A county council-owned farm in Cumbria has been sold for a record price on the open market. At just under 100 acres, East Park Farm in Crofton would have been ideal for a new farmer. But on the market it sold for £1.7 million – a   price per acre 80 per cent higher than the national average and well beyond the reach of new entrants.

read on…

http://www.grazingamazing.com/1/post/2013/04/wasted-asset.html

As an old farming journo I also knew the farming group of the headline – Velcourt. Through the 80s and 90s this UK company was in the vanguard of the change from mixed farming to high-input cereal growing. Its speciality is the big-scale wheat monoculture, heavily dosed with chemical fertilizers and pesticides. The kind of agriculture that robs soils of their fertility, putting vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and depleting everyday foods of their nutrients.

It’s the kind of agriculture that destroys sustainable farming systems and puts small family farms out of business. It denies us our heritage of health-protecting foods such as pasture-fed meat and dairy products. Instead it has built a national diet of cheap, processed wheat grains – the foods that give us obesity, heart disease, diabetes and a host of other degenerative conditions. It’s also the agriculture that has stopped a generation of youngsters from ever getting into farming, while robbing the British countryside of much of its wildlife.

Now Velcourt is to move into Romania, and it’s looking for investors. Company chief executive James Townshend forecasts double-digit returns, both from intensive farming and the resulting hike in land prices. He calls this “land arbitrage” – the consolidation of small farms into large blocks, with “proper irrigation and crop storage”. In a few years it could more than double the value of Romanian farmland, he believes.

Since 89 per cent of Romania’s 3.9 million farms are less than 5 hectares in area, there’s likely to be a lot of arbitraging going on. There’s also likely to be a lot more unemployment, a lot more carbon dioxide gushing into the atmosphere, and a lot more pesticide-contaminated, nutrient-depleted wheat to be processed into “healthy” breakfast cereals or taxpayer-subsidised biofuel.

I can only hope the EU Commission – having seen the devastation caused by their policies in the west – will act to prevent the same tragedy happening in eastern Europe. Now at least they have the evidence of the biggest-ever scientific study of global farming. It concluded that industrial agriculture was not a sensible way to feed the world. (Agriculture at a Crossroads. www.agassessment.org )

In the Telegraph story James Townshend compares the value of Romanian farmland (£2,365 a hectare) with that of East Anglia (£26,277 a hectare). What he didn’t point out was that many East Anglian soils are now largely dysfunctional. Decades of chemical farming have robbed them of their fertility. Their carbon stores have largely gone. They can no longer retain nutrients or water. They cannot sustain healthy crops without ever increasing inputs of chemicals, energy and irrigation.

In contrast Romanian soils – at one tenth the value – grow nutrient rich foods without the need for chemicals. They store huge amounts of carbon and water, sustain incredible wildlife populations, and provide a living for millions of farming families. Such are the distorted values of the City. What, I wonder, will happen to East Anglian land prices when British consumers finally realise they’re being fed crap foods from a ruined landscape and start demanding real, nutrient-rich foods from Romania. That’s if western agribusiness hasn’t wrecked them too.

So here’s my own tip for City investors who want to get into farming. How about helping restore life and fertility to our own impoverished countryside? The best way to do this is to put livestock and grazing back into the farming rotation. In other words to recreate that greatest of all British cultural inventions – the mixed farm.

Our political influence outweighs our numbers, says Richardson, because of our stridency and exaggerated claims. The world’s food supply is even now teetering on a knife edge. If extremist ideas like ours are allowed to prosper we’ll be condemning whole nations to shortages – or worse.

Strong stuff. But could there be just a touch of guilt projection here? Let’s look at some recent agrarian history. Richardson’s generation of farmers inherited a very productive and sustainable system – mixed farming. One of its leading exponents was George Henderson, author of the wartime best-seller, The Farming Ladder.

Henderson made his little Cotswold farm so productive that the wartime government brought in farmers by the busload so they could learn how to do it. In his book Henderson calculates that if all Britain were farmed like that we could easily feed a population of 100 million. And all without the products of Monsanto and Syngenta, I might add.

