How did we ever survive the 1950s?

One of the most intersting seasons on BBC Four recently has commemorated the 40th Anniversary of the end of regular steam trains on the British railway network. As a part of this season the channel has been showing a fascinating documentary made in 1954 about a the daily non-stop express called `The Elizabethan' which ran between London and Ediburgh. There are three days left to watch the programme which was made by the British Transport Films Unit.

Have a look carefully at two minutes and nineteen seconds into the film. You'll see a food hygiene faux pas which would have the offending restaurant closed down today. A tray of what appear to be raw chickens loaded onto a shelf directly above another tray of what appears to be cakes.

As far as I'm aware raw meat should never be placed above cooked food in a fridge. We're lucky to be alive today!

No milk to be spilt or cried over

It’s long been the cry of the dairy industry that farmers were being driven out of milk production because they got a pitiful price for their labours. Now though it seems the chickens are well and truly coming home to roost, or rather the cows, as well as the farmers are being retired and this has left the country short of milk.

Just last year the cows of Britain gave us fourteen billion litres of the white stuff for the breakfast table, or for the butter on your toast or for the cheddar cheese for your sandwiches. Suddenly, almost imperceptibly that’s slipped. Somewhere a billion litres has disappeared.

For the past decade, some say even longer, the dairy farming industry has lurched from one crisis to another, until now almost entirely over the price which farmers were getting, but now it’s all about the amount of milk those farms are producing.

Over that time the British dairy cow has worked harder and harder. It’s not unknown for some of the high yielding animals to give as much as ten thousand litres of milk a year, the average across the board is about seven thousand. The problem is that there are fewer and fewer cows to yield anything at all.

Ten years ago there were more than three million chewing the cud and trudging into the milking parlour twice a day to give us our morning pinta…or litre. Not that figure’s down to less than two million.

Ten years ago the price the farmer got for the effort put in by their cows was about twenty two pence per litre. Today it’s gone up… a massive four pence per litre to twenty six pence. In between then and now it fell to as little as just sixteen pence per litre, at some times of some years even less. And for almost all dairy farms the cost of production never fell below about seventeen pence per litre, often without taking into account any wage for the farmer.

It’s no surprise that many bailed out. In the early years of this century the National Farmers Union reckoned that as many as three a day were leaving the industry. The problem for those who were left was that very often the farmers might have been off to pastures new, but their cows were sold on to other farmers to make bigger and bigger herds.

At the turn of the century, the 21st, not the twentieth there were thirty two thousand dairy farms in the UK, just five years later that had shrunk to just under twenty five thousand…nut at the same time the average size of the herd had risen from 72.8 cows to 83.8. Bigger herds were a way of reducing costs. All the time though, the milk price was falling as the overall level of supply stayed constant.
The biggest factor was foreign competition for the milk products which could be imported. For instance those cheesy spreads that are so heavily advertised with smiling children going demented to get their hands on them, are often made with milk from cows in continental Europe, which is dried into powder, shipped in container lorries over to the UK, and then re-constituted into something the marketing wonks can really get their teeth into….mmmm….yummy….not. So in effect the only real UK market was for fresh milk and for cheese or butter production which wanted to use British milk.

The trouble was that all of this yummy stuff made from the dried produce of Polish or Austrian udders helped keep the market price of good old British Milk well and truly on the floor.

But those of us who were watching the industry unwind started to notice something. In 1984 the European community, as it was called then, introduced a limit on the amount of milk that every member state, and every farmer could produce. For the UK it was something in the region of fourteen million litres per year.

About four years ago I noticed that for the first time we seemed to be heading for an `undershoot of the quota limit’ in other words we were producing less milk than we were allowed to. At first this looked like it was just a temporary blip, but then it got bigger and bigger.

This was the point at which the national herd started to seriously decrease. Of course the milk powder could still come in from Poland, Austria or even Timbuktu, the trouble is that doorstep deliveries….those which still exist need fresh milk which is both expensive to transport and has a limited life. The same is true of cheese and butter production, and consumers are getting more and more fussy about where their food is from. Although the number of cows in the country had been decreasing for some time, those left were more productive. But now the hard working Holsteins who were left could no longer keep up. Shortages started to appear.

The culmination of this is that First Milk, one of the biggest farmer owner dairy co-operatives in the country is now cutting jobs at two of its cheese making plants because of shortages of milk.

And the question that now arises is whether paying farmers more in the difficult years might have encouraged more of them to stay in the industry. But there is a further problem. Even with the price of milk from the farm gate at a whopping 26 pence per litre, many dairy farms are still running at a loss because the cost of fuel and feed has gone through the roof.

So there are real fears that unless shoppers and the shops they use pay a lot more for their milk and dairy products shelves could be left empty.

So farewell then Lord Rooker

The news that Lord (call me Jeff) Rooker has gone off to spend more time decorating his house will come as a big disappointment to many farmers who believed that for once they had a farm minister who actually understood the pressures the industry faced.

It’s also a blow to those of us in the world of journalism who rage against the bland. Jeff Rooker was never a minister who could be accused of being dull. He was remarkably frank, and honest, even when that meant rocking boats.

I have two memories of encounters with him that stand out.

Back in the late nineteen nineties during his first tour of duty at what was then MAFF I was studio producing `Farming Today' in Birmingham on a live programme. Jeff Rooker, as he was then, was booked to come onto the programme, we thought in an interview conducted over the telephone. He would ring us. His press office insisted that we couldn’t ring him, as a minister it was unthinkable that we should have access to his home phone number - although it was in everybody's contact book anyway.

We waited, and waited, for the phone call until just two minutes before we went live at ten past six in the morning. Then the phone rang. It was the security guard on the front desk at the now long demolished Pebble Mill. “Is anybody there expecting a Mr Rooker? He’s in the front reception”

A mad dash ensued down the Pebble Mill corridor and the Minister, a Birmingham MP, was in front of the microphone with five minutes to spare. He could talk for England and I spent a very entertaining fifteen minutes chatting to him on the steps of Pebble Mill as he left the building after the programme.

My other memory was the Royal Show of 2007, a matter of days after Gordon Brown was crowned Prime Minister. The Obligatory reshuffle saw the replacement of David Milliband by Hilary Benn, but much to everybody’s surprise Lord Rooker stayed, infact I think he was even promoted up the ministerial ladder. No-one was more surprised than the noble Lord himself.

As we stood outside in a rare moment of sunshine at that year’s rain sodden event he told me that he’d just assumed he’d be booted out to make way for new blood, and had gone home to complete some much needed decorating when the surprise phone call came asking him to remain in the department as minister for Farming and Animal Health.

It’s not unusual to get ministers who will be frank and honest off the record, it was a joy to have a minister who would do that when the microphones were turned on.

Highland Beef T-Bone Back on the Menu

The years since the Conservative government admitted in March 1996 that there probably was a link between the cattle disease BSE and a variant of CJD, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, in humans, has been a nightmare not just for the families of those affected but also for the beef farming industry.

