“We just do not know what’s going to happen beyond Brexit.” It’s an icy December morning when I catch James Davidson, skating down the farm close to his office. A few days ago, snow fell across the country, and in the north east of Scotland it’s still clinging to the ground—an extra challenge for the lorries carting barley, wheat and oilseed rape away from the Davidsons’ farm. There’s nothing new about weather getting in the way, though, and if it means hours guiding drivers on the slippery track to the grain stores, then that’s what the Davidsons will do.
It’s been eight years since James came back to the family farm. After leaving home for university, work took him as far afield as Japan, but ten years later, a growing interest in agriculture brought him back to Scotland. Now in his thirties, he’s running the business with his father, and starting a family of his own: this isn’t the time for uncertainty.
Access to European markets was the key driver of James’s vote to remain in the EU: Brexit means uncertainty for his business, a challenge that’s particularly acute given farming’s notoriously slim profits. “It’s very difficult to really make any longterm planning decisions at the moment: we just do not know what trading conditions we’ll be operating within.”
But James remains positive, or seems to: “As an industry, we’ve always been used to working against an uncertain backdrop. It’s always a very volatile market place.”
Nearly 500 miles away, near the Brecon Beacons, John Davies is feeling about the same. He may be farming beef and lamb in the Welsh hills, but the challenge facing him is similar to that facing any businessperson: “I've made the investment, its more than often a big investment—you need to have an idea of what marketplace you're going to be in. Our calves that have been born today, the cow will face a post-Brexit marketplace already.”
“So, it's really, really important that we know where we are going forward: if you're going to dive off a cliff, the first thing you do is check to see how deep the water is.”
It sounds bleak, but even over the phone I can hear the energy. John’s enthusiasm for the industry is tangible. When I ask how he voted in the referendum (Remain, it turns out) he brushes the question aside: “Remain or Leave, that vote is done, and now we've got to get the very best deal.”
And he’s right, of course. Besides new trading conditions, Brexit will give the UK government control over agricultural subsidy, and in formulating subsidy policy, government will be forced to reassess what kind of industry farming is and should be.
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There was a taste of what that future might look like recently, when environment secretary Michael Gove announced an extension of the Brexit transition period for agriculture: farming subsidies will remain the same until 2022, when Britain will begin to move towards its own support system.
But beyond that, the future is hazy. Gove has hinted at a policy based on environmental stewardship and public access to land, criticising the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for a piecemeal approach that’s had little positive impact on the environment. But it’s unclear how his suggestions—tree planting, returning land to meadows, and clearing waterways—are really any different. Besides, 2022 is a long way away: in politics, the Department of Environment and Rural Affairs, DEFRA, is sometimes referred to as “death row”—where careers go to die. In the last two years alone there have been three different environment secretaries.
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Environmental concerns are painfully real—and farming is a well-known culprit, beloved of pop-science eco-warriors. Veganism rose by 360 per cent between 2006 and 2016, and last year a poll found that 25 per cent of Brits are cutting back on their meat consumption. It’s not that vegetarians have it all wrong—or I, for one, would be guilty of some serious hypocrisy—but agricultural pollution is not a constant. Many of the stats confidently trumpeted in defence of meat-free living refer to America, not the UK: here, nitrous oxide, methane, and ammonia emissions from farming were down 10, 11 and 12 per cent respectively in 2015 compared to 2000.
Driving this change is research innovation: in Wales, grass breeding is helping farmers reduce the environmental impact of their meat, as Mr Davies explains.
“In our little group we've got a Welsh Black mix that uses high sugar grass—it’s a recent development. Now, because of the high sugars in it, the cattle finish faster from the grass, and it’s actually 20 per cent less of a carbon footprint.”
Speaking to farmers across the country, their awareness of environmental issues is clear. Nick Deane farms on the Norfolk Broads, an important wetland habitat: “We know we have a specialist area, the Broads here – and not only are we pleased by it, we love it, we live in it, and we farm in it.”
Working with habitats and wildlife is nothing new, as Mr Deane is quick to emphasise: “We've farmed with them for years and years and years. They're still here, we're still here: so we can't be doing everything wrong, can we?”
If there’s concern about environmental measures, it’s that new policy will limit productivity. The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has identified three key priorities for the industry going forward: productivity, volatility, and the environment.
When I speak to the NFU’s director of EU exit, Nick von Westenholz, he explains: “Any sort of policy should do all of those together—they're worth more than the sum of their parts. For example, if you have a productive farm then it’s probably going to be using resources in a much more efficient and effective way, which will then reduce its impact on the environment.”
