Feeling sorry for farmers? ... screwed over by supermarkets?
Discussion
BoRED S2upid]royde]A girl I know's Dad is a farmer. He is paid by the EU some incredible amount of money to keep his fields empty. [quote said:
This is what I can never get my head around. Why pay them to keep fields empty of crops when we hear constant stories of people going hungry even in this country people are using food banks because they can't afford to buy food. Why not remove this payment and instead pay them for the crops, they would still be getting the payment but in return the EU would get some food to give to the poor or to export to Africa.
Capitalism.There are, of course, many different types of farmer producing many different types of food, from carrots to barley to beef to Champagne.
A few are rich, but many are struggling. Dairy and Pig farmers, in particular have suffered badly in recent years. I believe current milk market prices are lower than the cost of production due to market failure. There are many thousands of small producers, but only a handful of hugey powerful buyers, ie the big dairy processors and their supermarket clients. These organisations operate an effective cartel, and individual farmers have no leverage or bargaining power whatsoever.
On the other hand, arable farmers have enjoyed an absolute bonanza in recent years as grain prioes have traded at all-time highs, caused by demand from population growth outstripping supply. The white sliced loaf which cost 60-70p a few years ago now costs £1-30. They are the guys buying the shiny new Range Rovers.
A few are rich, but many are struggling. Dairy and Pig farmers, in particular have suffered badly in recent years. I believe current milk market prices are lower than the cost of production due to market failure. There are many thousands of small producers, but only a handful of hugey powerful buyers, ie the big dairy processors and their supermarket clients. These organisations operate an effective cartel, and individual farmers have no leverage or bargaining power whatsoever.
On the other hand, arable farmers have enjoyed an absolute bonanza in recent years as grain prioes have traded at all-time highs, caused by demand from population growth outstripping supply. The white sliced loaf which cost 60-70p a few years ago now costs £1-30. They are the guys buying the shiny new Range Rovers.
The cattle not cows are not just fed on grass and that's it, no there are many underlying things that office people do not see and hear about.
Vet bills, emunisation (sp),animal husbandry,silage splatering to make sure the grass is green for the next year, the list goes on.
I am not a farmer but I do buy my animals of them and to know if they have had a good life (the cattle/lambs/pork) makes my product a lot better than a supermarkets barn ridden over fed shoot.
What ever the farmer produces it in his best intrests to do the job right and get maxium profit for a good product.
I could go on.
Vet bills, emunisation (sp),animal husbandry,silage splatering to make sure the grass is green for the next year, the list goes on.
I am not a farmer but I do buy my animals of them and to know if they have had a good life (the cattle/lambs/pork) makes my product a lot better than a supermarkets barn ridden over fed shoot.
What ever the farmer produces it in his best intrests to do the job right and get maxium profit for a good product.
I could go on.
blearyeyedboy said:
I know quite a few farmers. They are as broad a species as "businessmen". Some are wealthy landowners and some are barely scratching out an existence on sub-minimum wage. Most are somewhere in between, as with most stereotypes.
The wealthy ones are the more visible but a small proportion. Most of the rest still don't need pity; they're doing OK. A significant minority are really struggling.
This is about the long and the short of it.The wealthy ones are the more visible but a small proportion. Most of the rest still don't need pity; they're doing OK. A significant minority are really struggling.
Unfortunately over the last 30 years or so the gap at either end of the spectrum has been widening and the really poor have often had to sell out to the wealthy agribusinesses, losing generations of work and bloodlines into the bargain.
EDIT - mentioning businessmen, there are some that make good farmers and businessmen, some that are good businessmen but average farmers, and some who only know how to farm and make terrible businessmen - success in modern farming is about how well you can run a business just as much if not more than it is about how good a farmer you are - some just aren't cut out for it.
