Farmer Focus: Remember – only nine meals from anarchy
Doug Dear © Jim Varney Well done team, you smashed it. There are now 566ha (1,400 acres) of crops in the ground that are up and growing.
It has been a hard slog, so we have invested in horsepower and bigger iron. Now, all we need is extra operatives to jockey the equipment.
See also: British farmers disadvantaged by banned pesticides in food imports
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I’m all for cattle coming into the feedlot as “big empty houses”, but this year, with the scarcity of summer grass, they are particularly empty.
Our realistic minimum weight into the lot is 450kg, but there are a lot of cattle under that. These are not going to be 90-day cattle, however hard we try.
Cattle must be filled up from the inside before we can flesh the outside. It will take some hard yarding to get them to meet the processor specification of a R3/4L.
Feed procurement is a constant battle. We are in the same market for feed stock as anaerobic digesters. Maize failed down country and everybody is in a mad scramble for raw materials.
Two of our staple ingredients are in short supply: spuds are tight because of the drought, and brewers’ grains have become short owing to a reported slowdown in brewing.
I am just debating whether to go back into growing sugar beet next year. The plan may be to grow some for the factory and some to put through the cattle.
It would be an option that would leave us with more raw materials under our control.
I was kindly invited by the NFU to host a visit for Defra. I wanted to show them that there must be a balance.
I believe we can farm for the environment, carbon, and biodiversity, but not at the expense of production. Profit and loss must be considered.
My message to the government is farmers either need supporting properly or being left to get on with farming.
Needless to say, the ministry visitors were given a good schooling on production agriculture.
Much of the Defra team suffer from normalcy bias (they disbelieve or minimise warnings of threats while believing what has happened in the past will continue to happen).
They totally underestimate the likelihood of us running out of food as a country.
Don’t forget, they say nine missed meals results in anarchy.