Make trip from pasture to plate painless

IT’S remarkable what statistical information you can dig up if you start hunting around seriously.

Such as the information I recently unearthed which showed that in 2005 this country boasted a total of 132,400 farm holdings but that by 2015 that figure had fallen to 104,000.

Pretty impressive to lose 10 per cent of your farms in a decade, but not really that surprising when you consider the underlying economic problem of smaller-scale farming being impossible on the returns the markets are now paying.

But it all puts the Government’s current desperation to secure trade deals with anyone anywhere in a different light. Because the last time I checked there was no sign of that decline slowing down. There is nothing – despite all the fine words various ministers are reading from the autocue – telling me that the UK’s shiny new, post-Brexit, standalone, thoroughly British farming policies are going to do anything more than force more smaller farms out of business.

And so if you extrapolate the trend we could soon find ourselves in trouble: slumping from a situation where we can only produce 60 per cent of the food we eat to one more in line with that in the 1930s when we were producing less than 50 per cent and unsustainably reliant on imports, especially when there were U-boats around.

Not that any of this stops the Government talking up its plans for the future of British farming, chief among them the brownie pointearning decision to ban live animal exports.

I have no problem with that. For far too long UK farmers have gone along with exporting on the hoof at the insistence of continental buyers, when in fact the only rationale behind those demands has been the fact that the animals could then be traded on at bigger profit – such as in the case of the British lambs that were being put out to graze for a few weeks on the coastal belt in western

France and were then sold on to the Germans as salt marsh-raised animals at a 400 per cent mark-up.

Of course the ending of live exports is a wonderful vote-catcher which is why both Tory and Labour politicians are now supporting the idea. But over this hangs the undisguised stench of hypocrisy.

Because both Tory and Labour Governments have seen to it that huge numbers of small abattoirs have foundered under the weight of gold-plated EU regulations. The same regulations which benefitted from a light touch introduction in continental countries but which became so onerous and were so ruthlessly applied as to be unsurvivable this side of the Channel.

The result: cattle, sheep and pigs from Scotland are now having to endure eight and nine-hour journeys to slaughter in Wales or Cumbria: journeys which are just as long as they would undergo to European destinations but which, because they are completed within the UK’s own borders, don’t appear to qualify for criticism.

No farmer wants to dispatch an animal for a lengthy journey because every hour spent in the stressful confines of a lorry means a loss of condition, weight and value.

So instead of wringing their hands over the mess they in particular were responsible for creating with their anti-farmer policies, Labour MPs should instead be calling on the Government to reinstate the network of small abattoirs this country used to have and which used to ensure that livestock’s journey from pasture to plate was as short, painless and stress-free as possible.

No farmer wants to dispatch an animal for a lengthy journey... every hour spent in the confines of a lorry means a loss of condition and value