By Gary Ford, head of strategy and producer engagement, BFREPA
At the end of May I was asked to say a few words in my local church at the annual Rogation Service. Rogation is a key event in the church calendar and is traditionally a time when farmers and the rural community ask for God’s blessing on the emerging crop. Certainly, after the driest Spring for over a century, they need it.
I started talking about some of the key agricultural statistics (and apologies that these are a little ‘England’ centric) – there are 95,000 farms in England farming 9 million hectares or 22.5 million acres. Broadly 54% of those farms are owned – the majority being family farms – whilst 14% are tenanted. We have an increasingly ageing workforce with 33% of farmers/farm workers aged over 65.
This has partly led to a poor health and safety record where agriculture accounts for 17% of work-related fatalities. We sadly lost 23 farmers and farm workers last year to fatal accidents on farm with many of these being men over the age of 65.
I touched upon the challenges of livestock disease – BSE in the 1990s which was distressing for the animals affected and anyone that witnessed this nervous disease; FMD in 2001 and we all remember the funeral pyres around the country, more recently Bluetongue and the ongoing bird flu outbreak.
Inevitably, whilst not wanting to sound too political I referenced the role played by government and their often confusing and inconsistent policies toward agriculture particularly over the past 45 years – from pulling out hedges and stubble burning in the 1980s to promoting regenerative agriculture in the 2020s. Their recent acts of implementing the family farm tax, removing SFI to new applicants without notice, trade deals that leave us exposed to cheaper food produced to different standards (e.g Ukraine) and removing farm subsidies (which make up 32% of typical arable farm income and 67% of livestock farming) leave us all feeling unloved and unappreciated. Thank goodness for diversification for those that have the opportunity and have been able to make it work.
All of this leaves us feeling quite demoralised and despite working long hours for small margins. All of this manifested itself in a recent RABI farming survey which found that 36% of the farming community are ‘probably’ or ‘possibly’ depressed. This is borne out by the fact that 133 people in UK farming and associated activities took their own life in 2019/20.
We all need to feel valued and have worth in society and agriculture is no different.