Edited by Mark Benson on Thursday 3rd January 13:56
I'm sure plenty are pretty well off. But then I've never thought of it as an easy job exactly. No experience, but I'd imagine there's some long hours involved and early starts. If it's that easy and people are chucking money at you, I'd imagine a lot more would be doing it. Having done some work at a cow farm, the idea of spening half a day in cow s
t is not my idea of enjoying work.
t is not my idea of enjoying work.Mr_B said:
I'm sure plenty are pretty well off. But then I've never thought of it as an easy job exactly. No experience, but I'd imagine there's some long hours involved and early starts. If it's that easy and people are chucking money at you, I'd imagine a lot more would be doing it. Having done some work at a cow farm, the idea of spening half a day in cow st is not my idea of enjoying work.
Many farmers die in their 60'st is not my idea of enjoying work.I've had dealings with farmers of all types, running all sorts of size farms, if there is indeed a poor farming class, I've never seen it.
Are we to believe all these land owners who are sitting on fortunes in assets as farmland breaks record price after record price are doing so to chisel out a meagre living and only avoid starvation because they actually make food, or indeed the price of the land continues to go up and up because it's a good way to lose money.
Or the tenant farmer who works every daylight moment of the day and more besides does so for the equivalent of sub-minimum wages and the love of the smell of cow st.
Farmers have a well earned reputation for pleading poverty, but it's not like farming needs some sort of strange genetic makeup that excludes them from any sort of other work, no one would work that hard to live the life of a pauper with the myriad of other jobs available in the world.
Are we to believe all these land owners who are sitting on fortunes in assets as farmland breaks record price after record price are doing so to chisel out a meagre living and only avoid starvation because they actually make food, or indeed the price of the land continues to go up and up because it's a good way to lose money.
Or the tenant farmer who works every daylight moment of the day and more besides does so for the equivalent of sub-minimum wages and the love of the smell of cow s
t. Farmers have a well earned reputation for pleading poverty, but it's not like farming needs some sort of strange genetic makeup that excludes them from any sort of other work, no one would work that hard to live the life of a pauper with the myriad of other jobs available in the world.
Back when I was in my early 20s I worked on a farm for 6 months. Bit of a shock for a born and raised Londoner but I had been on the dole and needed the work.
It was a dairy farm in Denmark and the hours were 6am until 11.30pm every day. It was enjoyable but bloody hard work. The farmer who owned the whole gaff was just about doing OK supporting his 4 kids and wife and once I had gained the experience to run the place with his eldest son he took the rest of the family away on their first holiday in years.
And before anyone points out the City dweller to farmer in 6 months, I'm just good at that sort of thing once I put my mind to it
but try telling that to the British Airways future pilot scheme. What the fek does a 50 year old need a degree for????
But I digress
It was a dairy farm in Denmark and the hours were 6am until 11.30pm every day. It was enjoyable but bloody hard work. The farmer who owned the whole gaff was just about doing OK supporting his 4 kids and wife and once I had gained the experience to run the place with his eldest son he took the rest of the family away on their first holiday in years.
And before anyone points out the City dweller to farmer in 6 months, I'm just good at that sort of thing once I put my mind to it
but try telling that to the British Airways future pilot scheme. What the fek does a 50 year old need a degree for????But I digress
To agree with the posters above, landowning farmers are doing very well, and effectively always have done.
Tenant farmers have always had the stty end of the stick, and always will.
One thing that got me when dealing with a couple of the big landowning types near me is the spread of opportunities available to them.
One has filled a field that had been used for burning for years (so full of metal waste and all sorts of st - useless for growing anything) with containerised gensets. He rents them, hooks them up to some switchgear, and gets paid more than the rental/maintenance charges for them just to sit there in case they are needed. Such is the growing concern for our electricity generation capacity...
Most people couldnt do this - he has the land available, the engineers on salary that could hook everything up in quiet time, the heavy lifting and shifting kit to install...
Let alone the biodigester built to take all his green waste, and turn it into electricity, low temp hot water and fertiliser. 10M a year minimum in cost savings and income for a guaranteed life of 30 years for a 6M investment.
Those that have land, and a business brain, are some of the most secure people in the country.
Those that are missing one of the above are held to the whims of politics, economics and fate...
Tenant farmers have always had the s
tty end of the stick, and always will.One thing that got me when dealing with a couple of the big landowning types near me is the spread of opportunities available to them.
