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.

Guerrilla Gardeners Go Mainstream

There’s a wonderful organisation out there, a group of people who were considered a bit bonkers at the time they started , whose mission in life is to turn roundabouts into flower beds. They’re the Guerrilla Gardeners . The idea is that in covert, night time highly-organised operations they'd grab an unused and unloved piece of land, mostly in urban areas and beautify it with flowers. A sort of Alan Titchmarsh in `Milk-Tray Man' garb.

It’s the kind of thing that councils should be doing, but these days in many places they can’t afford to. The reaction to the Guerrilla Gardeners was mixed – Many communities welcomed them with open arms, but some local authorities were decidedly sniffy, citing things like `elf & safety as the traditional reason for wanting this outrageous behaviour stopped. It's the kind of thing that gives elves a bad name.

A garden plot at Linthorpe Primary School in Middlesbrough

Now though the principle of grabbing any spare bit of land going has become `legit’, and is even being encouraged, but not for flowers. With food price inflation hitting 12% and petrol heading towards £2 a litre many people, and indeed those in authority, are looking for new and cheaper ways to feed the ever growing population. Urban Farming has become the buzzword these days, with a slightly Utopian concept that you can feed the cities from land within the cities. It harks back to the `Dig for Victory’ campaigns of the war years and the allotment movement which both preceded and followed the Second World War.

In recent times many of those allotments have been under threat. A friend of mine has just fought off a plot (sorry) to take away the allotments where she grows food, to extend a golf course. Fortunately the local council stepped in and protected the land. Not everybody has been so lucky. Over the past thirty years, something like two hundred thousand allotments have been lost in the UK.

In the North of England there’s a different approach being taken, with the Urban Farming project set up in Middlesbrough under a series of events called DOTT 07. DOTT stands for Designs of the Times, and it’s all about community involvement. In the case of Middlesbrough more than two hundred and fifty scraps of land have been identified which can be used to grow vegetables... many of them small and unused.

The organisers admit that it won’t feed the people of Teesside, but it might get them thinking about growing their own. The quantity of food grown on an allotment can make more of a difference to the cost of feeding a family, and can go a long way to supplying the annual vegetable requirements for four people.

More than seventy schools in the borough are taking part, giving kids the chance to grow and eat their own food, and perhaps understand a bit more about how it’s done and the amount of work involved. And people in local neighbourhoods are being asked to identify patches of land which could be planted with vegetables. So the waste ground of Middlesbrough may be bringing lettuce to a salad bar near you soon, and it won’t be done by people creeping around at night either.

Where there’s muck there’s a way to survive the fuel crisis

A bit like the gruesome orange `You’ve been Tango'd’ advert. A harsh reality has crept up behind the petrol heads, and is busy slapping them about a bit. The oil price has gone through the ceiling, taken the lift up to the 16th floor and stepped out onto the terrace at the top of the building….and however strong our powers of persuasion it ain’t coming down.

This is what makes a press release from the Soil Association especially interesting. It says farming must break its dependency on artificial means of restoring the fertility of the land.

Organic agriculture eschews artificial fertiliser. Artificial fertiliser is hugely energy hungry - something approaching 90% of the cost of producing ammonia based fertilisers is made up the cost of the energy used in the process. This often comes from natural gas, but the price of natural gas is very closely aligned with oil. In the past year the cost of most artificial fertilisers has doubled.

Organic farming does not use these fertilisers, so ergo; organic farmers don’t have the added expense of these inputs into their farming system.

There is a problem though. With most organic arable systems the yields of the crops fall. That’s fine when cereal prices are generally low and growing organically can generate a premium…. However with the world price for wheat and other cereals at near record levels, it can be worth farmers renouncing their organic status to grow crops conventionally increasing the yields, and trousering the extra.

This in turn means a serious shortage of organic animal feed. One farmer I recently visited in Cumbria found the problem was getting so serious last year that she bought a small piece of arable land, converted it to organic and is now growingbarley, quite a courageous move so far north.

In the current economic climate it should pay dividends and she’s hoping to be quids-in.

In terms of the organic system this is only really feasible on mixed farms where the animals provide a natural fertiliser which can in turn be used on the crops.

It’s often little help to organic pig and poultry farmers who often have small units, and very little space, or suitable land to grow feed.

For those organic farms which are self contained, and have a complete farming system within the same unit, something which goes to the very core of the organic movement, the oil crisis could be very good news, but for others who have to buy in feed, the rising price will hit hard.

Nor is organic farming immune from the other impact of the rise in oil price. The cost of harvesting the crops, using oil driven machinery, or the distribution costs, which again are oil-based.

What the advocates of organic farming will be hoping for is that the stratospheric rise in the oil price, and the consequent rise in the price of artificial fertiliser, will make non-organic farmers think very carefully about their dependence on these inputs, and maybe cut down on their use. If that does happen the real challenge will be to find ways of keeping the yields as high as possible to feed as many people as possible, with lower inputs.

For commodity farmers the next few years could be uncomfortable, but only because the old certainties, have gone out the window, and they may have to re-learn some of the old ways of farming where nature and its healing powers replace the nitrogen quick fix from a fertiliser bag.