First of all there was the ban on the export of beef, and cattle from the UK, and then a ban on the human consumption of beef from animals over the age of thirty months. In the UK most of the beef which is from older animals comes from what’s known as `cull-cows’. That is breeding animals which have reached the end of their productive life, and which by and large then go for processing purposes. Pies and sausages.

The one big exception to this is meat from traditional breeds. In particular Highland cattle. One of our most distinctive breeds these animals produce some of the finest meat know to mankind. The only trouble is that they’re not really ready to kill before they are at least forty two months old, or perhaps even a bit older. This is because they are fed on grass, they’re slow growing and this is what makes the meat so good.

Unlike many breeds of commercial cattle they’re not `finished’, or given supplemental feed to get them up to their slaughter weight. This has meant that the ban on consumption of animals over thirty months old was a real blow to this breed. They simply weren’t big enough to kill.
Fortunately for farmers with Highland Cattle this restriction, the Over Thirty Months Rule was scrapped in 2005 allowing these animals to enter the food chain. The only trouble was that this relaxation came with some pretty draconian caveats. The brain tissue from the animals had to be tested for the `prions’ thought to cause BSE. The animals could only be killed at specified, approved abattoirs, and they could only be killed on slaughter lines which were set aside for the killing and processing of such beasts.

This added a massive extra cost for the farmers. There was the extra transport involved, as there were few plants approved for the purpose, and the cost of the test itself… about twenty pounds. The slaughter cost is invariably more expensive as abattoirs generally had to handle fewer of these animals. Many farmers with Highland cattle didn’t bother to let their beats go to the full slaughter weight, and made the best of a `bad job’

Now having taken advice from the European Food Safety Authority, EFSA, the European Commission says it’s happy for this time threshold to be raised… probably to forty eight months, and possibly even further to sixty months. This would be a massive boost for Highland cattle farmers, but would also help some other breeds. For instance Dexter and Belted Galloway cattle don’t need so long, but it would be helpful to those who farm them to be able to have the flexibility of missing the thirty month deadline, even if it is just by a few months. Raising the time limit will be down to national governments, but few expect DEFRA won't take advantage of the change.

This will mean the shaggy Scottish icons will be able to reach their proper weight before being killed. One benefit is that the joints are much bigger, and much better to cook. There's less loss from shrinkage, and this makes them much more appealing to restrateurs. It could also mean the return of one of the finest bits of the Highland. The T-Bone steak. At 30 months this is little bigger than a lamb chop, by 45, it’s a fine piece of meat fit for a king.

Deer farms backed by healthy eating research.

Venison is good for you. Well, we knew that already, but it's always good to be reminded of things with the weight of academic research thrown behind what has been common knowledge for years.

And it seems that researchers have also found that it tastes good. So the hazard assessment for for this project probably went something along the lines of .....Eat lots of meat, suffer no ill effects... have a good kip.

The research was commissioned by DEFRA and the Scottish government, and led by the agricultural consultancy firm ADAS. It found amongst other things that loin of venison contains a third of the fat of a beef sirloin steak, and a quarter of that found in Lamb Chops.

There are around thirty thousand farmed deer in the UK, but as much is imported as we produce here. Mainly from New Zealand. According to Jane Emerson who rears both deer and Dexter cattle near Penrith in Cumbria, this is because domestic production simply hasn't been able to keep up with demand from consumers. She says that deer are easier to keep than cattle because they don't need to have their feed supplemented to get them to slaughter weight.

They're also marginally more profitable than cattle, but they are also quite capital intensive. For instance they need to have special fencing to keep them in... although one big advantage is that they can be slaughtered on farm. They are also a good alternative to sheep, although for upland farmers deer do need reasonably good grass to thrive so they're not suitable for the high moors.

Jane Emerson with some of her deer

The team at ADAS believes that the one thing which is stopping sales of venison from taking off is that people simply don't know enough about it and how to cook it. The health findings of the ADAS study come as no surprise to Jane Emerson. many of her customers are on low cholesterol diets, and deer is an obvious meet to eat.

Bluetongue Virus - To Jab or not to Jab…. That is the question.

Something rather bizarre’s been happening over the past few days. The sun has emerged, and for a blissful weekend it actually shone upon the righteous. That is the annual Langdon Beck Sheep show, which not only managed to take place this year, but it was also bathed in warm sunshine.

This is a traditional show in the finest traditions of the Northern Hills. Two hundred sheep and a `Bouncy Castle’. What more do you need? These are uncertain times though. Disease is never far away, and this year’s `plague de jour’ is Bluetongue. Unlike the foot and mouth virus, which knocked last year’s show on the head, Bluetongue is primarily tackled using vaccination.

Langdon Beck Show

At least that’s what the veterinary authorities would like to happen. Farmers have other ideas though, and many of those I spoke to at Langdon Beck had only vaccinated the stock which would be sold at this autumn’s sales. Of course there’s little point in vaccinating the fat lambs which will be going to the slaughterhouse in the next few weeks, they’d be dead – at the hands of the slaughterman - by the time the vaccine could take effect. There is according to vets a case for vaccinating the breeding stock which is staying on the hills.

Many farmers argue that at this time of year it’s impossible to gather in all the animals from the fells because there’s too many, and anyway the weather’s starting to get colder. Remember this is `Nine months of winter and three months of bad weather’ country. A lot of the farms take the view that the `vector-free’ period when the midges which carry the virus stop flying – and even die off, will be here quite soon.

The vets aren’t so sure and told me that a `Indian Summer’ could carry quite a risk of the disease re-emerging. There’s also a rumour circulating amongst the farmers that the vaccine can cause fertility problems amongst the ewes. Vets dismiss this saying the vaccine’s dead not live so there shouldn’t be any issues with it. Also there’s the cost. At fifty pence a dose, that can add up to more than a hundred pounds for even a small upland farm. But as one of the local vets told me that’s peanuts compared with the cost of treating even a couple of sheep which get the disease.

Pigs might fly....?

For as long as I can remember farmers have complained that they are ill used by the people they supply, whether it's the supermarkets, the processors, the wholesalers. Farmers are and have been under-valued by just about everybody. In many ways they have had some justification for this, and although at times it might seem like synchronised whingeing, it has to be said that the retail environment is very competitive... cut throat perhaps. The main purpose in life of the supermarket buyer is to get the produce his or her bosses sell... from the field to the checkout with the greatest possible profit, or margin possible.

This is what buyers do, this is what supermarkets do... it's capitalism. This would be all fine and dandy if it had been a relationship of equals. It isn't though. The retail sector is dominated by about four major players, with Tesco in the lead, followed, by varying degrees of proximity by Sainsburys, ASDA, Morrison and some of the smaller rivals like the Co-op, Waitrose and in the bargain basement Aldi and Lidl. There isn't a huge scope for choice and it's getting narrower. The Co-op recently swallowed rivals Somerfield.

