What will the winter bring?

SECOND cut is safely in and luckily the contractors were at hand to put slurry out on some of the aftermaths. We are fortunate to have had some rain to freshen up the grass as we were running close to the edge on our farm grass cover after the heatwave.

We have started to put some big bale silage in for the cows to help the rotation length as its promising drier. However, we are more fortunate than our farmer friends in parts of England. If the public are feeling the pinch on energy and food costs now, what will the winter bring? I don’t think it will be any good news.

Whilst basking in near 40-degree temperatures in the Royal Welsh Show, NFU Cymru had the company of our First Minister during one of the popular seminars, where he was asked by a farmer that with current rise in food prices and the potential shortfalls of the food supply, did he think that policies that are on the table put enough importance on food security and affordability and that the NVZ policy could harm those two items?

In his answer, he talked about the need to justify how public money is spent. A point he reiterated in a BBC Wales interview where he said that he had to justify his policy actions for farmers to the Bangladeshi taxi drivers in Cardiff. If I was asked about these actions, I would want a policy that would safeguard the quantity, quality and affordability of locally produced food.

We live in a privileged position in that we have access to an abundance of highly regulated, high standard, affordable food in this country.

When you think of it, very few countries in the world have these same standards and maybe that is why so many of us take our food for granted. The world as well as supply chains are fragile things, and government regulation must be sensibly balanced and not on extreme fringes.