The price isn’t right for Britain’s grain farmers

THE harvest has been held up by heavy showers and longer outbreaks of rain.

This has left cereal farmers around the country glued to the weather forecasts trying to work out what the next day will hold.

The stories about grain prices going through the roof last year seem to be forgotten as crop prices have plunged again.

I haven’t noticed the cost of stuff made from grain such as bread and beer dropping by 25% in the way crop values have.

Swings in prices have always been with us. They used to move by about £5 a tonne over a season but the swings can now be upwards of £50 and this makes planning ahead much more difficult, especially as some crops need to be sown 12 months before they’re harvested.

Many farmers would have been forgiven for thinking the price of wheat would hold up well. Not only were prices high last year but the wet autumn stopped much of the crop being planted.

This meant the amount of wheat grown in the UK this year is the lowest for 30 years — and much of what did get planted has never looked like it would produce a decent yield.

However, the wheat market is now a global one and this has led to a jump in the amount harvested across the rest of the world, and this extra supply has led to the fall in prices.

The price for malting barley, much of which is used to make whisky and beer, is even more complicated to pin down.

This year much of the ground not planted with wheat last autumn was sown with barley in the spring and in England the area of this crop virtually doubled.

In Scotland, however, the bulk of this type of grain is grown on contract to maltsters and distillers and the area didn’t jump nearly as much.

Although growers who sell their grain on these contracts don’t always know the exact price they’ll get, they do at least know that they will have a buyer if their grain makes the quality grades.

But the world market plays an important role in barley prices as well.

Recent record sales of whisky around the globe mean that, provided the weather lets us cut the stuff in good condition, most of the decent barely produced in Scotland will be snapped up to make our national drink.

Whisky-makers tend to buy as much home-produced barley as they can, but they aren’t bound to use Scottish barley to produce Scotch whisky.

This means they can buy cheaper grain from anywhere in the world, which keeps the lid on prices at home.

So farmers find they have to resort to a crystal ball — or the bottom of a whisky glass — to predict the price of their grain.