New chief is not a cause for celebration

I SHOULD, I suppose, be telling everyone how elated I am. How life has taken on an altogether more cheerful outlook following the announcement that the AHDB has acquired a new chief executive.

However, yet another appointment on a six-figure salary to yet another quango does leave me, on the contrary, rather cold, despite the fact that Tim Rycroft’s arrival is being hailed by those already inside the AHDB tent as “tremendously exciting” at a time when it is about to undergo such significant change.

As more and more farmers in various sectors are demonstrating, the only significant change the industry wants to see happening at the AHDB is the termination of its existence – though while waiting for that they would be grateful, if it is to go on sponsoring TV advertisements, that it makes them comprehensible.

Like so many organisations which claim to be acting on farmers’ behalf the AHDB is woefully out of touch with conditions on the ground, mainly because it is run by people who have spent more time sitting round tables than in a tractor cab.

And while we are on the subject of people being out of touch, I am sure many of you have read the latest shroud-waving assessment from the RABDF of the sorry state of affairs in the dairy sector, a third of whose members apparently, are on the point of quitting because they can’t source enough labour.

Nowhere in the hand-wringing assessment of the sector’s woes, however, is there a single mention of their root cause: the fact that dairying has been reduced to such a weakened, impoverished state because milk prices are still the same as they were in 1995.

Has any other sector of economic activity had to manage on 1995 prices while coping with 26 years’ inflation on costs?

I cannot believe so.

But RABDF officials come and go, as do highly-salaried AHDB officeholders, each one eventually departing with congratulations ringing in their ears from their colleagues for years of devoted service and a job well done. For whom?

Certainly not for British farming, where there are as many struggling enterprises as there ever were; where producers are working almost round the clock for almost nothing; and where hundreds of businesses are only still operating thanks to EU support payments – payments which are about to be replaced by a Government which on one hand is being urged by the CPRE to open up more of the countryside and on the other by the rewilders who want to close it down so they can grow brambles.

Is it any wonder that young people who may be contemplating a career in the dairy industry take one look at British agriculture, conclude it’s being run by a ship of fools, and go off in search of a nice indoor job with no lifting?

The AHDB is woefully out of touch with conditions on the ground