But Richardson and his mates couldn’t wait to dismantle the system. They got rid of their pastures and grazing animals, and laid off most of their staff. They then trousered the generous subsidies from Brussels and reinvented themselves as industrial wheat growers. From the start it was an unsustainable system that could only be made to work with the help of heavy chemical fertilizer and pesticide inputs.

Now after four long decades of continuous chemical assault, our soils are shot. The organic matter – which means the life and fertility of soils – has collapsed. As a result crop yields have hit a brick wall. In desperation Richardson and his chums are calling for rescue in the form of GM crops. The very corporations who wrecked our soils are being invited to sort out the damage with their unproven and risky technology.

Anyone with a basic knowledge of agriculture knows this is whistling in the wind. There is only one sure way to make Britain’s farms more productive. It’s not speculative. It’s tried and tested. It’s simply to restore life and fertility to our long-abused soils by putting grassland and grazing back into arable rotations.

Let’s get dairy cows out of their sheds and off their enforced diets of maize, soya and cereals. They’ll be healthier, so will the milk they produce. And at long last we can start making British agriculture productive again.

The cost of all this is now becoming clear. In return for the “green revolution” we have degraded soils, polluted rivers and a food supply uniquely vulnerable to extreme weather events like drought. In place of healthy foods we have commodity grains – depleted of nutrients – which food corporations turn into branded products that are the cause of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and a host of other degenerative conditions.

There’s an urgent need for industrial countries to return to sustainable farming methods – what we agricultural geeks used to call “good husbandry”. To make this change farmers will need the support and guidance of sound science. Yet this is the moment the BBSRC – the quango dispensing public money for farming research – decides to put agribusiness companies at the heart of the process.

If anyone has benefited from the wholesale destruction of sound farming in Britain it’s corporate agribusiness, a powerful consortium of fertilizer manufacturers, chemical companies, biotech firms, machinery manufacturers and oil companies. The war on family mixed farms has mostly been conducted by well-funded corporate lobbying, particularly in Brussels.

The near strangle-hold on UK farming by agribusiness companies now extends to publicly-funded research. The BBSRC – which dispenses public money for biological research – has set up a clutch of what it calls “research and technology clubs”. The declared aim is to work with business partners on collaborative research projects. But what the clubs will do is give the very corporations that have destroyed sustainable farming in Britain a major say in the way taxpayers’ money is spent on research.

For example, the Crop Improvement Research Club includes the agrochemical company BASF, the biotech giant Monsanto, the chemical and biotech company Syngenta, and Velcourt, an agribusiness farm management company that has been in the forefront of high (pesticide) input farming in Britain. The club’s management group is even chaired by Keith Norman of Velcourt.

Together the agribusiness partners bring £560,000 in research funds to the club. But the BBSRC contributes a massive £6 million of public funds to the party, while the Scottish Government contributes another £500,000. This means that while contributing just 8 per cent to the club, the chemical and biotech industries get to say how £6.5 million of public money is spent on research. This when the research most needed in farming is the sort that will get their damaging products off the land.

Another collaborative venture largely funded by taxpayers is the Diet and Health Research Industry Club with over £12 million to spend. Industry members include such health promoting companies as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo UK, Kraft Foods, Nestle, Sugar Nutrition and Unilever. The very corporations who peddle health-destroying foods are put in control of healthy diets, while farmers – the real producers of healthy foods – are shackled to the same corporate sector.

Only a political class driven by free-market ideology – and lacking any real understanding of farming, food and health – could have spawned such an Alice-in-Wonderland construct.

When a small group of us set up the Oxford Real Farming Conference a few years back it was because we believed farming should be conducted in the interests of people, not of corporate profits. The established conference we opposed was – and still is – supported by corporate sponsors. We are not. Our only financial support comes from an organic farming trust. Our aim is to provide an independent forum for sustainable and productive agriculture, informed by sound biology.

If you share our aims please check out the ORFC website and sign up for the 2013 conference. And let’s together bring farming – and the public research that supports it – back under the control of the people of these islands.

