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.