Navel-gazing’s not the way forward for farming in UK
Comment Fordyce Maxwell
Arecent survey by estate agents indicates that only 28 per cent of their clients think the UK government is paying enough attention to farming in Brexit negotiations.
Knight Frank, which claims to be the UK’S leading independent real estate agency, also quotes some of the respondents in its extensive survey published last week.
One said: “Agriculture is not foremost in the public’s mind unfortunately. If it were, government would give it top billing.”
Another said: “Government has allowed the public to regard farmers as subsidy junkies instead of explaining that the support exists to maintain cheap food in the shops.”
I can’t remember the last time I saw “subsidy junkies” used.
And with respect to Knight Frank’s extensive and useful survey, it is possibletolookatthosequotes and get an impression of two landowners/farmers of a certain age who have a one-dimensional outlook in a world that has passed them by.
They’re not alone. It’s natural for every sector of industry or society to think their case is more important than anyone else’s. A survey of steelmakers, carmakers, holiday camp owners, dentists or plumbers would produce the same result, that is, government does not care about us.
In fact it is a surprise that 28 per cent of those taking part in the survey thought enough attention was being paid to agriculture as the interminable Brexit negotiations go on. And on. And on.
Face it, British agriculture
0 Farmers are concerned – but the public is less bothered is an extra in any sphere of these talks whether it is in Westminster, Commons and Lords, in Brussels or in any of the tentative trade talks with countries outside the European Union.
Their agriculture might be important as they look to the UK as a potential market. But not ours. One of the fears expressed in the Knight Frank survey was of food imports that are produced to lower standards and are cheaper,the“cheaper”partbeing the very thing that appeals to our supermarkets and consumers.
Trying to argue that present EU agricultural subsidies to British farming of more than £3 billion a year help provide cheap food is not an argument that the average consumer, if they ever thought about it, would accept. Their concern is that food costs are going up.
They probably never think about land prices either. But as the Knight Frank land value graph shows the average price of farm land in 1976, all types included, was about £250 an acre. That was three years after the UK joined the EU.
By 1996 the average value was about £1,700. By 2016 the average price was about £8,000. Much the same has happened to house prices, but comparing land price in 1976 with that of 2016 is still hair-raising. As with farm rents, EU subsidies must have something to do with fuelling the increase.
This stunning rise in land prices and farm rents over a generation also brings us, as always, to the contradiction of what farmers and landowners do compared with what they say.
What they say is usually pessimistic. It is fear and foreboding about the future, at the least uncertainty. Farmers’ organisations, whether generic like the national farmers’ unions, or specific interest such as tenants’, sheep or beef, warn that they are on the brink of catastrophe at any given time and that there is no future for the young.
That is a poor message to give if anyone paid any attention. The fact that they don’t is emphasised by the scramble for any tenancy of any kind that becomes available and rents offered and prices paid for land.
The inexorable move to fewer and bigger farming businesses continues as it has done for at least two centuries, but the effort to be one of the fewer and bigger shows no sign of easing off, Brexit or no Brexit.
There is also a growing belief that farmers can do much more for themselves apart from pleading for subsidies to continue. One Knight Frank respondent said Brexit might “help farming stand on its own feet and modernise” with a potential gain of more efficiency and innovation.
Well, hallelujah and amen to that.