Anyone over 50 will have grown up in a Britain of mixed farms. As well as growing crops, these farms included grassland and grazing in their rotations. Clover-rich grasslands when grazed by livestock rebuild the fertility of the soil without the need for chemical fertilizers and pesticides. So mixed farms were largely self-sufficient and less vulnerable to wild swings in global commodity markets.

No wonder leading scientist Sir George Stapledon praised the mixed farm as best for Britain. It ensured the three essential elements of a healthy agriculture – self-sufficiency, sustained fertility and flexibility.

Mixed farms had the added benefit of supplying very healthy foods. Recent research shows meat and dairy foods from grazing animals contain a range of health-protecting nutrients, some of which are deficient in modern diets. They include vitamins, omega-3 fats and a substance known as CLA which protects against heart disease and cancer.

Under the EU subsidy regime British farmers have abandoned mixed farming in their droves, reinventing themselves as specialist arable growers. But to grow crops year after year in the absence of livestock and grazing means relying heavily on chemical fertilizers and pesticides, all of which damage our soils and put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The NFU gloomily reports a 15 per cent drop in wheat yields due to torrential rain. But they don’t mention that Britain already produces a vast surplus of wheat. In fact we grow so much of the stuff that less than half is needed for all the bread, pastries and biscuits we chomp our way through. As much again gets wastefully fed to animals – including dairy cows which are naturally adapted to eating grass!

Over the centuries British people have thrived on meat and dairy foods from grazing animals. Today we’re all having to eat the foods of grain-fed animals with disastrous consequences for our health. And because of our unprecedented exposure to global commodity markets we now face big price hikes.

Writing in the Sunday Times Danny Fortson reports that Irish dairy farmers are planning to increase production by 50 per cent when EU milk quotas end in 2015. “Thanks to its rainy climate, cows there feed mainly on grass,” says Fortson without obvious irony, “which means production costs are a third less than in Britain.”

Has Fortson not noticed that the climate here is rainy too? For centuries grass has provided us with healthy foods by sustainable methods. Sadly farmers have got into the habit of using animals to mop up a damaging wheat surplus. Suddenly grain prices have spiked on global markets as soft commodities are apt to do. And we’re all having to pay up. Welcome to casino agriculture.

In an animal feeding trial reported in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology, rats fed on Roundup-tolerant GM maize developed tumors and multiple organ damage leading to premature death. Equally alarming, rats exposed to the weed-killer Roundup at levels currently allowed in the US developed similar symptoms.

Dr Michael Antoniou, molecular biologist at Kings College, London, commented: “This is the most thorough research ever published  into the health effects of GM food crops and the herbicide Roundup on rats. It shows an extraordinary number of tumors developing earlier and more aggressively – particularly in female animals. I am shocked by the extreme negative health impacts.”

A few days earlier Australian scientists warned that GM wheat – modified to produce less starch – may cause a human condition known Glycogen Storage Disease lV, resulting in enlarged liver, cirrhosis and failure to thrive. Children born with the disease usually die at around 5 years of age.

Molecular biologist Professor Jack Heinemann of New Zealand’s Canterbury University said the wheat – developed by CSIRO, Australia’s national scientific agency – incorporates a GM technology designed to suppress an enzyme producing starch. But there was strong evidence that the genetic modification can be passed to humans, suppressing the enzyme that produces glycogen, which is critical for life. The risk would not be removed by cooking.

Food safety campaigners are calling on CSIRO to release full details of its safety testing so independent scientists can review them. If it cannot quickly respond to these safety issues, the agency should halt all field trials and abandon its plans to start human feeding trials.

GM foods are clearly beset with risks. The scandal is that we don’t need them. After a comprehensive study of current farming methods, scientists around the world concluded that the world was quite capable of feeding a growing population without GM technology, especially if there’s a switch from chemical-dependent, high-input monocultures to ecological systems (IAASTD, 2008).

