Just let our farmers get on with the job

WHEN it’s a quiet news day and the anti-farmer brigade don’t have anything topical to bitch about they inevitably fall back on one of the old favourites, and usually intensification.

Easy target: everyone knows what they’re on about and it ticks a lot of boxes with the concerned public.

The latest specific activity to which the crusaders have taken exception is zero-grazed cattle. It’s an issue which is likely to become more prominent and one which divides farmers, because while keeping livestock permanently housed may be seen as depriving them of the fresh air and sunshine they would otherwise be enjoying, the animals don’t waste energy foraging for food and are less prone to injury and other problems associated with being outdoors most of the time.

From a nutritional point of view, of course, there is little difference between allowing cattle to free-graze and cutting the grass and delivering it to their pens. Farmers can also make better use of early grass at times of the year when wet ground can easily get poached.

And, unnatural as it may seem to many, the system does, undeniably, offer a way of reducing costs at a time when (as ever) the markets seem disinclined to deliver a decent enough return to allow for a modest profit and some reinvestment.

But as always there is a more than a whiff of hypocrisy hanging over the pious individuals denouncing yet another farming practice as cruel.

I can understand them needing to maintain a high profile in order to continue attracting funding for their various charities but if they were genuinely concerned about ‘intensive’ farming they should be tackling the problem from the other end. Because as far as I can see the vast majority of the public are still happy to pick up a £3 chicken, and fill their shopping baskets with milk and beef without giving the slightest thought as to what rearing systems may have been used to get the products to them. As long as the price is right they are content.

Rather than beating farmers up for trying to farm profitably within the near-impossible economic constraints of a woefully outdated price structure, the welfarists should perhaps be galvanising public opinion; getting shoppers to demand milk and beef from outdoor-reared cattle and to request that only free-range chicken should be offered for sale.

Thanks to some pressure a few years ago from Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall most supermarket shelves now offer the option of free-range birds (and personally I won’t buy anything else) which are experiencing a steady trade.

But not every family can afford to pay three or four times more than the price of an intensively reared bird.

The real challenge in all this – and the one the welfarists are frightened to take on – is to completely overhaul the sourcing and buying habits of supermarkets (which, at the end of the day, control this country’s food policy) so that only meat and other products from free-range poultry, pigs and cattle are available.

That would entail a massive uplift in farm gate prices which would be mirrored by price rises at the point of sale, many on a scale which would shock the consumers. We could then turn to the welfare lobby and ask them what solutions they propose to the situation where the food on offer is completely in accord with their requirements but is unaffordable for a significant sector of the population.

Until this ideal state of affairs can be achieved, however, I suggest the Packhams of this world belt up and let farmers get on with the job of keeping the nation fed at a price it can pay while doing their best to offer a welfare-friendly, safe and tasty alternative to the junk food the Government is inviting in from other countries.

As far as I can see the vast majority of the public are still happy to pick up a £3 chicken