p/kg. After a two-week wait for a licence, the price dropped by a further 5p. I considered this too low, protesting that this was below the cost of production – not knowing exactly what that was.
Unlike colleagues in the dairy sector, we beef and sheep chaps are not good at costing our enterprises. I immediately rang the Exeter University agriculture business unit, which monitors producers accounts, to find the exact cost of producing a lamb. Working on a typical 18kg lamb, variable plus forage costs equalled 96p/kg. Not too bad, I thought. The shock came when I added fixed costs, which amounted to 159p/kg, making a total of 255p/kg and that did not include any wages for me.
While a proportion of the shortfall is covered by subsidy, the rewards for our efforts are well below the minimum wage. I suppose while we are collectively prepared, or forced, to sell below the cost of production, we are not doing ourselves or our neighbours any favours. *
Not knowing exactly how much it cost him to produce a lamb, Peter Delbridge investigated – the figure of £2.55/kg shocked him.