Farming Brexit fatigue runs even deeper than the snow drifts

Comment Brian Henderson

They say it’s a sure sign that you’re getting old when you no longer get a thrill of excitement from a heavy fall of snow.

It probably harks back to school days when there was a chance of an unexpected day away from studies and the iron rule of the teacher. (Although, being married to one, it is interesting to see just how excited the members of the teaching profession get about a snow day as well…)

But while it’s more than a few years since there was any chance of a day stolen from my own studies, there was still a bit of excitement last Wednesday in the interruption to the normal routine.

However, a few days into the fall there was no getting away from the fact that the attractions of the drifting white stuff had begun to pall. And I guess the chaos and additional drudgery of the recent wintry days could add snow to what they say of guests and fish - they all stink after three days.

And while the extended TV news telling tales of disruption, derring-do and acts of kindness as people around the country struggled to cope with the unusual conditions was, at first, compulsive viewing, it, too, began to add to the tedium – which peaked with a mighty groan and a scrabble to find the offbutton as The One Show joined the bandwagon.

So, with the battle to get feed out to the stock and keep pipes defrosted addingtothedailygrind-while ploughing, mucking out and the growing list of other jobs urgently requiring attention remains undone - it would be fair to say that many in the industry are

0 After a few days the snow thrill starts to pall now suffering from a bit of snow fatigue.

However, it would appear that this isn’t the only area in which boredom is brimming over in the farming world.

For, if the turn-out at the Brexit roadshow I attended a couple of weeks ago was anything to go by, then there’s probably even more fatigue out there for this long-standing topic than there has been for the recent wintry weather.

With the organisers accounting for more than half the unexpectedly poor crowd of around 20-odd individuals, there were definite signs of apathy. And the fact that another of these events was cancelled after only seven farmers had signed-up indicated that this lack of interest wasn’t just a local issue.

It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with the speakers - as they all knew their subjects inside out and gave good, solid presentations on their areas of expertise.

It was just that there’s been nothing new to add to the mix as the stagnation on the political front has meant we’re not really much further forward in the way of hard facts of what awaits the industry than we were the day after the referendum.

But, showing that hope can still triumph over experience, there was some real expectation that two big events which occurred last week might have addressed this lack of movement and produced the sort of step-change which might have broken the current information log jam on the detail farmers so urgently need on farm policy in the postbrexit world.

For it was widely hoped that both the launch of Defra secretary of state Michael Gove’s consultation document on this very topic and Prime Minister, Theresa May’s Mansion House speech would fill in some of the blanks.

But it was just as well that we hadn’t been holding our breaths.

For while Michael Gove’s much hyped “Health and Harmony: the future for food, farming and the environment in a Green Brexit” – first sold as a command paper then re-branded as a discussion document on future farm policy - ran to many dozens of pages, it was bulked up by numerous cut-and-paste case studies which only served to highlight the lack of detail.

And, although the agrifood sector got a special name call in Mrs May’s keynote Brexit speech on Friday – as an area where the government wanted to secure flexibility to make the most of the opportunities arising from Brexit, and for more protection for the environment – there was a similar lack of clarity on detail.

The prime minister rounded her speech off with a rousing “Let’s get on with it” – a thought probably echoed by many in the farming world.