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Farming and crofting are going through unprecedented change. There is a clear drive in farming to increase the size of some businesses, fields, machinery and herd size. In crofting, and commercial hill units, the opposite is happening with folk leaving the industry via herd dispersals. What are the drivers of this change, and the consequences asks Vice President Alasdair Macnab?
The first consideration is return on investment. Profit from the supply chain has been on a downward spiral for a long time, making the changes over the last twenty years slow and subtle. Businesses have quietly given up, land moved into fewer hands by purchase, rent or agreement, some herds of pigs and cattle have expanded where they are in areas suited to production. New poultry units are much larger than twenty years ago.
Lower returns mean farming cannot match pay levels being offered for example, in the new ‘green’ sector, and the hours needed by some farming sectors do not match the life work balance sought by many today.
Secondly, technology has allowed expansion alongside a diminishing workforce. Just consider modern cereal and potato machinery, automated feeding, milking, and handling systems, transponders for monitoring health. Yet in all this there are sectors where technology investment has not developed at the same rate such as hill cows and the sheep sector.
Thirdly, there are increasing subtle pressures with loss of animal health and plant protection products, fluctuating world markets, increasing input costs, rising cost of living and much more.
Fourthly, the drive for climate change mitigation has brought a new genre of decision maker to our countryside, the rewilding off-setter. They are competing to buy up land and alter its traditional use to something they envisage as better.
All these and more arguably elicit one of two outcomes. Businesses stop trading or expand by using the economy of scale or efficiency. Both bring new issues to the fore. Land abandonment and the development of larger livestock units. The outcome is highlighted by the news recently that if the UK had to feed itself, we would have run out of food by mid-August.
Land abandonment, to date, has not caused any concern with the public or single interest groups. There is public interest in rewilding and carbon offsetting yet the potential consequences in terms of wildfire risk, introduced species and food security are not yet on the public radar. These are issues NFUS is addressing with other stakeholders.
Large livestock units are very much on the public radar with complaints about smell, concern that animals spend their entire life inside, perceptions of factory farms, cruelty and exploitation. This is a subject familiar to me and as an industry there is a lot of hard work from highly driven and dedicated staff running these units whose operations revolve around ensuring good welfare prevails. It’s simple, poor welfare means poor returns.
From dairy to pig to poultry, the standards required every hour of every day brings a lot of pressure. These units are targets for animal activists with repeated attempts over the years to denigrate these sectors. Why have these attempts not succeeded?
Operating and welfare standards for these sectors are high and subject to regular audits from farm assurance bodies, sector standard inspections and unannounced visits from processors and retailers.
The public place a lot of trust in retailers to police their food supply in terms of welfare, safety and most importantly having it on the shelf. To date they have delivered for the public, but at what cost?
Regarding UK food self-sufficiency, from the above it is clear that there is a developing problem, one recognised by the last UK government which set up a food security index to combat the reduction in food security. Demand for food is not going to go down, we need to reduce imports for a range of reasons, and we will need even more efficient food production in the future.
Governments across the UK will have to come to terms with the trade-offs required to feed our nation, less dependency on imports, and less water moved across the world in the form of vegetables and fruit.
It will also mean more investment in larger livestock units to produce food. The public demand a constant supply of good, nutritious food, produced to exacting health and welfare standards at a suitably low price.
This thinking needs to apply to all livestock systems as, for some, returns from the supply chain are insufficient to provide the profit needed to sustain the business leading to herd and flock dispersals. Much of the land being abandoned is perfectly good land for livestock production and needs to be managed to maintain its capability. This will require government support to maintain this reserve of production for the rainy day when it will be needed.
To feed a nation in an unstable world as we have today needs the vision and foresight to value and protect what we have and invest in a food secure future for our country.