His concerns are clear: “What we don't want is to see a policy that focuses specifically on one of those but to the detriment of the others.”
Or, as Mr Deane puts it, “You can't farm for the green if you're in the red.” His question is simple: “Are we going to be a competitive vibrant agriculture which can lead the world in production techniques? Or are we going to be handicapped by a lot of environmental legislation, and become lawn-tillers and park-keepers?”
Those are extremes, but they reveal a deep sense of pride in the industry, a pride shared by everyone I talk to. Farmers are farmers, after all, and they want things to stay that way.
John Davies has worries, too: “Our own government now is talking about increasing welfare and environmental standards, not decreasing them. If we're not careful, there's very real danger of us having more regulation and a WTO [World Trade Organization, i.e. less regulated] marketplace. Which would be horrendous, you know, that would be really, really heart-breaking.”
Heart-breaking, because WTO rules would see new products—from GM crops to hormone-treated beef—flooding the market place. Cheap for the consumer, but produced to lower environmental or ethical standards, the challenge to British farming could be insurmountable. Nick von Westenholz is wary: “We have to be very, very careful as a country about rushing into trade deals just to prove we can do them. Every trade deal needs to be looked at carefully.”
But for many people, price really does count. That’s something farmers understand: many who I speak to draw attention to the need for cheap food to support consumers facing tough times. But the fact remains that as a country we’ve never spent less feeding ourselves: in the 1950s, a third of income went on food; by 2016, that had fallen to 11 per cent. At the same time, the percentage spent on accommodation has risen, leaving less income free for other essentials. That’s a systemic change that farmers have no control over.
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David Pridgeon farms in Lincolnshire, near Boston: almost all his produce goes directly into food and drink: barley for beer, wheat for bread, oilseed rape for cooking oils and spreads, plus strawberries and raspberries.
“Do consumers really want the very cheapest food, from anywhere in the world, which is produced to lower environmental and animal welfare standards?” he asks. “I'd like to think they don’t. I know prices are important but at the moment food is almost too cheap, and it's not valued: when you've got milk in the supermarket for less than the cost of a bottle of water, there's something fundamentally wrong.”
Dairy farming has been a high-profile casualty of low prices: in 2016, over 1,000 dairy farms had been lost in just three years in England and Wales. “The producer pays for these promotions not the retailers,” Mr Pridgeon explains. “They're using food as a weapon, these global retail businesses. It's easy to use food as a tool to be competitive, but it's the producers who pay for it.”
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One of the biggest problems, cited by every farmer I speak to, is misconception. Today in the UK more people than ever live in cities, and the countryside is populated with commuters: “There's been a generation of disconnect with the land: whereas about seventy or eighty years ago nearly everybody would be related to someone who had a farm or a holding, now that's been lost.”
Making that reconnection is critical for the industry. Mr Pridgeon takes his tractor to the local school for the kids to climb on; Mr Deane helps out in schools too, and with Open Farm Sundays at a neighbour’s farm; Mr Davies is involved in similar schemes in Wales. He has a number of holiday cottages on his land, and has an open-door approach, encouraging visitors to come down to the farm. Everyone is keen to have an opportunity to speak to an urban base.
Over and over again I hear the same thing: farmers just want a fair price, a fair chance, a level playing field. But today, most countries provide financial support to farming: in Russia, agricultural profit isn’t taxed; China spends $165billion on agricultural support, guaranteeing minimum prices well above current market value. It’s something that criticisms of the CAP, and accusations of subsidy addiction, must take into account.
Too often, the assumption is that farmers are vastly wealthy. While a quarter of farms need subsidy for profit, 16 per cent would make over £50,000 without it. But on average, farmers are around £5,000 worse off than the rest of the country, with their average wage clocking in at £22,763. And while farmers who own their land have seen a 149 per cent increase in value in the last decade, that value often remains inaccessible, as farms are passed from one generation to the next.
But still the question remains: why bother? Why support UK agriculture? Why not leave the industry to the vagaries of the market, and import to fill the gap? It’s a question I put to all the farmers I spoke to, and their responses were varied, both passionate and reasoned: jobs, environmental concerns, ethics, food security.
For James Davidson, farming in Scotland, it was about the bigger picture, the way farming ties into the wider economy: “Tourism is a massive industry for this country, and I believe that farming plays a key part in carving out the very scenery that people come to see. We’re a massive part of the countryside and what brings people into Scotland, and I suppose a lot of that’s down to our management of the countryside, and us working with the land.” Long may it continue.
