COUNTRY & FARMING
The weather in August didn’t quite manage to match the scorching temperatures of June and July, but then perhaps we were all ready for a break.
The August bank holiday was a bit of a washout, but for farmers, the August rains were welcome.
Looking at the Welsh countryside, you would be forgiven that all has returned to business as usual. The fields are green and the hedgerows look healthy, with the first blackberries appearing.
But behind the scenes, all is not quite so straightforward. There is a looming winter forage crisis.
It probably feels like farmers are always complaining – it’s either too wet, too dry or too cold. But it can seem desperate when you are faced with having 200 cows in your care, and no way to feed them.
“We had a long hard winter stretching from the end of last year’s show to April – and within a month we were into the height of summer and a drought,” said NFU county chairman Jeff Evans, speaking at the Pembrokeshire County Show in August.
Mr Evans farms around 200 dairy cows in North Pembrokeshire.
“We’re already 60% into next year’s fodder since the first cut and we missed the bulk of the growing season in May and June,” he explained.
“The cost of production is going up with the demand on feed stocks, bedding and everything else.”
WHY CAN’T THEY JUST MAKE MORE FODDER?
Most farmers keep their cows indoors through the winter and feed them silage or haylage.
Both are basically a kind of fermented grass which is cut and stored through the summer, ready for the winter months. Silage is cut three, maybe four times, between May and August. It’s like stockpiling your larder before a snowy period.
It is peace of mind knowing you can go for weeks, maybe even months, without having to go short of food.
But balancing summer grazing and growing enough grass to cut is a difficult game. During the heatwave, not only was there not enough grass for cows to eat, the silage grass wasn’t even growing.
Faced with the immediate crisis of keeping cows fed, farmers opened up their silage pit and began feeding their winter supplies in July. Now, they are playing catch-up. But at this time of the season, nature is against them.
If they can’t make the fodder they need, there is only one alternative – buy it in. And that means a huge bill for feeding this winter, adding up to 4p per litre on to the cost of production of milk.
That doesn’t sound much, but over a six-month period, for a typical Welsh dairy herd of 200 cows, that adds up to over £30,000 of additional cost.
Analysts at the Agriculture & Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) say that animal fodder demand was at it’s highest level for the month of July since records began in 1995. James Webster, analyst at AHDB, said it was largely down to the adverse conditions in June and July.
There is a shortage of grain across Europe too, which also feeds into the UK market. Research from the European Commission has also monitored pasture conditions across Europe, which showed productivity between May and July 2018 was the lowest on record for all of Wales and much of the UK. It is a pattern reflected across much of northern Europe.
NOT JUST A FINANCIAL COST
For Abi Reader, 2017-18 was a tough winter and her farm had run out of feed and bedding by March, meaning they had to buy extra supplies in. But Ms Reader paid a high price for this, and not just in money terms.
“The feed that we bought in was bad and it affected quite a few of my cows, and they started to go sick and then one by one they started to die and I lost 12 in total,” she said.
“The cost of losing them was huge to the business and the cost in terms of the emotional stress was massive as well. It’s something you can’t really put a cost on.”
During the early summer season, she was able to rebuild the depleted stocks that she had lost over the winter, but the heatwave put a hold on this.
“By my calculations, we’ve only got enough food to get us through to January 10 next year. I need to get through to March 31,” she said.
“We are going to get to the point where there is nothing left.”
At this time of the year, Ms Reader would expect to have made 1,000 bales of haylage. She has less than 200.
THE GRASS MIGHT LOOK GREENER
Luke Winton, a young farmer and a vlogger at TeamDairy, posted a photograph of the same field on his farm in the Vale of Glamorgan, only four weeks apart. It shows that the grass in his fields is growing once more.
But the lush greenness hides a more serious situation.
From January to July this year, the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institution (RABI) has given out around £67,000 to working farmers and their dependants in Wales, a 86% increase on last year’s figure of £36,000 for the same period.
Trish Pickford, head of welfare at RABI, said: “Existing problems have been exacerbated by the long hard winter, followed by the hot, dry summer. The weather conditions have particularly affected livestock farmers and we expect to see the knock-on effects over the next few months.”
Many of us have already forgotten about the cold hard winter. But according to the Centre for Economics & Business Research (CEBR) consultancy, 2018’s big freeze, together with the summer heatwave, would end up costing consumers about £7 extra per month as we head into autumn.
The heatwave has also created a market which is seeing record prices for straw.
Most straw is brought into Wales from the UK arable regions in the east. Auctioneers have reported prices double the level in comparison to last year.
The previous hard winter and the dry summer has caused a national shortage of straw across the country, a situation not helped by an increasing use of land to produce fuel for biodigesters and biomass.
Arable farmers have reacted to calls from the livestock industry and higher straw prices by baling more, but feed availability this winter and grass growth remains the major concern for livestock farmers.
HIGHER FOOD BILLS
CEBR said farming costs and yields were under considerable stress. It calculated that:
■ Wholesale vegetable prices had jumped between March and July, with onion prices up 41%, carrots by 80% and wheat for bread by a fifth.
■ The farm gate price of butter has climbed 24% since March, as hot weather hampered grass growth for grazing.
■ Meat prices are set to rise due to a shortage of livestock feed .
It means that the cost of meat, vegetable and dairy prices are set to rise “at least” 5% in the coming months because of the UK’s extreme weather this year, the CEBR research suggested.
Even the egg industry is affected
and producers have called for an immediate rise in prices they receive for their eggs. The very small margins in producing eggs mean it is easy to turn a profit into a loss. Feed prices have soared by as much as 50%, which means a medium-sized producer with 16,000 hens will spend an extra £40,000 in a year.
Welsh egg producers Country Fresh Eggs farm 39,000 free-range hens at Ty Mawr in St Brides Wentloog on the edge of Newport.
Owner Victoria Shervington-Jones has seen feed prices increase for her flock but it is something the business is having to manage.
“The industry is not great at the moment – there is a massive oversupply,” she explained.
“It means prices won’t go up for the consumer, and the additional fee costs are just something we are having to absorb and manage.”
NOT A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
Farmers receive financial support from the Government in the form of the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS), which is paid from December each year.
There have been calls by industry leaders for the payment to be brought forward early this autumn to ease the strain on farmers struggling to cover their additional costs.
But in August, the Welsh Government announced it would not change the usual December date and would not heed further calls for emergency loans to be made available. In Scotland, farmers have already been offered government loans to help them recover from the heatwave.
The Farmers’ Union of Wales (FUW) criticised the Welsh Government’s decision and suggested it was “out of touch” with the implications for farmers of the severe weather experienced over the past 12 months.
FUW president Glyn Roberts said: “Ironically, Scottish Labour criticised the Scottish Government for being slow to confirm loans would be available in October for farmers unable to afford to buy fodder and feed following a disastrous harvest – and for not going far enough.
“Yet in Wales, where Labour are in power, the Welsh Government propose going nowhere near as far as what is proposed in Scotland.”
The release of early loans and payments in other parts of the UK and in Ireland, as well as parts of the EU, could lead to desperately needed fodder and bedding being taken off the UK market from October and possibly even stockpiled by farmers in other countries.
Welsh farmers run the risk of being unable to compete while they are left waiting for payments.
“Given the disastrous harvest here in Wales and across the EU, there is a real risk that by the time Welsh payments or loans become available, earlier payments or loans in other countries will have removed vital fodder from the market and driven up prices,“Mr Roberts said.
“The delay in arranging the emergency weather summit we requested in early July, and this decision, raises real concerns that the Welsh Government is just out of touch with how serious the implications of the weather are – despite our regular correspondence and updates since May.”