In the past farmers allege that the supermarkets have had an unfair advantage because farmers haven't had anywhere else to go. But there has been a change, a correction in the balance. Perhaps one of the turning points for this has been the change to the subsidy system which brought an end to the payment of subsidies....sorry support payments..... to farmers according to how much food they produce, but according to the area of land they manage.

This has removed for instance the necessity for farmers to produce a crop on every field. This was the whole idea of the reform of the common agricultural policy. Farmers wouldn't produce every bit of food the can, they would instead produce only what they could sell to the market.

In the case of farmers in England, a range of about a dozen different payments linked to the area they cropped, or the number of animals they have in their fields, was rolled into on Single Farm Payment. Off course the combination of a payment based on the area of land farmed, and a complex computer system to administer that new system was a recipe for disaster, and a cock-up of biblical proportions ensued. That was then, and after a couple of years of chaos, the system has now calmed down a bit.

Throw into the mix a genuine contraction is some sectors, for instance a sizable number of pigs seem to have been lost from production in Holland and Denmark, as has happened here. UK Pig numbers have fallen from over eight hundred breeding sows in 1999 to about four hundred and fifty thousand now... and you have the makings of a shortage of supply.

In the `Good?' old days, all the processors and supermarkets had to do was to wave the `import' stick to get UK prices tumbling. That isn't possible now, and there has been something of a change on the part of consumers. Shoppers now want to see the `Union Flag' on their packets of bacon. The net result is that even if retailers and processors wanted to squeeze the UK farmer, these days when it comes to pigs their options are somewhat limited. The result of this is that the price of meat at the checkout has increased by over 17% according to the latest Consumer Prices index from the Office of National Statistics. Bad news for the Treasury and the Governor of the Bank of England who is now having to write letters of explanation to the Chancellor, explaining why inflation has gone above 2%, so often now that a fresh stationary order will be required.

In the case of Beef, this is complicated even further by the growing affluence of countries in the Far East. There has been a massive increase in demand for instance from China and South Korea, combined with drought problems in Australia, this has increased the demand for UK beef exports. This very interesting graph of prices shows the massive increase in both beef and pig prices year on year. The jump in the price of lamb is more measured. This is partly due to the fact that demand is more sedate, and supply has remained high since the problems with Foot and Mouth disease in 2007. However there could be a price increase next year, after research from the Scottish Agricultural College discovered that there has been a fall in sheep numbers in the Highlands. The other bluebottle buzzing around the ointment is cost. Over the past year there has been a massive rise in all manner of inputs, from oil, to soya, to wheat and barley. Some of those have now stabilised or even come down (wheat and oil)... but other continue to go up. In a way this year's poor harvest conditions may have helped livestock farmers. because so much milling wheat is of poor quality it will have to be sold as animal feed. This will mean the price of feed based on wheat could well fall... See once again the `Farmer's Weekly' graphs.

All of this leaves farmers in an unusual positioin of power. The retailers are desperate to compete with each other on price, but squeezing suppliers isn't an option. In the case of beef the meat could simply end up going elsewhere. The ready supply of Brazilian beef which used to be used as a weapon to keep the price of the domestic product down is bogged down inthe fallout from their foot and mouth problems, and in that sense beef farmers really do have the option to have a much greater influence over the price. Many farmers are reluctant to excercise this muscle as the good times, such as they are, may not last. Many a combine harvester bought in the wake of last year's bumper crop has lain idle this year as the heaven opened.

The bottom line for farmers is profitability, and whether that can be sustained. Lats year pig farmers were losing about £25 per animal. This year it's a profit of £8 per pig. The big question they're all asking if whether that will be enough to re-invest in buildings and equipment, or whether their hand-to-mouth existence will continue to keep their farms on the edge of viability. In other words `Will pigs fly?'

Why sprouts are bad for you.

Basic facts:-

1) Cereal crops are grown because of the cereals they produce.
2) The cereals they produce are seeds
3) Put seeds into the ground and they grow.

All in all this has been a miserable summer, although the floods haven’t reached the same biblical proportions that they did last year, fields don’t need to be knee deep in water to bugger up the harvest.The problem this year has been a steady stream or rather showers of rain. Just enough to keep the ground soggy enough to prevent the machinery getting into the fields to harvest the crops. In technical terms it’s too wet for the machinery to `travel’.

And the grain’s wet too. This causes two problems, first of all the wet grain which is harvested has to be dried. Basically the farmers measure the moisture content when it comes in from the fields, and for it to be sellable it has to be reduced to about 15%.

This drying is done by putting it through a grain dryer.... a big cylindrical vat through which hot air heated by propane is pumped. Given the price of gas, which is currently at 34p per litre, this adds about £20 per ton to the cost of getting wheat to the point at which it can be sold.

Also most of this wheat is only suitable for animal feed, rather than bread or biscuit making, so that reduces the price to the farmer by about a further £40 per ton.....

The other big difficulty caused, both by the wet, and by not being able to get the crop in, is the danger of sprouting. This is where the ears of the wheat or any cereal crop fall to the ground and the grain, which is a seed, starts to grow again. The grain is largely useless, and because it has sprouted almost impossible to get back. In most cases where there are patched which have sprouted they just have to be left to be ploughed back in or `spayed off’ and killed with herbicide. The loss amounts to hundreds of pounds per field.

`The grass-like green shoots in this field is part of the crop which has sprouted'

However the biggest problem for many farmers at the moment is being able to get onto their land to put in next year's crop. The oilseed rape should be going in about now, and some of the farmers I've spoken to say they simply won't make the deadline. This is a nightmare for farmers because most have already bought, and will have to pay for, the seed, the fertilizer and the fuel to plant next year’s crop. In some cases they’ll be looking at less valuable crops like beans to fill the rotation gap left by a lack of oilseed rape

This year the harvest is a bleak payday on the land. Where they can farmers will write this one off to experience and get on with the job of trying to salvage what they can from a dismal summer.

Distressing times for Damsons

There is a small corner of Cumbria which is at the heart of a fruit growing tradition stretching back two thousand years. The Damson was probably introduced to this country by the Romans. It's a type of plum which is especially prolific in the former territories of Westmorland, annexed by neighbouring Cumberland in 1974 under the rule of Heath the merciless.

The Lyth valley, which rather unusually runs from the south to the north, rather than east-west stretching up from Morecambe Bay into the Lake District, is one of the biggest damson producing areas in the country. In April the trees, and there are hundreds of them both in the hedgerows and in orchards attached to many of the local farms, are white with blossom. Damson Day is a celebration of this blossom held towards the end of the month.

The crop of fruit is normally harvested towards the end of August and into September. This year however it's a washout. According to the Westmorland Damson Association, which exists to promote the use of this fruit the harvest is down by about eighty percent. The trees, have to quote Helen Smith the secretary of the association, `had enough'.

They were assailed by fierce easterly winds in the spring when the blossom was forming, this icy blast put the pollinating insects off pollinating. The blossom was blown off the trees and the fruit failed to form properly.

The result is trees which are are literally aging before their time, or at least they are putting on their winter clothes long before they should. The leaves are already turning yellow and some of the fruit which has actually made it onto the tree is small and shrivelled.

