The Lie Of the Land

[sandersj89]

Owenwill

 

I have the upmost respect for small dairy producers, I fathers familly used to run their own dairy and rounds themselves but got of dairy back in he 80's. On our farm in Devon we have never milked, instead we focused the livestock activity on sheep and rasing a few, approx 20 a year, pedegree holstiens. The rest of the land is down to arable.

 

Any livestock operation is a huge commitment, I hardly remember going on holiday when I was young as you are tied to the farm 365 days a year.

 

The treatment of farm gate prices for milk is nothing less than a scandal in my view.

 

Best of luck with the dispersal sale, I hope you make a good market and best of luck.

 

Jerry

[kirky640]

some good points of view here!

 

thanks for the good read chaps

 

my father has just retiered from a hill farm 85 suckler cows and 4 hundred ewes

 

no money in it its sad but true would have been a better life than driveing a lorrie round

scotland for a living

 

 

 

hope somthing happens soon for the good of the countryside and farming comunity

 

kirky

[Mungler]

I hope the viewing figures are good for the program but I suspect that they wont be great for a number of reasons but mainly it was on channel 4 and fairly late in the day.

 

Also I doubt many of the viewers were the average shopper, people who made the effort to watch would I expect, in the main, have an interest in the subject or know some of the hard truths already.

 

Still as I said before, hats off to the makers and C4 for showing it.

 

You all know I am from farming stock so I have first hand experience of living/working on a farm, indeed within the next couple of years I will be back on the family farm in Devon running it to gain an income and preserve it for my kids…..must be bonkers!

 

So a few of my views on the program.

 

The start of the film in Cornwall showed very well the pressures small farms are under, if they have no scope for diversification then they are at high risk of going under, the Single Farm Payment will not save them. The number of farmers and their families who hold down 2 or more jobs off the farm is testament to that fact. Farming in such disadvantaged areas is getting harder, buying more land to increase the farm size and to take advantage of economies of scale is not a common option, land prices are still strong and a lot of small parcels of land in such areas are being snapped up by non farmers at very high prices, we recently tried to buy a small parcel of bare land, land with no farmhouse, in Devon and it was sold prior to auction for in excess of £15k per acre. The land was permanent pasture with no water and one old stone barn within the boundary of the Dartmoor National park, our view was the land was worth no more than £3k. The new owners wanted the 4 paddocks for some horses, no farmer can compete on those grounds.

 

Diversification is also always not that easy, correct location is vital especially for tourist based expansions, and access to reasonable finance is not easy in the current climate.

 

The culling of the bull calves was an interesting point, this is a fairly recent change, when I say recent I mean within the last 15 years or so. Previously bull calves from the dairy herds, normally Friesian, Ayrshire, Holstien, etc where produced from a bull from a beef line other than those herds who were breeding replacement calves to take into the milking herd. A Friesian cross south devon for instance will produce a decent beef animal. Even a Friesan bull on a dairy cow producing a bull calf can produce a half decent beef animal, not as good as a beef cross though.

 

What is happening now is beef bulls are often not used, they are crossing with Jersey/Guernsey to produce follow on heifers to take into the milk herd that produce a milk with higher cream/fat content which the cheese makers like. Any bull calves produced wont make a decent beef animal and are close to worthless, however they do have a market now. The lifting of the beef export an means they can be exported, often to Spain/Portugal for rearing as veal. Most veal production is now on a extensive basis with crates banned.

 

The program then moved onto a large intensive beef farming in a more favourable area of the country, it was obvious the scale of this guy was large. He had room to diversify into game farming in a big game area and I am guessing he was running a good few hundred acres if not thousands. I am sure he had a few other enterprises on the go as well.

 

It was obvious he was using Belgium blue bulls/semen on his cows. Belgium Blues are the body builders of the bovine world, they look like they work out in a gym from the day they are born, they have huge shoulders and massive rumps, they have been selectively bred for centuries to produce a heavily muscled animal.

 

As a result they also produce large calves, that dead calf was huge, twice the size of many I have seen. The mother was a Hereford/friesan cross at a guess, white face and hocks with a dark body. They make good suckler cows and mothers but they don’t have massive pelvises and can struggle when covered by a Belgium, I would want to be on hand for all births. With Belgium bulls the instances of caesarean sections is often high. In such a large herd he is not always going to be there and that will cause problems.

 

If it were me I would be looking to use a native beef bull such as a South Devon, the trouble is while these produce excellent meat with a very good confirmation and flavour they produce less of it slower. Economics are against him and I don’t blame him in anyway for going down his route.

 

Where our food comes from is important, trouble is few in Sainsburies or any of the supermarkets, with the probable exception of Waitrose, know or really care where it comes from.

 

Beef imports from S America are increasing, the meat is cheap but I have concerns over how it is produced. The use of Feed Lot systems in the Americas is increasing, these mean huge number of beef animals can be produced cheaply, not something I would ever want to see here.

 

Milk, the price per litre at the farm gate is low, very low. The price in the supermarket is low but they still make a decent margin. Would the average consumer notice if a couple of pence was added to the farm gate litre price by the way of the price in the shop….I doubt it very much but the supermarkets wont do it. We are now importing milk from Europe as we cant produce enough in the UK to meet the demand…madness.

 

And all those vegetarians out there that drink milk, I hope they realise the number of bull calves that get killed is party down to them.

 

Why are we in this mess? To long to go into but it centers around a number of keys facts.

 

The governments, not just the current but everyone since the end of WW2, desire to provide cheap food for the population, fine to begin with but then the growth in power of the Supermarkets and how this changed the buying and eating habits of the British housewife.

 

Europe and subsidies, this divorced many producers form the real economics of the industry and changed the focus of the producers.

 

Globalisation, cheap imports from other areas of the world, often produced to lower welfare standards than we have imposed on our producers.

 

Is there a way out….I sincerely hope so but there will be casualties along the way. Adapt and change has to be the order of the day/decade but it is not going to be easy.

 

Jerry

 

 

Very interesting and very informative.

 

On a tangent, I went to lunch yesterday with a client who buys his beef and steak on line from a specialist farm in Scotland - select the cut and next day it arrives. He pays a little bit over the odds but reckons it is worth it. I was going to give it a go but don't see why I should have to wait on the Royal Mail and a Scottish farm to provide me with top notch Beef.

 

What about sponsoring your meat? Or buying in advance?

 

There should be a farmer's ebay - direct sellers to buyers. Mind you probably bundles of regulations.

 

Also, a lot of the local farmers markets have suffered from farmers buying goods in from 3rd parties and knocking it out as local / organic etc.

 

What are the rules on slaughtering etc. these days