David Handley Talk of imminent doom is over the top

I’VE never known an industry like farming for scaremongering. Here’s the RABDF telling us that unless its members can bring in foreign labour the dairy sector is doomed

Here’s Minette Batters waving a shroud and forecasting that if we are forced to accept cheap imports of the appalling rubbish Americans call beef and chicken the livestock and poultry sectors are doomed.

But hang in. Back in the spring the growers were telling us that unless they, too, could have the use of their usual supply of cheap imported labour they would equally be doomed.

Yet funnily enough I saw no evidence of any shortages in the shops or footage of broken-hearted producers weeping over fields of unpicked, rotting strawberries. And the next page in the farming journal where I read the RABDF’s dire prediction there was an article telling me that the dairy sector was on the way back up – and this week’s announcement of some prices rises only reinforces that view.

There really is no need for any sector of agriculture to be short of labour because thanks to Covid our unemployment rate has climbed to 4.5 per cent.

There are therefore thousands of able-bodied people out there who could be usefully put to work as members of the farming workforce.

It may mean a complete change from a job in a cosy, warm office. It may be a slightly more physically demanding occupation and they may well go home with dirty hands and slightly less money in their pockets. But it will be work – and work which benefits the entire nation.

Another ‘doomed’ institution – if you listen to the NFU – is the small to medium family farm.

But I’ve been on this planet somewhat longer than Ms Batters and I can tell her that the NFU was preaching the same message all of 25 years ago. And for a very good reason: small to medium farms only pay modest NFU subscriptions: the real money comes from the bigger farms at the other end of the scale.

Small and family farms no more registered on the NFU’s radar then than they do now which is why Farmers for Action was formed to give them a voice in the ongoing national debate.

In fact when you look back over the intervening years the only message the NFU has pumped out is that the only way to make a living from farming is to get bigger: to go down the road of industrial farming with the size of pig and poultry units measured in acres rather than square yards.

To milk thousands, rather than dozens of cows. To create bigger and bigger units and plant fields that stretch over the horizon.

All well and good. All fine and dandy. Until you can’t get the labour to run enterprises on that scale, at which point panic kicks in and industry leaders start warning that the nation is on the brink of starvation. I would argue that that model is unsustainable and that small to medium family farms should become the foundation of the industry.

They need very little, if anything, by way of hired-in labour; they tend to have a lower environmental impact; and they have a far better public image than factory-sized operations.

There remains the problem of profitability. But that could be resolved through legislation to ensure home-produced food could only be sold at a price which provided a modest margin over the cost of production – a formula which is one of the fundamental principles of every kind of trade or commerce. Except farming. Why?