The prematurely yellow leaves are clearly visible on this tree

This is a bad year but it isn't a disaster, yet. There is a Cumbrian damson mountain, not yet on the scale of Europe's butter mountain in the nineteen seventies. In freezers in several location across Cumbria and North Lancashire with much of last year's harvest. Quite a lot of this was bought by the Westmorland Damson Association as a part of their policy of ensuring that in the good years like 2007, enough is stored away for the lean years like this one.

What would really hurt would be if this years freezing east winds returned next spring. Those who use damsons for jam, gin, pies and sausages will probably be OK for now, but would struggle to survive a second barren year. These Damson famines happen from time to time, but climate change watchers will watch with interest to see if this becomes a trend.

Farmers bogged down as harvest stalls

It's August. It shouldn't be the month when the farmer showing you his crops warns you to watch out for yet another nasty puddle. Fields about to be harvested shouldn't require wellies. If anything this should be be the season for dust masks. This should have been a bumper harvest, but in parts of the country farmers are facing losing some or all of their crops to the miserable wet weather which has plagued this us this summer. Normally the Northumberland Coastal Plain is one of the top areas in the country for growing wheat and oilseed rape. Glen Sanderson (above) who farms near Morpeth should be in the middle of a bumper harvest. Last year he had one of the best years ever, and until a few weeks ago he was hoping for the same, now he's just hoping that the rain will hold off long enough to be able to get some of his crops in.

By now the barley harvest should be finished, oilseed rape should be started, and the wheat should be ripening nicely ready for the combines in the final week of August. The harvest is later here in the North than elsewhere, but it's good land and on a good year yields can match anything else in the country. The problem is getting the crops out of the fields. The oilseed rape was ready last week, but it was too late to harvest. The problem is that ground is too damp for the machinery, and the danger is that the crop could start `chitting' or sprouting. The oilseed rape seeds, from which the oil itself is extracted are tiny, and black, contained in slim pea-like pods. Those pods are now quite brittle and Glen Sanderson's worried that even a medium strength wind could blow them open and spill the precious seeds across the soggy earth.

The loss of this crop would mean thousands of pounds down the drain. To grow it it costs about a hundred and fifty pounds an acre, and with prices paid to farmers now falling the chances of making a profit on fields like this are fast receding. The wheat field down the road tells a similar story. The wheat stands proud and strong, but the grain in the ears turn to mush without much pressure between the fingers. It can be dried at a cost of about £20 per ton, but a lot of the quality is lost, which means that it's now only suitable for distilling into alcoholic drinks, or for feeding to animals. The money is in what's called `Milling' wheat. This field would normally find its way into the biscuit tin, but not this year. This means a loss of £20 a ton, and about £100 per acre.Some farmers have decided not to plant next year, saying the cost of fertilizer is too high to make crops viable, and it's better to farm nothing and collect the Single Farm Payment. The price of fertilizer has doubled in the past year, closely linked to the oil price. Glen Sanderson is more determined, declaring that farmers in the North and Scotland are tough, although maybe stupid to try growing anything in this climate, and he's determined, he'll be back again next year.

The Credit Crunch...Crisis or Opportunity for farmers?

It was an ill wind which was certainly blowing through Northumberland at the weekend! The rain which battered the farmers market at Hexham was relentless, and the mood could well have been just as depressed. These are not easy times for the food industry, a recent report from the consultants Price Waterhouse Cooper predicted that up to a third of people will cut the amount they spend on food by moving their shopping to a cheaper supermarket, and nearly half could cut costs by eating at home rather than eating out.

The first of those two propositions is now good news for farmers markets like Hexham, the second could be the silver lining in the cloud which was unleashing a flood of biblical proportions on the poor shoppers on Saturday. Some farmer producers think that they will actually be the beneficiaries of a shift towards home cooking. People can buy very good ingredients to cook themselves for half the price of a meal out.

While I was at Hexham I bought two organic sirloin streaks from Askerton Castle Estate which came to thirteen pounds. With vegetables, from Bluebell Organics and a few other bits and pieces the entire meal cam to about sixteen pounds. The equivalent, eaten out would have been forty pounds, at the very least, and there would be no guarantee that the steak would have been as good...or even the knowledge of where it came from and what kind of animal it was from. In this case Belted Galloway, which is in my somewhat amateurish opinion, one of the best looking and tastiest of our traditional breeds.

Another farmer who runs an organic milk business near Darlington, Gordon Tweddle at Acorn Dairy, says that despite having to increase his prices to consumers, business has held up very well. The key says Gordon is to talk to your customers, and explain why it is that you have to increase your prices. Basically people are sensible enough to know that if they want to have milk from animals of whose provenance they can be certain, and if they want local food, they will understand that this is the only way such food can survive.

These are not easy times for any farmer, especially those who are dependent on buying in feed....but as the co-ordinator at Hexham Farmers Market pointed out to me... if you're sourcing local ingredients, and you're selling just a couple of miles away from where you bake your bread, then your costs from Diesel, and distribution don't rise at the same rate as the supermarkets with whom you're competing, and so you stand a fighting chance of surviving.

The good news, I suspect, is that many of the people who regularly use farmers markets like the one at Hexham won't be hit by the credit crunch, because they don't have any credit. My suspicion is that many of the people who buy their food in this way actually own their homes outright, and many live of interest-rate related incomes, and might actually benefit from a rate rise.

Poultry slaughter under the spotlight.

This week has been much exercised by chickens. Not how they live or are farmed... rain forests of newsprint and many terabytes of digital space has been taken up with that recently, but how they die. Following a very high profile campaign by the TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall there has been a significant increase in sales of free range birds in supermarkets.

You might remember that Mr Fearnely Whittingstall set up his own experiment where he kept one flock of birds in a shed, and another flock in free range conditions and compared the kind of lives the two birds had. One thing which perhaps passed unoticed, although it was mentioned in the programme, was that at the end of their lives the chickens, both fee range and shed reared, or broilers, met the same end at the same slaughter plant.

Now questions are being asked about whether the slaughtering process is as humane as it could be. If you're squeamish please look away now. This is how it works... The birds normally arrive at the slaughterhouse in crates, from which they are unloaded. They are then placed upside down into shackles from which they hang by their feet. These shackles move along a conveyor, in a fashion which is not dissimilar to a car plant. Upside down, their head is immersed in an electrified water bath. The chicken completes an electrical circuit; a massive current is designed to render the bird unconscious.

One of the concerns is whether this always happens, and whether some of the birds are only partially stunned, and maybe still conscious when they move to the next stage of the process which is where their throats are cut by a machine with a series of rotating knives. Death under this method actually occurs through bleeding.

The Farm Animal Welfare Council which advises the government has been carrying out an inquiry into the way that white meat species are slaughtered, and the first conclusions of the working group chaired by Professor David Henderson have started to emerge. According to Compassion in World Farming which was present at an open meeting addressed by Prof Henderson, there are worries both about the shackling and about the way that the electrical water stunning baths actually work, or sometimes don’t.

