You’re probably aware of Riverford’s (and Guy’s) campaign against, so called, fake farms. Personally, from what I’ve seen, I think they’re being a little too easy on them. Fake farms aren’t just about duplicity – ie giving a false impression of both provenance, and bucolic bliss for both farmers and livestock. They also completely dehumanise farmers, taking away not only their name, but also any remnants of control that might have been left in their hands. If Willow Farm doesn’t really exist etc etc, it can’t have any rights. Can it? So all the control is in the hands of the owners of the fake brands. If Tesco delist Fairy Liquid we might hear about it. If they drop Farmer Giles as a supplier of chickens to ‘Cherry Tree Farm’ no one will ever know.
There probably are tiny nodules of surplus fat left in the food chain. The problem is that supermarkets want it all (and more) for themselves and their shareholders, and even when they have it all, they go on ringing it out of the people at the bottom end of the chain – the farmers. Fake farms are without doubt, an aberration and ways should be found to stop the practise. But they’re just the tip of the iceberg and there is almost certainly far worse beneath the surface.
The nameless ones would counter with the argument that they do a good, and essential job of delivering cheap food to the end user. And there lies the nub of the matter. We have BCorp certified, every box ticked, Riverford doing an amazing job of delivering organic, well sourced at all levels, produce to your door but it’s only affordable to, maybe, 10% of the population and, again maybe, another 20% who prioritise good food and make sacrifices elsewhere in order to buy it. That’s a complete guesstimate. We (BFS) don’t tick anywhere nearly as many boxes as Riverford but the demographics of our customers are similar (hopefully a little wider). I don’t think you could call us cheap either. I’m not claiming we’re on the one true path, but it’s better than a diet of unsustainably cheap UPFs and buckets of fried chicken, with all the associated uncosted health and environmental add-on costs.
The traditional farming sector, coupled with a diverse range of small scale start up enterprises (The Apricot Centre, Fresh Flour Company etc and the Old School Farm and Baddaford collectives of businesses – to name a few, locally) provide a foundation for a new, locally based, food system and they’re doing something of unquestionable benefit, without any help whatsoever. At the same time customers are increasingly having to make sacrifices, they really shouldn’t have to make, to buy good, healthy, food. Something needs to give. Michael Gove commissioned Henry Dimbleby to compile a National Food Startegy, from production to consumption, that Boris Johnson rubbished before it had even been published. Too many taxes on the working man etc. Maybe it’s time to have another look because it’s by far the closest we’ve come to a strategic, all-encompassing, farm to table, plan.
So, all in all, I don’t think it’s too depressingly Starmer-esque to say that the food system is broken – or too Watson-esque to claim, with over 90% of the grocery trade in the hands of the large multiples, that fifty years of free market economics is to blame. The ‘powers that be’ needs to do something – fast, because, not only are most people eating unhealthy food produced in an unhealthy way, but farmers are going out of business every day and the countryside is becoming the preserve of mega rich and mega farms – not necessarily crossing over on the Venn diagram. The retired to Sussex, wealthy City Johnny, with his pheasant shoot, horses and vineyard probably won’t want a mega, zero grazing, dairy unit on his doorstep.
Some sort of basic payment for farmers might be the beginnings of an answer. In these strange times when, as well as being food producers, farmers are also seen as custodians of the countryside, carbon sequestration and biodiversity – together with all the environmental challenges that go with it, the problem of the ongoing financial security of many small to medium sized, mainly tenant, farmers, is always likely to put a spanner in the works.
You could put your rose-tinted spectacles on and look at James Dyson’s uber-slick videos here and think; ‘well that’s how you do it – why aren’t they all doing it like that’. As of many things, I’m sure it’s been said about farming, as it has about so many things; ‘the way to make a small fortune out of farming is to start with a big one’. I have no idea whether James Dyson makes an operating profit out of his farms but being underpinned by the capital value of 36,000, inheritance tax free, acres is an advantage unavailable to most start up farmers. I for one don’t want the country to be owned by a few dozen billionaires and value the input of the traditional ‘yeoman’ farmer and wouldn’t want to see them being forced into a metaphorical global south.
Riverford’s Wicked Leeks, among others, have suggested paying all farmers a no strings attached, basic income payment but I’d have thought that it would be less contentious if attached to some sort of guaranteed price for their produce. Broken record that I am, I mentioned it a couple of months ago in relation to the early days of the Common Agricultural Policy, whereby ‘market price’ was made up to a set level by a government payment. It resulted in massive overproduction, which, at the pre global warming time, would almost certainly be coupled with some pretty dodgy practises – both business and environmental. We certainly don’t want a return to wine lakes and butter mountains, or any worsening of the environmental landscape but that doesn’t make the idea a bad one. It just needs to be recalibrated taking into account today’s criteria, which are not, as they were for the first thirty years of the EU; to provide as much cheap food, irrespective of environmental degradation.
As a country, we’re always saying something doesn’t work and instead of rethinking the idea and ironing out its faults, we throw it out with the toys, baby and bathwater plus anything else to hand. We end up swinging from one extreme to the other without finding the sensible path in the middle. So, I think some sort of minimum payment scheme for farmers might be the way forward, with levies (similar to the sugar tax) as the ingredients get processed and sold. That way, fresh ingredients would be cheap with prices rising as the food gets systematically degraded. If people want to eat KFC and drink Monster Energy drinks, they can pay the price. They’ll probably still throw the packaging out of the car/van window but I can dream, can’t I? But working out the details is way above my paygrade.