the future for food, farming and the environment

[kevinjohnsonmbe]

2 hours ago, drinksloe said:

 

Farming is 1 of those things its very easy to cast wide sweeping statements or cherry pick certain things

 

 

2 hours ago, drinksloe said:

 

So any loss in bird/animal life is not down to habitat loss or modern farming practices

Wide sweeping statements ya say....?

[Billhook]

2 hours ago, drinksloe said:

Farming is 1 of those things its very easy to cast wide sweeping statements or cherry pick certain things and compare them with something entirely diferent..

 

Supermarkets ahve a big influence of farming and not a positive 1 with the constantly chasing cheaper produce no matte rthe cost to animals or environment.

And the british public doesn't help either, not just with farming but all industry/products too many residents would rather something was cheap and imported (not caring about standrds of the product or the workers) than slightly dearer made in the UK so supporting jobs etc

 

Also politicain's never help matters either, yes plenty folk moan about the susbidies, but forestry also relies on subsidies as does a lot of boifuels industry too.

The things gpoing on in the renewable sector the now are a disgrace with boidegesters and boi fuel plants as well as RHI scheme

 

So far in the thread u have had hill farms mentioned nd then comparing them to intensvely worked farms, chemical/pesticides or habitat loss, all very different things.

Hill farms probably haven't changed in hundreds of years apart from the quad bike.

Even as recently as the 1980's the  sheeps fleece's used to cover the rent of the farm as well as shepherd wages, nowadays it costs money to clip the sheep as often wool won't cover the clipping costs.

I'm sure further south and east on better lower land they're has been a lot of changes and some habitat loss but when u get over 150m or so very little has changed as the ground just isn't good enough.

So any loss in bird/animal life is not down to habitat loss or modern farming practices

Agree with this.  I would class our farm as a very average arable farm.  Nobody but me has seen the birds, bees and other wildlife, nobody has ever done a proper survey and by that I mean turning up for more than one random day.   

The guys who look after the owl boxes come about three times a year and report on young ones.

A lot of the "Decline in wildlife due to modern farming methods"  is what I call crapetition.  Which is the constant repetition of a buzz phrase until people believe it to be true, without actually visiting a farm.

There are certainly changes due to the amount of predators, Buzzards, Kestrels, Kites, Carrions, Jackdaws, Magpies, Polecats, Minks, Foxes not forgetting the domestic cats.  Is it any wonder you do not see as many garden birds as in the sixties.  They are here still as I hear Thrushes sing on my morning bike ride, but I do not see them very often especially in the middle of a lawn where they used to be seen.  The Sparrow Hawks put an end to that

We have had loads of bumble bees and I admit that the honey bees are in decline but for ten years I was in HLS organic and there were still no honey bees.  More likely that they succumbed to a disease.

We have breeding otters on the lake (fish and stream must be healthy) and loads of Pipistrelle bats as well as other species. (so there must be plenty of insects around to keep them going.)

Trees have been planted, new hedges and pond scrapes and wild  Bee orchids cared for as well as Marsh, Early Purple and Pyramids.

I have a white car and the front is usually covered with insects on a warm night drive.

I think that a greater impact on wildlife is the loss of habitat due to house building, new roads and bypasses and the ever increasing volume of traffic.

[Mull]

Snot a thicket

Left in the hands of the rewilders it soon will be.

[drinksloe]

12 hours ago, kevinjohnsonmbe said:

 

Wide sweeping statements ya say....?

 

Aye Fair play.

And thats the thing, i'm talking about fields i grew up and worked in that i''ve known very well for 30 odd years, i'm sure that is not comparable to some intensive arable unit.

And very easy esp on here to be arguing over a point but we're both talking about it in 2 very different situations, round my general area there really hasn't been many hedges ripped out or ponds filled in, infact in last 20 yrs been miles of hedges planted and new ponds dug.

But where i'm talking about i could still go to the exact same hedges/rabbit warrens i used to ferret 30 odd years ago.

The same ponds are still there, very little has changed there in 30 or even 50 years (apart from that farm is no longer vaible without a 2nd job, infact that farm now is really a hobby farm and used to support 2 workers)

 

1 of the biggest problems with UK is the 'conservationists', they have somehow either convinced that predators don't make a difference or too scared to say it incase it costs them funding, publicity or members (rspb kills predators on most reserves but won't admit it)

They also tend to be folk who've never worked in the real world/countryside so can spend vast ammounts of grant (taxpayers) money on projects that will never work

It is people like billhook who have lived on a farm all there life and notice changing animal/bird populations over years/decades, most'conservationists' look down there nose at him and don't listen to wot he has to say.

