26 October 2017
Good Seed On The Land
Development opportunity: but for what?
by J R Thomas
Last week we walked gloomily across Britain’s wet and empty farmlands, harvest gone, fields full of detritus and decay, empathising with the nation’s farmers and digesting the advice of AHDB (that jolly quango, the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board) to meet the threats of Brexit by boosting their productivity. We thought that suggesting this as a simple answer to an industry that spends much time trying to do just that, with very little money to invest and few remaining efficiencies to be made, was perhaps a little naïve on the part of the illustrious board. Indeed we were tempted to suggest that if they cannot get production up, maybe farmers could get costs down by ceasing to pay the AHDB levy for which they are always liable; but we won’t.
But let us not be negative. Problems are there to be solved; thinking is best done laterally in both senses, best of all under a hedgerow. It is not easy to see how conventional farming can do much more than it is already doing. British farms are already among the most efficient in Europe – the many acres, lack of hedges and huge machinery make for very effective spreading of both manure and costs. Animal farming is also pretty efficient – though with a wide range of producers, from the small scale rare breed organic producer to the massive factory sheds of Norfolk and Herefordshire with food and water supplied by electronic management. It is, however, highly regulated (one of the few things British farming has in common with British banking), with some of the highest standards in the world vigorously enforced (in spite of recent troubles in the chicken factory business). “Good” you may say, and good it is, for livestock, consumers, and for farming’s reputation; but it makes competing at an international level more difficult. The gloomy prognostications of AHDB on Britain’s farmers’ ability to prosper post Brexit assume no qualitative control at the quay side, so that we would be able to import inferior products.
So, more mainstream animals or crops are not the way forward. Growing vines for winemaking has been a real growth area, but a lot of bottles come from a few acres, and, unless we all become much more serious drinkers, more wine drunk will mean less beer, and thus less barley growing, which takes us back to where we started. Goat meat is slowly growing in popularity; llamas and alpacas are widespread; a farmer in Cambridgeshire has shown considerable bottle by breeding crocodiles for the Sunday lunches of Cambridge dons and Fenlanders. Ostriches though have had their boom and are now rarely seen. On the edge of towns, horsiculture is well established as a glance from any suburban train window will show, and horse owners will pay large sums for keeping and feeding their weekend delights. But there are not enough urban-owned horses around to make much impact on the farming economy.
Then there is that slowly but growing retail opportunity, the farm shop. It began, as do romances, with just a glance – at the little wooden shelter by the farm gate with four-stone sacks of potatoes (half the supermarket price), and maybe a few jars of honey or bunches of carrots or cartons of eggs. Now, for those with retail flair, a bit of capital or an understanding bank manager, and on the right road side (that’s the key element, at least in the early days) farm shops can be a very serious business and shopping opportunity indeed. Lord Iveagh in Suffolk has expanded his (A11) road side stall to a massive food and rural goods supermarket with restaurant and children’s playground. Having the family Guinness fortune behind him has no doubt helped with both capital and retailing flair, but many a more humble soil tiller has developed a variant on that approach. The great thing about selling your produce direct, supplemented by other retail temptations, is that it cuts out the middle man and the squeeze on the price by Tesco’s professional buyers (well trained in the arts of purchasing, those Tesco types).
But none of this will help much. Bolder farmers, if they can raise the capital (a big if, but British bankers and hedge funds are always there to help), might be looking at hard production rather than soft. Paintballing can indeed be very hard if you get hit in the wrong place, so maybe go-karting might be safer if noisier. A local theme park will use up a couple of hundred acres, as will an eighteen hole golf course. All of these need to be proximate to people, or at least to the roads that will bring them; but not so music festivals which will make ten years agricultural income in one weekend, though with what feels like ten years clearing up afterwards. No neighbours are a definite plus if you want to run a music festival – and no surrounding hills for free viewing.
Cambridge not only has its crocodile farm, it also many acres of solar panels; fields and fields of them, not so much glistening in the sun as scooping it. Those farmers keen for every last penny, or reluctant to mow grass, can even graze sheep around them. They have the extra advantage, for the landowning farmer, that the power company will take a lease for twenty five years, install the panels at their expense, and maintain them (not the sheep), thus turning Farmer Giles into Farmer Electron, free to lie in bed while the rent cheques come in. If not solar panels, then how about wind turbines, car parking if near an airport, camping or caravans (with or without farmshop on site)?
But there is one little problem here. In fact, one quite big problem. The planning system. The planners, and the neighbours, and the lobby groups, tend to prefer countryside which is rural, green, punctuated by trees, decorated by sheep and cows of many colour variations, all unspoilt and as seen on chocolate box lids. Things are bad enough with farmers building great white pig sheds and pulling out most hedges for the ease of big machines, but solar panels, silver modernist windmills, deranged hippies? These do not go down well with your average modern countryside dweller seeking serenity and quiet and pure air. Farming used to have an easy ride with the planners; many farming operations did not need planning consent at all. But the urbanisation of Britain, and the urge of everyman to interfere in everything, has gradually dragged farming and its attempts to grow profitable side shoots into the planning system. At the very least this means extra cost, and delay and expensive conditions attached to consents.
Central government policy tends to lurch from the urge to stimulate the rural economy, to sustainable power generation, to improving food self sustainability and cutting food miles to solving the housing crisis, to keeping Britain pretty for the tourist industry, to building bypasses and widening motorways. These splendid individual objectives are often highly contradictory as a mass, which means of course that for ages unlimited nothing much happens. Farming continues to turn into bigger and bigger business, and the countryside grows ever more abandoned.
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