One has filled a field that had been used for burning for years (so full of metal waste and all sorts of s
t - useless for growing anything) with containerised gensets. He rents them, hooks them up to some switchgear, and gets paid more than the rental/maintenance charges for them just to sit there in case they are needed. Such is the growing concern for our electricity generation capacity...Most people couldnt do this - he has the land available, the engineers on salary that could hook everything up in quiet time, the heavy lifting and shifting kit to install...
Let alone the biodigester built to take all his green waste, and turn it into electricity, low temp hot water and fertiliser. 10M a year minimum in cost savings and income for a guaranteed life of 30 years for a 6M investment.
Those that have land, and a business brain, are some of the most secure people in the country.
Those that are missing one of the above are held to the whims of politics, economics and fate...
A recent wheeze for farmers has been solar panels and windmills, there was plenty of money to be made from them when you have loads of buildings with south facing roofs and suitable windy sites. Not as lucrative now though, but at least the farmers who missed the boat have something else to whinge about.
doogz said:
Laplandboss said:
They are big posh sods with plums in their mouths, and the plums have mutated and they have got beaks. They make pigs smoke. They feed beef burgers to swans. They have big sheds, but nobody's allowed in. And in these sheds they have 20ft high chickens, and these chickens are scared because the don't know why they're so big, and they're going, "Oh why am I so massive?" and they're looking down at all the little chickens and they think they're in an aeroplane because all the other chickens are so small.
They grow mutant chickens. They sell chicken breasts in 4 packs in the supermarket. And chicken legs in 6 packs. Which means they must be breeding 3 legged chickens...
BoRED S2upid]royde]A girl I know's Dad is a farmer. He is paid by the EU some incredible amount of money to keep his fields empty. [quote said:
This is what I can never get my head around. Why pay them to keep fields empty of crops when we hear constant stories of people going hungry even in this country people are using food banks because they can't afford to buy food. Why not remove this payment and instead pay them for the crops, they would still be getting the payment but in return the EU would get some food to give to the poor or to export to Africa.
Farmers are not paid to keep fields empty. The public likes to see the countryside looking a certain way, patchwork fields, hedge rows, lambs skipping around. Trouble is, they also like to buy food from supermarkets who like to buy from the lowest bidder. Low prices require production on an industrial scale with large machines. These large machines don't work very efficiently in pretty little patch work fields surrounded by high hedges that the birds like.
Now, we also need to remember why subsidies were introduced in the first place, namely twice in the 20th Century Europe couldn't feed it self. So subsidies were introduced to kick start a revolution in agriculture. Now in the early part of the 21st Century we have loads of cheap, quality food. But people say they still want the countryside, so they have to pay for it, which is why the subsidy have been decoupled from production and moved to providing palaces for wildlife to live. There is no keeping fields empty any more AFAIK, there are things like keeping stubbles over winter for grown nesting birds, but there is a cut off date when this has to be worked and the land must always be kept in such a state that it can be reverted straight back to full production.
There is much debate that most of the Single Farm Payment ends up in the hands (bank accounts) of the land owner, when it should be going to the person that actually farms it. However people are so desperate to farm (mainly because they like the way of life), that no matter what system was put in place, a similar amount of money would go to the land owner each year, just with another name.
This year has been hard for most farmers because of the wet, cool and dark weather. Things just don't like growing in these conditions. The farm I work on has had a good year, pretty good yields, because we have not had the weather as bad as most due to local weather patterns and thanks to the wonders of the global commodities markets, we (the management) has sold everything for a very good price. Win win. The potato yields are now from about 20 tons/ac to 14ton-ish and we (I) have had to leave some behind, but the price is very good. So not all bad. However, thanks to the weather we have not been able to plant all of the winter sown crops and the land has not been prepared for the spring grown crops either. Many people have not sown anything and other has sown crops which have been ruined by the wet weather.