He might not have letters after his name but they do see wot's going on over decades.

Suerly this massive rise in predator numbers at the ame time prey numbers are in free fall can't just be a conincedence

 

In the whole river valley/catchment, nowadays there is hardly a rabbit left, while a mixy knocks them down (as it always has) now the rabbits don't get a chance to recover as they're is so much vermin eating them, buzzards, corvids, badgers, foxes, stoats, PM.

U are in trouble when something whuich breeds as wellas the rabbit can barely survive.

 

Ur talking about pollution, habitat destruction etc, again i don't know how it is south of border, but really most of that happened in the 60-70's, by time 80's most of the really dodgy chemicals were banned, ur were no longer meant to rip hedges.

I can remeber burns/ditches swimming in slurry and silage effluent back in the early 80's, real stinking, while it wasn't the norm it was not unusual. Now u never see it, most burns will be cleaner now than they've been for 40-50 yrs, otters are making a comeback all over UK.

My local river is chocca full of them, infact probably too many

 

For me the whole habitat destruction/pollution angle just doesn't add up, most of any habitat loss happened before any populations started to crash and in many areas (poorer upland ground) there has been very little if any habitat loss or agricultural change yet still seeing the same things, rise in predators, decline in prey species

As even in places where they're has been little or no change, no pollution and no chemicals some bird species are still declining, yet u go to an almost idetical piece of ground near a grouse moor/well keepered and all these birds suddenly reappear and are absolutley thriving.

The GWCT study at Otterburn proved this where the other thing they changed was predator control and wader breeding success rose by something like 300% within a few months of the control starting (compared to the sites with no predator control) Also have a look wot they have achieved at there Allerton project combining a profitable arable farm with conservation

 

 

Edited May 4, 2018 by drinksloe

[Billhook]

One more thing I would like to add is the question of subsidies.  We have had subsidised farming since the war for reasons already mentioned.  My father benefited from deficiency payments from the war until we joined the EU.

These payments only stepped in when grain prices went below a certain value which was negotiated by the NFU with the government and was only a figure to stop farmers going under rather then making them profit.

I never heard or saw any complaint about these subsidies in all those years.

The trouble started when it became a political weapon to control farmers in the 1980s and turned into a single farm payment which was seen by many as a way of paying farmers to do nothing.  This was quite correct in some high profile cases, but for the majority it meant running around like blue arsed flies trying to fill in forms and tick a load of boxes just to make a living.

Most farmers would rather just be paid a fair price for their produce and forget subsidies.

In fact subsidies are subsidising the general population to provide cheap food.  This is made worse by the super markets making food so ridiculously cheap that people do not value it any more.

Not only do we have a huge obesity problem causing a nightmare for the NHS, but also a huge food waste scandal, again not helped by sell by dates and demands for ever more exotic non seasonable food.

 

The simple answer is to make food more expensive which would mean the end of subsidies and obesity but it would be political suicide.

 

People laugh at me when I say that wheat should be £1000/ton.  But in 1978 I was paid £100/ ton and a Ford tractor was £6600.  The equivalent tractor is now ten times more at over £66000.  The wheat price is not much different today forty years later at £140. it should be ten times this.

A  £1 loaf of bread should really cost £10. Bet you wouldn't chuck it out for the birds in that case!

[LeeGray]

7 hours ago, Billhook said:

One more thing I would like to add is the question of subsidies.  We have had subsidised farming since the war for reasons already mentioned.  My father benefited from deficiency payments from the war until we joined the EU.

These payments only stepped in when grain prices went below a certain value which was negotiated by the NFU with the government and was only a figure to stop farmers going under rather then making them profit.

I never heard or saw any complaint about these subsidies in all those years.

The trouble started when it became a political weapon to control farmers in the 1980s and turned into a single farm payment which was seen by many as a way of paying farmers to do nothing.  This was quite correct in some high profile cases, but for the majority it meant running around like blue arsed flies trying to fill in forms and tick a load of boxes just to make a living.

Most farmers would rather just be paid a fair price for their produce and forget subsidies.

In fact subsidies are subsidising the general population to provide cheap food.  This is made worse by the super markets making food so ridiculously cheap that people do not value it any more.

