Farming

The BV magazine, January ‘23

NEWS

Flowery strip in a field of spring barley, hopefully it will be a source of beetle and aphid munchers.

The science of profit

Blandford farmer George Hosford abandons the stats and checks his crystal ball to see if his profit calculations will be accurate this year

Below left is a screenshot from a clever app which helps us to analyse the outcome of various tramline trials we carried out on the 2022 crops. The yellow/green pattern represents the yield map generated by the combine while harvesting – green is better yield than yellow, with orange and red being progressively worse than yellow. The app – called Climate Fieldview Cab – is from Bayer, one of the big agrichem companies. Love them or hate them, they have the resources to develop clever stuff like this; it’s not always just more chemicals. The app allows you to select any area of the field you like, or individual passes of the combine, and then tells you the area and yield on that part of the field. So where we have applied a treatment to a particular part of a field – alternate tramlines in this case – we can then measure the effect of the treatment on yield. The blue pins represent where the tramlines are; I simply walked across the field and added each one in the right place. This helps you to choose the right passes to include in the analysis, and to ignore the ones which run across two treatments. In this field we were testing a product which is supposed to reduce the amount of nitrogen lost to the atmosphere by converting nitrogen oxide into plant feed. You can see we found no significant difference in yield between tramline treatments. Elsewhere on the farm we wanted to test our nitrogen fertiliser policy on wheat, so we chose a single tramline in each of four different fields and applied an extra 40kg of nitrogen, then measured the difference using the app. We found that the extra 40kg produced extra yield between five and eight per cent. If you haven’t already dozed off, you may now be asking “so what, it all depends on the value of grain and the cost of the fertiliser” and you would be quite right. It also depends on when you sell the grain and when you

Supporting food production has been deemed less deserving of support with public money ...

buy the fertiliser, and whether you have to borrow the money to do so ... A fair bit of number crunching and crystal ball gazing then needs to happen in order to decide the right approach for next season. We have already committed to buy next year’s fertiliser, at eye-watering prices. To leave it longer would have been reckless as we might not have been able to secure supply at all. But we are now very dependent on the grain price holding up to make the figures work and for crop growing to remain profitable. The trouble is that over the last six weeks the price of wheat has fallen £50 per ton. That’s making a huge difference to predicted margins, and right now we are not looking so clever (the same as very many other farmers). Anyway, we have the fertiliser in stock and we don’t have to use it all if calculations suggest it won’t pay. We could hold some over for the following year. In any case, we have already had to pay for it a year before we will see any return from selling the grain it generates. Welcome to the roulette wheel of farming. The old joke goes “How do you make a million from farming? Start with two million.” In some sectors, like pigs, poultry and horticulture, that is absolutely the case right now, with energy costs, labour shortage and the intransigence of retailers leading to producers saying “stuff this for a lark, I am not risking another production cycle when the prospects guarantee huge losses”. They aren’t placing orders for new egg-laying chicks, productive sows are being slaughtered and not replaced, and the horticulture and protected (under glass) sector is reducing output after two years of 30 per cent of unharvested crops, due to lack of labour. The fear is that these producers won’t come back, making the UK ever more dependent on imported food, the opposite of what every food shopper says they want. The picture on the left illustrates part of the problem. Why does anyone need to import nearidentical overseas products when we produce them here?

Unfriendly destination?

Our production costs are higher even than Europe because of tighter welfare and other regulations and we are now having to pay more for labour thanks to having become an unfriendly destination to foreign workers. So can anyone explain why we need to import Dutch, German or Danish pork loins? They are all the same price on the shelf. There only seems to be one likely outcome – answers on a postcard please.

And then there are sheep

The above picture shows why we still keep a few sheep. In farming terms they are unproductive, they can denude a landscape with their persistent nibbling, they attract every ailment you can imagine, they get hopelessly stuck on their backs in hot weather, they get stuck in brambles in any weather. Their wool, once the mainstay of our nation’s productive output, and despite its undeniable magical properties, is now a valueless annoyance, and their meat ... well, if you can find any among the bones and fat then you are cleverer than I. However, they do make excellent pets. You can leave them outdoors all year round, they can survive on very little food and don’t drink much water, and you can turn up in the field with a group of tiny schoolchildren and the sheep will gallop towards you in search of titbits. Once the toast has been distributed most of the sheep wander off, but the best ones remain to entertain the children in the gentlest fashion. The children are mostly fearless, and the sheep reward their bravery with great patience.

A Dorset motorway?

Could there actually be an economic case for ploughing a motorway through Dorset, asks Andrew Livingston

Here’s a horrific notion to get you started for 2023 – should Dorset have a motorway? Now just hear me out before you smash your phones, tablets and laptops in utter disgust. Growing up in one of the five counties without any stretch of motorway has always been a source of pride for me. But I have been starting to brood on it. And I won’t lie – I am starting to see a few benefits. What if, let’s say, the M3 continued all the way to somewhere like Dorchester? This all started when I saw a few statistics as I rummaged through some government reports. Around 75 per cent of Dorset is used for agriculture, around the national average. However, food production in the county employs fewer than 6,000 people. In 2021 that was less than 10 per cent of the total employed in that sector in the South West. It made me think. We’ve got some amazing food here in Dorset. Could we be doing better at exporting it? Think about our neighbours in Devon, Cornwall and Somerset. Their counties are renowned for some amazing agricultural and food products that are sold all over the country – the cheeses, creams, beers and cider that are grown and made there.

Made in Dorset

There are so many amazing foods made in this county, but you don’t really see them further afield. Granted, Clipper Tea is found globally, but the tea isn’t grown in Dorset. Ford Farm’s Coastal Cheddar, Moore’s Biscuits, Capreolus charcuterie and BV Dairy’s creams are a few local products that I can think of that you can find in stores nationally (but of course no one actually knows when they’re buying BV Dairy product from Dorset!). Admittedly, Cornwall also doesn’t have a motorway and still manages to ship its food and beverages nationally just fine; but they do have the A30 and A38, which both lead straight into the M5. And I don’t mean to break the hearts of big fans of the A35 and the A37 but frankly, they are awful. Especially in the summer. The Romans invaded Maiden Castle and Dorset in 43 AD and occupied the county for more than 300 years. When they left and headed back to Italy all we had to do was tarmac their roads occasionally (and maybe replace the signposts once a century) and we would have been fine! I will admit – before I get chased out of the county by the readership wielding flaming pitchforks – that the A38 from Bridport to Dorchester is stunning on a clear day. But you daren’t overtake anyone on the one stretch of dual carriageway in case a wandering car drifts lanes as the driver looks across Eggardon Hill to the north and the Jurassic coastline to the south. In my head I obviously hate the very idea of a motorway. But I also believe that the rest of the country deserves some of our amazing Dorset produce. If extending the M3 means that Londoners get the experience of the silky smooth taste of Purbeck ice cream then so be it. I’ll even accept some decent dual carriageways if it means that the north could finally know that a Dorset Knob isn’t just sitting between the legs of the Cerne Giant.

Only five English counties are entirely without a motorway: Rutland, Suffolk, Norfolk, Dorset and Cornwall