The worry which CIWF has about the shackling is that in some plants, according to them, the birds can spend several minutes in an unnatural position upside down before they are stunned. According to the lobby group this can be worse in some of the larger plants where up to a hundred birds a minute are killed and the actual killing lines can wind around the plant before the birds are stunned. CIWF says that not only is, being held upside down by their feet an unnatural position for the birds to be held, it can also be very painful as it can exacerbate leg and foot problems which may have been caused by the way they were reared.

There are also worries about whether every bird receives enough current to properly stun it. Every chicken is different, in size and electrical resistance, and this may effect how much current it gets. CIWF also says that sometimes by flapping their wings the wingtips of the birds actually hit the electrified water first, something which according to `Compassion' is very painful, and causes them to recoil their necks thus missing the stunning bath.

An alternative to electrical stunning is the use of gas. This is used to kill the birds, and renders the unconscious in the process. This isn’t a poison as we would think of it, but an inert gas such as Nitrogen or Argon which simply deprives the bird of oxygen. Dr Mohan Raj of Bristol University told me that when Michael Portillo, the former politician turned TV presenter made a programme about `How to kill a human’ hypoxia, or the deprivation of the brain of oxygen was probably the least unpleasant way to die!

This is in effect what is happening with gassing. The birds are put into a chamber which is then pumped full of either pure argon or pure nitrogen, which is, for the purposes of killing considered inert. A mixture of thirty percent Carbon Dioxide and either Nitrogen or Argon may also be used. The birds are deprived of oxygen and die. When they are unconscious, and the brain ceases to operate, they will continue to move, thrash around even, but this is purely a nerve response, according to scientists, the same as cutting the head off a chicken. One advantage of this system is that the birds can be killed without having to be removed from the crates in which they arrived at the plant.
There is some concern though within the industry that in the process of this automatic response, the birds can damage their wings, and this can reduce the value of the carcass. However the bigger stumbling block to the widespread use of gassing is the capital cost of the equipment, something in the region of hundreds of thousands of pounds to replace the existing lines. Fine if those lines are life expired, but beyond the reach of companies using lines with many years of life left. The change is happening though, and about a quarter of chickens, and most turkeys killed for food in the country are now gassed.

It will be interesting to see whether the concerns about how chicken live will be duplicated when the FAWC report is published this autumn looking at how they die. One problem is that by looking at the label it’s now easy to see how a chicken lived its life. It’s almost impossible to know how it met its end.

World Trade deals, no easy answers for farmers or governments.

I recently had the privilege of meeting a group of farmers from the developing world who sell their produce through a fair trade company to European Markets. They were not downtrodden, but they were acutely interested in the way that their crops are sold here, and despite the fair trade tag, there is still a massive disparity between what they receive and what we pay. In some cases they are also restricted in how much of their produce they are allowed to send to our supermarket shells by tariffs and trade agreements.

The World Trade Organisation talks which have just collapsed in Geneva were about liberalising markets, removing those tariffs which stopped farmers in the developing world from freely selling their produce in Europe and the USA. Some of those countries also had tariffs of their own which stopped imports from the highly developed, highly technological developed world flooding in and squeezing out low yielding subsistence farmers, or newly established industries.

In the press much of the blame has been laid at the door of the Indian and Chinese delegations, wanting to keep the right to protect their own agricultural industries from competition from the West. However there is some sympathy, amongst anti-poverty campaigners, for the stand taken by countries from the developing world against the deal on the table.

The trouble is that these talks weren’t just about food and farming, they were also about industrial tariffs, and the west wanting fewer restrictions on access to markets, something which according to the charities would be hugely damaging for the fledgling industrial sector which is fuelling the growth of many of these countries. Action Aid laid the blame at the door of the EU and the US for trying to maintain subsidies to their farmers, and resisting the efforts of poorer countries to protect their own workers, saying that in the end it was better to have no agreement than a bad agreement.

Oxfam too was critical of the EU and US saying the lack of a deal was a wasted opportunity, however in a statement the organisation’s International Director Jeremy Hobbs said “At a time when prices are volatile, developing countries were right to fight for the flexibility to defend their smallest farmers and ensure food security.”

In the US cotton farmers will still get their subsidies, and in the EU billions of pounds will still be paid every year to arable farmers who are seeing some of the highest prices for their crops for several years.
The big problem though is that farming isn’t a single entity. Whist the barley barons are doing very well at the moment, many livestock farmers face a desperate struggle to find the cash to buy the feed for their animals. And those barley barons are in turn looking very carefully at the cost of planting next year’s crop. They will want to know in advance that the price they will get will match the increase in the cost of the fuel and the fertilizer needed to grow it.

The level of subsidies in Europe is decreasing, but farmers say that without these payments some of their crops simply aren’t worth growing. The question is whether taking away those payments would actually make a big difference to farmers in developing countries. In some cases, perhaps it would.

Perhaps an increase in the price of wheat on the world market might help farmers in developing countries get a better price for the alternative they could offer. Where the lack of an agreement really hurts is where there is competition, for instance in cotton where US growers receive a subsidy. Action Aid says the continuation of this will be a bitter blow to African cotton farmer who simply can’t compete.

But tariffs and trade restrictions are not always one-sided. As we’ve seen with the market for beef, it isn’t only the developing world that puts tariffs on imports; sometimes countries in South America put their own restrictions on their own exports. Argentina did this out of fear that beef shortages at home, caused by massive exports, could stoke inflation in the fragile Argentine economy.

Maybe at the heart of this would be a better world without any tariffs or subsidies. The trouble is that these measures are often linked, inextricably to somebody, somewhere needing the vote of an elector. Perhaps in the end the world food market is just so volatile that there was never going to be an agreement in this round of the WTO talks.

But maybe perhaps at a time of ever rising food prices and potential shortages some of the tariffs will have to go, just to ensure that the Western World stays fed. The question then will be whether the West sucks out of the developing world, the food that farmers need to feed their families and their fellow citizens.

Sun shines on Countryside jamboree after last year's washout.

Sometimes it feels like there can be too much of a good thing, and at this year's CLA Game Fair at Blenheim Palace there was almost too much sun. Farmers will be absolutely delighted to see the sun shine on their crops, and the Game Fair organisers will heave a sigh of relief that this year's event fared better than last year when the soggy ground at Harewood House in Leeds meant a last minute cancellation. This year the sun shone from day one, as a hundred and fifty thousand people flocked through the gates. The Game Fair is a bit different to other countryside events, for a start there is no livestock, so it has survived the various outbreaks of animal disease in the past few years, and partly because of this it is one of the few countryside events on the summer calendar where dogs are welcome. The Royal Highland is one of the few shows with livestock which allows dogs. The reason given by most show organisers where dogs are banned is our old friend 'elf and safety', with worries that should the pouch slip the lead it could cause livestock to panic, resulting in visitors being hurt. At the Game Fair the blazing heat of the weekend this made the doggy water stops with their bowls and hoses more than welcome.