Not only do we have a huge obesity problem causing a nightmare for the NHS, but also a huge food waste scandal, again not helped by sell by dates and demands for ever more exotic non seasonable food.

 

The simple answer is to make food more expensive which would mean the end of subsidies and obesity but it would be political suicide.

 

People laugh at me when I say that wheat should be £1000/ton.  But in 1978 I was paid £100/ ton and a Ford tractor was £6600.  The equivalent tractor is now ten times more at over £66000.  The wheat price is not much different today forty years later at £140. it should be ten times this.

A  £1 loaf of bread should really cost £10. Bet you wouldn't chuck it out for the birds in that case!

Perfectly put!

[Nick Connell]

As a new farmer I hope that subsidies end in their current form. At the moment they cost every take payer £50 per week but there's no way they make food any cheaper. The majority of the money all ends up in big estates. It's a closed game as well as you need to buy "entitlements" for each acre of land you own to be able to claim subsidies.

I went to and interesting NFU conference about global food security and it said that by 2050 the world will need 50% more food than it produces now to feed the growing population and they estimate that only an additional 5% of land could be used for agriculture. So really the only way to feed people will be through efficiency.

[Peasgood]

9 hours ago, Nick Connell said:

NFU conference about global food security and it said that by 2050 the world will need 50% more food than it produces now to feed the growing population

As a farmer I could easily treble production with very little effort but I doubt I could sell that produce at all never mind get a sensible price for it. 

Just as a simple example, last year I left about 50 tons of apples unpicked. Nothing wrong with them but no point picking them if nobody will buy them. I offered some for £150/ton (11p/lb) to someone who said it was too dear, they cost 10p/lb to produce.

I could easily flood the market with cabbage, runner beans, gooseberries, rhubarb, blackcurrants etc on my own never mind what other growers could produce. A waste of time because nobody would buy them.

One day folks are going to be hungry in this country and by then there'll be nobody left to grow the stuff.

[Richard 1234]

One more thing I would like to add is the question of subsidies.  We have had subsidised farming since the war for reasons already mentioned.  My father benefited from deficiency payments from the war until we joined the EU.
These payments only stepped in when grain prices went below a certain value which was negotiated by the NFU with the government and was only a figure to stop farmers going under rather then making them profit.
I never heard or saw any complaint about these subsidies in all those years.
The trouble started when it became a political weapon to control farmers in the 1980s and turned into a single farm payment which was seen by many as a way of paying farmers to do nothing.  This was quite correct in some high profile cases, but for the majority it meant running around like blue arsed flies trying to fill in forms and tick a load of boxes just to make a living.
Most farmers would rather just be paid a fair price for their produce and forget subsidies.
In fact subsidies are subsidising the general population to provide cheap food.  This is made worse by the super markets making food so ridiculously cheap that people do not value it any more.
Not only do we have a huge obesity problem causing a nightmare for the NHS, but also a huge food waste scandal, again not helped by sell by dates and demands for ever more exotic non seasonable food.
 
The simple answer is to make food more expensive which would mean the end of subsidies and obesity but it would be political suicide.
 
People laugh at me when I say that wheat should be £1000/ton.  But in 1978 I was paid £100/ ton and a Ford tractor was £6600.  The equivalent tractor is now ten times more at over £66000.  The wheat price is not much different today forty years later at £140. it should be ten times this.
A  £1 loaf of bread should really cost £10. Bet you wouldn't chuck it out for the birds in that case!

I was talking about this yesterday (wheat prices) that was the exact point of the conversation. How can wheat be virtually the same price at the farm gate now as it was 30 years ago?

There is a 3200 acre farm just gone up for sale here, the reason for sale is they are fed up of all the hassle for a return that simply isn’t worth the bother when they can sell up and do nothing and live off the proceeds.
A harvesting contractor has just gone bust as well £3 million in the hole.
The equipment is too expensive the price of food too cheap. The system is broken

[Peasgood]

20 minutes ago, Richard 1234 said:

There is a 3200 acre farm just gone up for sale here, the reason for sale is they are fed up of all the hassle for a return that simply isn’t worth the bother when they can sell up and do nothing and live off the proceeds.

Pretty much what we are doing apart from the 3200 acre bit, we don't have that much.

I grew lots of fruit and veg and the prices now are the same as 30 years ago, you can't live off that.