My dairy tale How do farmers ever make money? Thanks to cows, filming – and frisky tourists, says Jamie Blackett, who farms in Dumfriesshire
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ntil I discovered journalism, I was convinced farming was the worst-paid job of all. And it seemed inevitable it would always be so. The raw economics of globalisation and the boundless ingenuity of agricultural technologies – mechanical, chemical, biotechnical and now digital – seemed destined to drive the price of food ever lower. Thomas Malthus’s dire prediction – that the world’s population will grow to the point where eventually we will all run out of food – was already looking shaky. It has been finally demolished by the invention of laboratory food, which can be grown from stem cells and yeast cultures. As the last people who remembered eating Woolton pies started dying off, it seemed no one would fuss about the UK’s food security ever again. The reality of agricultural deflation dawned on me when I wrote the cheque for my son’s first term at prep school in 2003. At the time, my main income was from arable and the price of wheat stood at £60 per tonne. When I went away to school, 30 years earlier, wheat was £120 per tonne, the costs of growing it a fraction of what they were in 2003, and my school fees were around £300 per term. My son’s fees were nearly 20 times what mine had been and all our other costs had risen in proportion. The net effect was that it was around 100 times harder for us to educate our children. I know every generation of parents says this, but I still don’t quite know how we pulled it off. Yes, 1973 was the peak of the commodities boom and the Russians had just thrown wheat markets into turmoil with the ‘great grain robbery’. But, still, during the Queen’s reign, food purchases have fallen from over 40 per cent of household expenditure to around 9 per cent. That has never happened before in one reign. It has had a dramatic effect on the 30 The Oldie June 2022
Cash cows: Jamie moved into dairy
economy: all those foreign holidays, digital gadgets and Netflix subscriptions paid for out of disposable income have been enabled by the world’s farmers becoming more efficient and tightening their belts. In my case, mostly belttightening. You’re welcome. It was a terrifying prospect. I had taken out a seven-figure mortgage to buy back two-thirds of our farm, sold to pay death duties a generation before. So, like most other farmers, we took on other jobs to make ends meet. I started writing, my wife, Sheri, became a photographer and we opened up our house as a B&B and converted farm cottages into holiday lets. Looking back, I wouldn’t change a thing, though it has been hard work. The writing allowed me very necessary head space away from the stresses of farming. The tourism brought a steady trickle of characters, along with their money: the middle-aged couple
Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce filmed coitus in our bedroom
I found engaged in intermediate foreplay on our sofa, in the fluffy dressing gowns Sheri had thoughtfully provided, when I wandered into the drawing room to throw a log on the fire. Or Barbara and Arlene, who put the T into LGBT and us into fits of giggles as they conducted a photography session – in crinolines – on our lawn, where a visiting pack of basset hounds had just left their mark. Then there was the time we let out the house to a film crew, and Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce filmed coitus in our bedroom – so convincingly in her case that she was nominated for an Oscar. Somehow we survived. We gave up wheat as a bad job. We started beef farming – then gave that up as a bad job as the price of beef flatlined while our wage bill went up by 50 per cent. Then, in response to Brexit and the prospect of cheap beef and grain flooding in on the back of Boris’s trade deals, we went back into dairy farming as we left the EU – the mirror image of my father’s decision to give up dairy farming shortly after we joined the EEC. So far, the decision appears to have been successful. And now we have the cost-of-living crisis; the inflation no one appears to have seen coming; the blood of Ukraine paying for another Russian ‘great grain robbery’; and the sudden interest in the UK’s food self-sufficiency. Though it feels wrong to write this, in farmhouse kitchens across the land there is relief that food prices can go up in real terms. Still, if the price of wheat, currently up 100 per cent over the past two years at around £300 per tonne, were to reach its 1973 level, it would be £1,600 per tonne in real terms. Now that would be a real cost-ofliving crisis. Jamie Blackett’s Land of Milk and Honey: Digressions of a Rural Dissident (Quiller) is out on 14th June