There are plenty of fresh veg that will have suffered too that gets sold straight into supermarkets. My guess is that the supermarkets have not lost out. I know someone that grows potatoes on contract to a processor like many do. He will have sold based on historical average yields of say 18 tonnes/acre and probably sold them for about £120/tonne. Unfortunately like many potato growers he had lower than average yields from what he did harvest and hasn't been able to harvest all he planted due to flooding. He now has to find potatoes of the correct quality (rocking horse s
t this year) to fill his contract which could well cost him £350/t. He is expecting to loose 400 grand this year on that enterprise.You also need to remember that livestock farmers have to buy in food. A lot of this will be wheat, barley and other products traded on the international commodities markets. So these people are having to pay big money to feed their animals this year. They will also be having to buy more feed in because the weather has been so poor that their grass for example will not have yielded much bulk or quality and the animals will have needed housing for longer which incurs a high cost.
Farmers do a lot of moaning and it pisses me off, but they are at the mercy of the weather and politicians which they can do nothing about.
During the RAC Rally some mates and I stayed with a Welsh hill farmer's family, sheep and some food stuffs.
It was literally freezing. There was an easterly coming off the Urals and at some speed. We asked, cheekily we thought, if we could have a breakfast around 4am and asked to be woken. The woman was completely unfazed.
As it turned out, we didn't have to be woken as the freezing temperatures kept us awake. So we were eating breakers at 4.15am when in came the farmer, in courderoy trousers, a string vest and hairy body, drying himself with a small towel.
He then set off for 'work', in the dark, in the snow and the force 8.
(I wore a vest, a thermal vest and long johns, a thin shirt, a thicker one, a pullover, trousers, two pair of socks, a 'scarf' (in reality a towel to stop the rain getting in), and then a waterproof top and trousers when I went out. Despite walking up a Hafren hill I was frozen.)
There were few signs of luxuries - apart from a blazing fire - and whatever he was being paid, it wasn't enough.
It was literally freezing. There was an easterly coming off the Urals and at some speed. We asked, cheekily we thought, if we could have a breakfast around 4am and asked to be woken. The woman was completely unfazed.
As it turned out, we didn't have to be woken as the freezing temperatures kept us awake. So we were eating breakers at 4.15am when in came the farmer, in courderoy trousers, a string vest and hairy body, drying himself with a small towel.
He then set off for 'work', in the dark, in the snow and the force 8.
(I wore a vest, a thermal vest and long johns, a thin shirt, a thicker one, a pullover, trousers, two pair of socks, a 'scarf' (in reality a towel to stop the rain getting in), and then a waterproof top and trousers when I went out. Despite walking up a Hafren hill I was frozen.)
There were few signs of luxuries - apart from a blazing fire - and whatever he was being paid, it wasn't enough.
Talking to farmers on a regular basis, last years harvest, and looking at this years, was pretty much the worst for a generation. The quality of the stuff coming off the field is poor and quite a few farmers didn't bother with harvest and let the crops rot in the field. A first generation farmer would also never be debt free for the rest of their lives, it'll be their children that finally start paying off the bills - quite a few farmers don't own any land either and choose to lease it from a big land owner who might be the people buying big range rovers, etc.
Last year, being an agricultural farmer was an incredibly stressful experience.
Last year, being an agricultural farmer was an incredibly stressful experience.
Hooli said:
doogz said:
Laplandboss said:
They are big posh sods with plums in their mouths, and the plums have mutated and they have got beaks. They make pigs smoke. They feed beef burgers to swans. They have big sheds, but nobody's allowed in. And in these sheds they have 20ft high chickens, and these chickens are scared because the don't know why they're so big, and they're going, "Oh why am I so massive?" and they're looking down at all the little chickens and they think they're in an aeroplane because all the other chickens are so small.
They grow mutant chickens. They sell chicken breasts in 4 packs in the supermarket. And chicken legs in 6 packs. Which means they must be breeding 3 legged chickens...The bloke gets out of his car to investigate and wanders into a shed, full of more three legged chicken. He sees a farmer and asks, "Excuse me, why have you got loads of three legged chicken?" The farmer replies, "Well, all the supermarkets and KFC want more chicken leggs than breasts, so we had them genetically engineered so they're born with three legs". "That's incredible!", he replies, "Tell me, do they taste the same?" "I've no idea!", says the farmer, "We haven't caught one of the f**kers yet!"
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