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.