Amongst the hundred and fifty thousand visitors were the Farm Minister Lord Rooker and the Conservative leader David Cameron who is also a local MP.

The Game Fair is always a good place for unveiling policies; in the past the CLA has used it to launch a campaign to get restaurants to reveal where their beef comes from, this year it was the turn of the anglers. Perhaps feeling a little left behind the publicity generated by Hunting and Shooting, several of the organisations representing the four million people who indulge in Britain’s most popular pastime, are to merge to give a stronger voice to those who fish for pleasure. Several debates were held at the Game Fair about the proposal.

Those behind the move deny it’s out of fear that after the ban on hunting, fishing will be the next target for animal rights campaigners. This is more about getting their voice heard in government circles. In particular anglers feel they want more done to improve the aquatic environment in return for the money they pay for their rod licence. They want improvements to water quantity as well as water quality. This for instance would mean changes to the way that houses are built and the planning system to ensure that surface drainage from new developments is free of the pollutants which could damage fish… things like heavy metals, solvents and fats.

The merger of the Angling Conservation Society, the National Federation of Anglers, the National Federation of Sea Anglers, the Specialist Anglers Alliance and the National Association of Fisheries and Angling Consultatives is likely to get the support of those involved in the sport. Infact these different bodies have been mulling over the idea of merging for almost a century. Now it looks likely to happen. A final name for the new body is yet to be decided, but for the moment the campaign goes under the banner of Angling Unity. Could I suggest `Worm Drowners Inc?’

Where’s the beef? - Farmers urged not kill `Cash Cows'

A couple of years ago the full horror of the Australian drought was brought home to me when, at a food trade show in Paris, the European representative of Meat and Livestock Australia told me that many beef farmers in affected areas were sending perfectly good breeding beef cows for slaughter to be eaten because there simply wasn’t enough water to keep them alive.

Now it seems that some farmers in the UK are sending their breeding cows to be slaughtered for meat for a very different reason. Because prices are so high, they are getting much more money than they would ever have anticipated, and they’re cashing in.

A good `suckler’ cow could have as many as ten calves during her lifetime, although seven or eight is nearer the norm for traditional breeds, falling to five for the commercial breeds. Until recently when beef from animals over thirty months old was banned from the human food chain these animal had to be processed under the Over Thirty Months Scheme…the OTMS, when they reached the end of their productive life. The sum paid for these animals, which were simply killeds and incinerated was small, maybe reaching two to three hundred pounds per head.

Now, with restriction lifted, older cows being sent for slaughter and which can be eaten, are getting as much as eight hundred pounds each according to the National Beef Association, the NBA, which is throwing its hands up in horror at this development. It believes the early killing of prime breeding stock depletes the supply of heifers and steers to eat which will be born in the future….and warns this is a bad move when the future is looking ever rosier for beef farmers.
OK, this might seem a bit strange, an organisation representing farmers actually predicting that prices will rise, and now is not the time for retrenchment or profit taking. But the NBA is probably right, world population isn’t going to fall, and there will continue to be an inexorable rise in the consumption of beef in the Far East. Add to that a reduction in the land area available for livestock in South America because soya or sugar cane is actually more profitable than meat, and such optimism makes sense.

However a big question mark hangs over all of this in the strength of the consumer economy in Europe, and particularly in the UK. A beef farmer with whom I talk regularly told me the other day that he firmly believes that if the economy continues to falter, in a few years time meat will become a weekly treat, not a daily staple.

The other big problem is that the price that farmers are getting for their beef may be rising ever faster, but so is the cost of producing that beef. This could wipe out any of the benefits from higher prices, so some farmers may see some sense in cashing in their `cash cows’ now whilst they can still make a fast buck.

For the consumer this could mean facing much higher beef prices five years `down the road’ when the supply of beef dries up, not just from European farmers but also from parts of the world, i.e. South America which were traditionally seen as an alternative when UK beef producers started asking to be paid more.

Small Abattoirs - Update. Hope for operators.

Just as news of a change to the way abattoirs are charged for the supervision of the Meat Hygiene Service, MHS, was announced, one of slughterhouses affected has sent me news of another possible change to the inspection regime, which might help to reduce the level of these fees for the smallest slaughterhouses.

At the moment an Official Vetinarian (OV) has to be present to inspect the animals before slaughter... ante mortem, and supervise the removal and disposal of specified risk material, the SRM, which is thought to be at most risk of carrying the prion whch causes BSE.

Under the new system, which the MHS says would only be practical for the smallest plants, the vet would still check the animals prior to slaughter. They would then leave and allow the killing and dressing of the carcass to take place handled soley by the abattoir staff. Later in the day the OV or a Meat Hygiene Inspector would return to check that the relevant parts of the animal, categorised as SRM had been removed and stained to show they are unfit for human consumption.

The new system would only apply to Pigs which can't get BSE. With the execption of those animals requiring testing for the disease Trichinella. Sheep, goats and cattle aged under thirty months. The latter three are thought to be a lower risk than cattle over thirty months of age.

Abattoirs would be given permission to work under this new system on a case by case basis, and would have to meet rigorous standards first, but it's the kind of approach which will be welcomed by the industry. Not least because according to a discussion document, the procedure which is called `Cold Inspection' is designed to make the operation of the MHS more efficient, and cut the cost of running it. Hopefully for the operators of these plants this will also mean a reduction in the fees they are charged as MHS staff will have to spend less time supervising them. Although those in the more remote parts of the country wonder whether inspection teams having to make two separate trips will save money above the same single vet carrying out both the ante and post mortem examinations.

Killing time for small abattoirs?

These are not easy times for small abattoirs. Once many butchers’ shops had a slaughterhouse attached, now the meat we eat is often killed many miles from where it was reared and where it finally ends up on sale.

A mixture of regulations and the economies of scale have led to the concentration of killing in large industrial plants a million miles removed from the countryside.

The first problem for many small abattoirs is that out of necessity they tend to be located close to people, and many people… particularly in urban areas do not like to the idea of animals being killed at the bottom of the garden. Most of them are of course happy enough to eat the meat that comes out at the end of the process, they just don’t like the idea of what goes on inside.

As the world moved on from the horrors and deprivation of the war years, the pressure was on to become a modern nation. Convenience led to a disconnection with the food we eat. By the nineteen seventies meat had moved from behind the butcher’s counter where it hung as a carcass, cut up in front of the customer, to the chiller cabinet where it sat ready prepared in polystyrene trays. With this move to convenience packaging came a move to a meat industry centralised into bigger players. It became more economic to move thousands of cattle and sheep, every week, to bigger plants where they could be killed and cut-up on a highly mechanised line in a similar fashion to the car industry.

This made the larger plants more efficient, and the smaller ones closed. At the start of the nineteen seventies there were almost nineteen hundred slaughterhouses in England, Scotland and Wales. Twenty five years later that number had fallen to just under five hundred. This year that number dropped below three hundred for the whole of the UK.

