We must show hunger for doing it better

WELL, we’ve just about got through another winter, spring is finally and definitely in the air, and we should be looking forward with renewed optimism.

There is plenty to be optimistic about. We have 66 million hungry mouths on our doorstep, there is a growing consumer trend towards buying British and local and we have the expertise and the enthusiasm to develop and advance what is already a world-class farming industry.

Why then I wonder, is the NFU so keen to tell us all that Brexit will mean the end of the world as we know it, that British farms will be vis- ited by decay and dereliction and the whole British food market will be engulfed by a tsunami of cheap imports from every third-rate food producer on the face of the planet? Why? Because the NFU cannot see beyond the mechanism of subsidy. It cannot conceive of any kind of farming being possible once the life-supporting flow of EU cash is turned off. Life without the dollop of dosh delivered under the name of the single payment is unthinkable.

The problem with the NFU is that it is run by too many people farming 10,000 acres or more and for whom EU payments have been the key to a featherbedded existence for the last four decades.

With income on that scale cushioning their businesses they have become fat, complacent and lazy. If they have displayed any hunger it has been for higher payments.

Meanwhile, among the ranks of the small and medium farmers, there has been a real hunger for change, improvement and innovation. For adding value. For farming smarter and more efficiently. For sweating the assets. Because those are the only routes to better profitability. Those are precisely the principles we should be instilling in the up-and-coming generation of new entrants to the industry. We need to ensure they display the same hunger for doing things even better than we have.

Above all they need to be acting like proper businessmen – because at the end of the day that’s what they are. No other business sector in this country is bailed out to the tune of £3 billion a year – and if anyone were to suggest it should be, there would be an enormous outcry.

What Brexit is going to do is to make a lot of consumers realise to what extent they have been indirectly subsidising farmers’ income all these years. I can’t really judge what their reaction will be. But my suspicion is that they will demand that the support mechanism is phased out as soon as possible. So it should be. As I said previously, we have the enthusiasm and the expertise to farm successfully. So let’s show the rest of Europe how it can be achieved.

No other business sector in this country is bailed out to the tune of £3 billion a year