Farmer Focus: Can ‘regen’ beef stand up without subsidy?
© Jim Varney They say two years are never the same. Well, it’s becoming clear that the shift in the weather is a developing trend.
Autumn is becoming wetter and more problematic, meaning that early-doors drilling has paid off hands down this year, with a swift 320ha (791 acres) drilled straight off the bat. However, the final push has been harder after spuds, and we have mauled in wheat after maize.
See also: Working with nature improves Lakeland farm’s profits
It’s not been our best season for maize, with very variable crops. This is mostly due to wet holes and a considerable amount of nutrition rinsed out of the soil. Needless to say, I’m happy it’s in the clamp and not still out in the field.
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There’s nothing worse than factions of an industry trying to score points off one another. Apparently pasture-fed beef is far more nutritious, containing far more vitamin B12 than feedlot beef. Bearing in mind that the only difference between the two systems is that I clamp the “pasture” and feed it at scale, why would there be any difference nutritionally?
But here lies the problem: people don’t like dealing with scale – mega-farms, if you will. The unfortunate truth is while large poultry, pig, beef and dairy farms are unpopular, they are the most efficient by many metrics and produce food with the lowest resource base.
Quite a lot of extensive pasture-fed beef systems only work on highly subsidised schemes, where the “regen” cattle are only a by-product of nature reinstatement. I doubt they would stand up on a net income basis, and the livestock performance is often a non-starter.
Maybe Defra’s Janet Hughes would like to look round more mega-farms and see what they are like instead of having a jolly in the Lake District with her rose-tinted glasses on, with what appears to be an aim of de-stocking some key livestock areas.
We’ve had the first 100 days of the Labour government and been promised the earth and received nothing from Steve Reed and pals. Some Farmers Weekly columnists were sucked in by it. I wonder if they have got buyer’s remorse. We have a government stuffed full of student-union politicians that couldn’t sell a life raft to a drowning pirate.