Many of these are the larger abattoirs, which can handle hundreds of animals a day. In the case of cattle, more than half the animals killed in England meet their end in just twenty of the largest plants, according to Her Majesty’s Customs and Revenue documents setting out guidance for the valuation of business rates.

With sheep three quarters of the slaughter takes place in just seventy six plants, but in pigs four fifths of the British animals we eat are killed in just twenty slaughterhouses. This has as much to do with the specialist skills and equipment needed for dealing with pigs.

However what has really spelled the end for the small slaughterhouses is the increasing weight of regulation they have to follow. At the top of this list is a set of controls which are designed to protect meat eaters from BSE, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy. The disease was first discovered in the UK in 1986 and has been linked with a variation of a brain disease in humans, v-CJD, Variant-Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
A hundred and sixty four people in the UK are thought to have died have died from the disease since 1995 when it was first identified as being different from Classic CJD.

Research into BSE found that the prion, the infective agent which causes the disease, was thought to collect in certain parts of the animal, namely anything to do with the nervous system, the brain and for some reason the spleen. Controls were introduced which ruled that these parts of the body… given the title Specified Risk Material must be cut out and discarded.

There was also a growing feeling that BSE wasn’t just confined to cattle. There were suspicions that the disease had emerged from the practice of feeding sheep brains to cattle. A theory emerged that BSE originated from a similar sheep disease called scrapie. Sheep too became subject to rules on the removal of SRM.

Animals over a certain age are now required to have their spinal cord taken out.
All of this significantly ramped up the requirement for those who were doing the killing… or to be more accurate, the preparation of the carcass, to follow some pretty heavy duty rules. And rules mean just one thing these days… enforcement.

Both abattoirs and licenced red meat cutting plants, where the carcasses are butchered on an industrial scale are regulated by the Meat Hygiene Service, which is part of the Food Standards Agency. It provides the inspectors and official veterinarians, who have to be present every time animals are slaughtered.

Until now fees paid by these plants have been based on the number of animals needing to be inspected, so the smallest slaughterhouses paid the smallest fees. That though is about to change with the headage payment of the past replaced by a charge based on the number of hours MHS inspectors spend at the plants.

This is coupled to a twelve percent increase in all charges, and the introduction of a new charge for inspecting the removal of SRM.

The package of measures however will only reduce the subsidy paid by the taxpayer to the MHS from £28m to £25m per year. And many in the meat industry say the real answer lies in reducing the operating costs of the MHS. At the moment it costs £m91 per year to run, and Norman Bagley of the Association of Independent Meat Suppliers (AIMS) which represents the operators of small and medium sized plants reckons this can be reduced to about £50m-£55m. The FSA itself says it is aiming to reduce the operating costs of the MHS to £74m by 2012/13.

The FSA says small abattoirs will be protected under the new regime, but many within the industry fear quite a few will still disappear. This, according to supporters of this way of food production, will mean more food miles, greater stress for the animals and the potential for a greater risk of disease as animals are moved around the country to go to larger killing plants hundreds of miles away.


See inside a small abattoir - Noel Chadwick and Son Standish

Just when you think it's safe to go back in the cowshed...

You might recall that last year the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse decided to spend their summer holiday in the UK. After all there are a wide range of places offering stabling facilities... War and Conquest were taking a breather from some heavy-duty rampaging in the Middle East, Death was having a sulk, so, finding himself at a loose end, Pestilence decided to occupy those long summer days by generating a bit of misery across the land.

After a spot of ad hoc flooding, he turned his attention to spreading a bit of disease, and where better than the stockbroker belt of Surrey. Some impromptu re-plumbing on the drains of the Pirbright laboratory site shared by Merial, a veterinary pharmaceutical company and the Institute of Animal Health, the IAH, did the trick. An outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease led to eight farms being infected and just over two thousand animals slaughtered. It caused a summer of chaos for farmers, but why stop there.

On the other side of the channel rancid fetid midges, carrying a ghastly virus called Bluetongue were waiting to pounce. Actually the midges can't have been that rancid... they were well enough to fly across more than forty miles of water and pass the disease on to a Highland cow called Debbie on a rare-breeds farm in Suffolk.

The Culicoides midge which carries and transmits the Bluetongue Virus - picture courtesy Institute for Animal Health

Now to add to the misery of the foot and mouth restrictions which effectively brought a halt to livestock marts and agricultural shows a new set of restrictions were imposed because of Bluetongue.

I remember the day that Bluetongue was discovered was the day that the Langdon Beck show should have been happening. Langdon Beck is at the very top end of Teesdale in the North Pennines. It's a wonderful old fashioned sheep show, with just one trade stand from the local agricultural supplies company, and a bouncy castle. And lots of Swaledale Sheep.

The show had already been cancelled because of Foot and Mouth movement restrictions, and the chairman had organised a `cow day'. A `cow day' is a Dales euphemism for a massive drinking session. As I was about to join the farmers drowning their sorrows at the loss of their show, a text message from the DEFRA press office announced the arrival of Bluetongue, not unexpected but still shocking. I didn't have the heart to tell the farmers who had just lost their annual show.

Almost a year later the livestock industry is still reeling from the effects of Bluetongue. The virus causes symptoms similar to Foot and Mouth disease, but the one crucial difference is that it cannot be spread from animal to animal. Instead it is carried by a midge, the Culicoides, which sucks blood from an infected animal, and then infects other uninfected livestock as it moves around gorging itself. It affects all the animals which are susceptible to Foot and Mouth except pigs, which don't get it or carry it.

A sheep with Bluetongue - picture courtesy Institute for Animal Health

Although animals can't pass the infection directly to each other, those which have the virus are still a potential meal for a hungry midge. Because of that a series of movement restrictions were introduced, which aimed to limit the accessibility of these animals to midges. Within one hundred kilometres of an infection a Protection Zone is declared, beyond that a further fifty km is declared a surveillance zone.

Generally speaking in a Protection Zone animals can only move directly to slaughter, and are otherwise banned from leaving the area. In a Surveillance Zone animals can move freely within the zone, or from it to the Protection Zone but not to the disease free area outside. This has meant massive disruption for livestock markets, for agricultural shows and for owners of high value breeding animals who want to be able to trade them to the highest bidder.

Unlike Foot and Mouth disease, part of the control strategy for Bluetongue is widespread preventative vaccination. A vaccine against the serotype of the disease in the UK... BTV 8 has been developed and is being rolled out across the country. Farmers are paying about fifty pence per animal for the dose which they administer themselves. Animal health experts don't yet know how effective it is, but both they and the farming industry are keeping their fingers crossed.

Now however there is another threat lurking. In all there are twenty-four different varieties, or serotypes of the Bluetongue virus. The disease in the UK is serotype 8 BTV 8. What is worrying the scientists now is Serotype 1, BTV 1. It came to Europe last year from North Africa, landing in Gibraltar and killing four sheep. It then spread up the Iberian Peninsular before reaching the border with France last Autumn. Midge activity falls off when the temperature drops so it didn't get any further. Until now. Recently BTV 1 has started appearing in South West France, and is moving northwards at the rate of twenty kilometres every week.

