Britain’s forgotten farmers face uphill struggle

IHAVE just spent two weeks travelling the magnificent UK countryside as part of the Nuffield International Triennial Conference. The conference theme ‘Small island, big ideas’ is a very good description of the British psyche both in agriculture and as a very proud sovereign nation.

However, it does not take long for the underlying political uncertainly, even chaos caused by Brexit and the recent general election to surface to the top of every debate.

Simply put, nobody has any idea what will to happen to Britain and British agriculture into the future.

It is important to state from the outset that agriculture and food is a very small part of the Brexit debate in the UK, in fact agriculture and food was all but forgotten about in the recent general election debate and in reality, it has little if any political clout.

This lack of political inf luence for the industry results from a history of implementing a ‘cheap food policy’ which when one stands back and looks at the macro-economic picture of a nation with 65 million people and just 214,000 farmers, it really is no big surprise — it is the political reality.

The average holding in the UK is almost 350 acres, however, it is the magnificent large estates regularly measuring up to 5,000 acres in size that form the bedrock of British farming.

In Ireland, we can only dream of such scale as we f lir t with tax incentives for partnerships and longterm leasing to try and increase the size of our farm holdings.

However, on-the-ground experience from these grand farm units is that the annual net profit is no longer coming from the traditional farming enterprises of dairy, beef, sheep or arable but instead from alternative uses such as house rentals, commercial unit lettings of former grain and potato stores and a host of other non-traditional farming activ ities.

Of course, the EU Basic Payment Scheme and the myriad of environmental schemes are also a huge source of annual income. Many of these estates have lost their heart and soul created by the traditional mixed farming activity of crops and livestock, all centred around the grand period mansion and wonderful cut-stone outbuildings.

Instead, they have become a cold group of companies and businesses ranked by return on capital and various other financial metrics.

Post-Brexit, one has to question if the poor return on capital from the land farmed in these estates will cause the number crunchers to recommend selling the land to invest in more lucrative ventures elsewhere in the world? This could be the beginning of the end for large English estates.

The Brexit exit negotiations are scheduled to conclude by March 2019. There are four overlapping sets of negotiations that affect agriculture in this process:

Regulation

There are many EU regulations which must be incorporated into British law or scrapped altogether. The big question is how will this impact the British people? Is it a big opportunity for a new start?

These are all fascinating questions but they will take many years to answer.