Courtesy of the links page at Breaking the Armlock, the alliance site for fighting corporate power in the food chain, I came across this interesting long report, A Rough Guide to the UK Farming Crisis (500k pdf, 54pp.) at the Corporate Watch website.
It's an interesting high-level survey of the inter-related web of structures and pressures that are driving down UK farm incomes to unsustainable levels while allowing supermarkets to make massive profits.
The chapters are short and punchy, with a crusading style, but also a perceptible sense of balance behind the reportage. Myself, I was hoping for a little more detail and a little less rehash of headlines, but I suppose that information might be out there if it starts keeping me up nights.
This morning's Farming Today programme on BBC Radio 4 called attention to the problem of rising land prices in rural Britain. Here's the blurb from what will otherwise be a very short-term link:
The price of farmland across the country is soaring, and it's "lifestyle buyers" who are driving up the value. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors says prices have risen by 30 percent in the last 12 months and are due to peak shortly when the reformed system of farmers' subsidies kicks in — and then they'll steady out. On Farming Today RICS' rural spokesman William Tew explains how agricultural land is now worth on average £10,000 per hectare — pushed up by non-farming buyers for whom 'location, location, location' appears not to be an issue. Local authorities own a significant amount of agricultural land, but many of them are selling off these land assets, meaning would-be farmers with no capital can't get a foot in the door. Hertfordshire County Council isn't selling the ten thousand acres it owns and Charles Franklin, its Principal Land Agent, thinks other authorities should be holding onto their land too. Mike Potter farms his dairy herd under the Gloucestershire Rural Estates Scheme, renting his land and buildings from the County Council. He tells Caz Graham it's the only way he can keep farming.
I've heard numbers like this before - £10,000 per hectare. That's $7489 per acre in American terms, and that's a lot of money.
[incidentally, did you know that Google can do unit conversions? If you type 1 hectare = ? acres, Google will tell you the answer)]
Anyway, that's up about US$1000 per acre from the last time I posted on this topic.
Run some numbers. Cereal yields per hectare. Call it 5.5 tonnes. Income? £223 / acre? Plus subsidies? Another £80 under the new scheme? Plus what...what do I know about farm economics? Anyway, £300 per acre is £750 per ha. Gross. Deduct costs. Consider take-home pay. And the land is selling for £10000. How are you gonna pay to finance that?
Look at the mess this causes. We who live in the city can sell up our modest homes for an absolute packet and trade them in for some rural farmland (presumably with a house on it) and still have some money left over. Meanwhile, farmers who are struggling to break even are faced with an enormous bill for acreage that they'll never be able to pay for from the proceeds of their labour.
The ramifications are pretty overwhelming. Britain's "Cheap Food" policy must rely heavily on imports, since pricing land into the cost of food (as you have to do, say, when you eat out in London) makes "cheap" a nonsense. But isn't it a nonsense that it's cheaper to buy lamb from New Zealand than the UK?
As the man quoted above, the only way he's going to stay in business is as a tenant on government-owned land. That's in effect a subsidy, is it not? I mean, the article the free market (the "lifestyle buyers") would give the council more for the land than the tenant. So the local councils - some local councils - are taking the opinion that it's more important for rural Britian to keep on farming, even if it's a non-economic proposition.
Should farmers own the land they farm? Is there a difference between being a farmer and being an agricultural worker? Would people enter the professsion as workers rather than as owners? How can a system like Scotland's croft tenancy contend with issues of price pressure on the land?
No, I don't have answers. I wish I knew more. An area for one aspiring smallholder to research.