Squaring up to Goliath

The pandemic has turned shoppers’ attention from the supermarket giants to farm shops and village stores. Can local producers sustain this purchasing revolution, wonders Rupert Bates

CITY types will define diversification as a risk-management strategy, mixing a variety of assets within a portfolio, while the only investment vehicles farmers are interested in are tractors and combines.

So far, so clichéd – a conventional farmer, tilling the soil for crops and rearing livestock for food, is regularly told to diversify. But does that have to mean turning away from centuries of tradition? Does it have to be something like housebuilding? Too right it does if the cheque from the developer is big enough. B&B or some form of agri-tourism, maybe? But, as one grumpy farmer told me, that would involve talking to people – agro-tourism.

Or diversification could simply be a tweaking of what farmers do best, this time taking control and ownership of the food chain rather than being beholden to the suffocating grip of the behemoth supermarkets that grind down prices.

We’ve all gone full-bore bucolic during lockdown. Apparently everybody has left London for the countryside. I can’t confirm this, as I haven’t been on a train for six months. Meanwhile, dogs have been burying their leads in the garden for fear of yet another walk.

It all makes for an interesting housing market, with rural agents putting fresh air barometers on their property particulars. Call your home a farmhouse even if it’s a high-rise flat in Basingstoke.

Supermarkets’ scale, pockets, purchasing power, foot traffic and convenience will mean a farm shop’s slingshot of lamb shoulder is never going to floor Goliath, but if enough Lilliputians band together they might just tickle Gulliver’s ribs and provide sufficient irritation.

While we clapped for the NHS, we also started clicking and collecting from our village food shops. Eating at home was no longer to save money on restaurants but because there was nowhere else to sit. So why not buy local produce from independent outlets with low food miles? Lighter carbon footprints plays to the environmental agenda, too, and it is this purchasing revolution farmers are hoping to sustain out the other side of COVID-19.

Is diversification as simple as opening or supplying a village farm shop, rather than feeding the national supermarket machine? A healthier margin or not enough bulk to make it viable?

Unsurprisingly, farmland on the market hit record lows in the teeth of the pandemic but demand for lifestyle and amenity farms continues to rise.

Angus Locke, of Savills rural research, says, “The outlook for the farmland market is expected to remain positive in light of significant global uncertainty and a refocus on domestic food security. Low supply should continue to hold values firm and scarcity might well encourage premiums to be paid for the best in class.”

The Farm Retail Association estimates that the UK’S network of farm shops has a combined annual turnover of more than £1.5bn. That’s quite a sizeable slingshot and if everybody is indeed moving out of town, answering the siren call of the parish pump, then customer numbers can only rise.

Or the farmer could simply flog his land to a developer, trading food for bricks and melancholic will subsume bucolic, leaving the food gates open once more to cheap imports and lower standards.