What is particularly worrying is that the area affected by BTV 8, the one which is `over here', now overlaps with the BTV 1 area in Southern France. We're not talking mutation, but as Professor Peter Mertens from the Institute of Animal Health told me, the two varieties could end up `having sex' and swapping some of their characteristics... making the disease harder to tackle. The good news is that there is also a vaccine for the BTV 1 version of Bluetongue, as with BTV 8, however neither is effective against the other serotype. That means that if BTV 1 reaches the UK the whole vaccination process will be have to be carried out again.

The one ray of hope though is that it is unlikely that BTV 1 will get beyond Northern France this year which gives vets and the pharmaceutical companies a breathing space to manufacture more of the BTV 1 vaccine to cope with another invasion, should it happen.

Is healthy eating good for the countryside...?

We're on slightly virgin territory here. I like the countryside...and I love my food. Technically on the Body Mass Index...the all powerful BMI, I fall into the `Fat Bastard' category.

Some of this can be laid at the door of the brewing industry, some of it is down to eating too much food... not necessarily the wrong sort of food, just a lot of it. Much of the blame must lie in the fact that technically I'm a lazy `Fat Bastard'.

However I am trying to make an effort. I eat a stick of celery every week, and I have given up aubergines... arguably the world's most pointless vegetable... but every bit helps. I'm trying to eat healthily, but these things take time and effort.

We live in the age of virtuous eating. The Food Standards Agency's `five portions a day' slogan encouraging people to eat at least five portions of fruit or vegetables every day has to be the most recognised public information campaign since Tufty saved millions of the nation's children from an early death at the hands of the automobile industry.

Healthy food is big business, with entire chiller cabinets devoted to guilt free calories. Things like diary produce, and red meat have become the love that dare not speak its name. The nation is on the path to a long and healthy life, but can the same be said for the countryside?

An academic paper which has just been published by the Rural Economy and Land Use programme (RELU) based at Newcastle University has been looking at the relationship between farming, the food chain and the countryside.

In the first of a series of chapters colleagues from Reading University asked what would happen to our landscape if the population followed the kinds of advice being issued by the Department of Health and the FSA. Their conclusions make interesting reading.

If we eat fewer dairy products' the report says' this could lead to more farmers abandoning the milk parlour, in favour of crops or possibly livestock. If we eat less meat this could lead to the precarious hill-farming sector becoming unviable. The Reading scenario took as its benchmark the World Health Organisation guidelines for healthy eating. The researchers say that this, if followed by everybody, would mean a 75% drop in the consumption of cheese whilst the amount of fresh fruit and vegetables would increase by 50%.

In the case of the drop in consumption of red meat, which falls under this model by 15%, this would be made worse by competition from former dairy farmers who have switched to meat production in the lowlands, where the cost base is lower than in the hills. The end result could be the abandonment of hill farms, and a switch to massive `ranches'. There would also be an increase in demand for fruit and vegetables, and this might mean an increase in the Bete Noire of the `blight on the landscape' brigade, the polytunnel.

Of course healthy eating doesn't mean cutting out meat and dairy. Infact there is an argument out forward by the researchers that some of the methods used to produce healthier meat and dairy products, are infact very good for the countryside. For instance `grass-fed' meat has been found to be higher in beneficial fatty acids than meat from animals which have been fattened indoors on cereals.

Grass fed animals are good for the environment, and in some cases, in particular in the uplands they are also a vital tool for conservationists. For instance in the Yorkshire Dales traditional breeds of cattle are used because they can live, and thrive on the harsh limestone hills, whilst eating the invasive, tough, scrubby plants that the the sheep are `too posh to nosh'. Under the Limestone Country project which has just come to an end, farmers were encouraged to use breeds such as Dexter, and Highland and Luing. The beef was specially marketed, meaning the farmers got a better price for what they produced.

So the conclusion is that not only do you change the attitudes of people towards eating healthy food, but you change the composition of that food so that it is both healthy to eat and good for the landscape. Strawberries which are produced under plastic which allows ultra-violet light to come through, rather than in polytunnels have, according to the researchers, a better nutrition value, although the yields are lower.

Grass-fed beef is also more expensive to produce than its intensive counterpart. The message is that people must be prepared to pay more for their food if it is to be healthy for them, and healthy for the landscape in which it is produced. Something which may cause problems for people on low incomes.

Of course this vision of the future is based on a model which accepts that people will change their eating habits to consume only healthy food. That is highly unlikely, especially if that food is more expensive at a time of recession.

It’s showtime…..

There was book I once never bothered to read called `God is an Englishman’ by R.F.Delderfield…who also wrote `To Serve Them All My Days’, well actually the almighty is a Yorkshire man… or woman.

Last year’s Royal Show at Stoneleigh in Warwickshire was a washout…. So much so that the final day had to be cancelled to the public because the conditions under foot were just too dangerous and boggy.

By contrast the Great Yorkshire, no need for royalty in the name here….Great will suffice, was bathed in sunshine. This year the Royal was hit by reduced numbers of animals and slightly disappointing visitor numbers. The first day of the Great Yorkshire, celebrating its hundred and fiftieth birthday ended with throngs of people, and bathed in glorious evening sunshine, even if the weather was a bit iffy earlier in the day. I suspect this might have been instigated by the posse of bishops I passed as I was walking into the showground.

Farming is very much an isolated business. Long, and physically demanding days spent either trying to cox machinery back to life or attempting the same with sheep. Very few forage harvesters have an overwhelming desire to turn their toes up. With the decline of auction marts, and indeed livestock farming, there's little opportunity to socialise. Trade shows, are one way of getting to meet those of a like mind, but the highlight of the short summer hiatus before the harvest begins is the traditional agricultural show. They're also an opportunity to gain the approval, and admiration of your peers.

At the heart of every show there is the competition, whether it's the big national shows like the Royal, or the regional ones like the Great Yorkshire and the East of England. These competitions, the classes, the best in show matter. The animals entered are gliding along in the fast lane of the gene pool. This is the stock that all the most dedicated farmers want for their blood lines. A Win at the Royal, or the Great Yorkshire can be worth thousands of pounds, not in the relatively small prize money on offer, but in the resale value in the semen or the embryos of the cattle, or the sale of the sheep or pigs themselves.

Then there's the chance to press the flesh. The big movers and shakers in farming must be seen at the shows. NFU President Ptere Kendall was one of the visitors on the first day of the Great Yorkshire, Hilary Benn will be there in the Thursday, as will be the Queen... no doubt he'll get much more of an ear-bending about badgers than she will.

NFU President Peter Kendall at the 2008 Great Yorkshire Show

It's the chance for those who lobby on behalf of farming to test the water, to get a feel of what the countryside is really thinking. Some farmers prefer to avoid the general shows, prefering instead the specialist trade events, but for others events like the Great Yorkshire are a vital social lifeline which keeps them just the right side of the line between hope and despair.