The current frenzy to get GM foods accepted around the world is driven chiefly by agribusiness corporations and the tame scientists who rely on them for research grants. Complicit in this dangerous delusion are farm policy-makers who appear to have little understanding of agriculture and the importance of soil health.

For examples of farming methods that are both safe and sustainable, check out the new films on Pasture Promise TV.

http://www.pasturepromise.tv/video.php?videoid=85

http://www.pasturepromise.tv/video.php?videoid=84

Take a look at this photo of a mobile milking unit shot this week in a field in the south of England. It’s simple, cheap and low-tech. The power source is a small, ageing tractor. Yet it has the potential to revolutionise dairy farming in Britain.

The machine is being developed by new farmer Nick Snelgar. With the help of a grant from the Prince’s Trust, he’s developing the mobile milking unit together with a milk processing plant compact enough to fit into a domestic double garage. The technology will allow would-be farmers to start up as dairy farmers. They can rent a few acres of grass, stock it with a handful of cows, and they’re in business.

Local milk

Instead of having to sell the milk for around 25p a litre to one of the giant dairy companies that currently control the industry, they can process the milk locally, then sell it direct for £1 a litre or more to homes, shops and cafés in their area. It means that for a modest capital outlay, youngsters can set up as dairy farmers and make decent returns from the start. And we consumers will get a grass-fed, local milk that’s better than anything we’ll find in the supermarket.

In developing his idea Nick Snelgar acknowledges the inspiration of farmer-engineer Arthur Hosier, who pioneered it 90 years ago. Back in the early 1920s farm prices crashed following the mini-boom that accompanied World War One. Dairy farms were particularly hard hit, with many going to the wall. But  Hosier came up with a revolutionary idea. He would keep his cows out on pasture permanently, so saving the heavy labour costs and disease risks associated with keeping them in sheds for part of the year.

Grass-fed milk

To make the system work he designed a mobile milking platform through which cows could be milked out in the field. It was equipped with generator, refrigeration plant and vacuum pipeline to take the milk direct from cow to churn without coming into contact with the air. Hosier’s friends thought he’d gone off his head when he bought a big stretch of Wiltshire down-land and covered it with cows at a time when many dairy farmers were going bust.

But the intrepid pioneer went on to make his fortune by selling quality milk direct to the public. Because his costs were low – and there was no middleman – his milk remained affordable to most people even in hard times. Out in the open air, his cows stayed remarkably free of disease – including TB which was rife among dairy herds of the time. His milk was certified so pure by the county medical authority that a lot was sent direct to London hospitals for patients were too sick to tolerate everyday milk.

Milk produced in the open-air

So successful was the system that by the early 1930s several hundred farmers had adopted “open-air dairying”. But with the coming of the Milk Marketing Board – guaranteeing a market for milk – farmers lost their entrepreneurial edge. Hosier was bought out by one of the big dairies and his revolutionary system forgotten. Today dairy farmers are again in dire straits and Nick Snelgar reckons its time to revive Hosier’s ground breaking idea.

Healthy milk doesn’t need chemical fertilizers

Hosier proved that you don’t need huge machines, chemical fertilizers, big sheds, large herds, or over-worked cows to produce nutritious milk. In fact most of these things so commonly used today act against the production of healthy milk. The latest science shows that the best milk comes from cows grazing fresh pasture in which there are clover plants and deep-rooting herbs. Nick Snelgar is convinced that – using Hosier’s system – milk can again be profitable to the farmer. The key is to sell direct to consumers and businesses, cutting out the big margins that go to supermarkets and the big dairy companies.

Back in the 1920s Hosier’s pioneering development led to a big expansion in dairy farming, even though most people were suffering from the economic slump. Hosier’s low-cost system made the best milk affordable even to the poor. Can Nick Snelgar’s reinvention of the system do the same today? Can good, healthy milk become local again? Make sure you return to this site to see how the story develops.

See Nick’s film on Pasture Promise TV, below:

http://pasturepromise.tv/video.php?videoid=32&section=Farming

For decades now – through good times and bad – UK dairy farmers have chosen a style of production that makes them uniquely vulnerable to volatile world markets. They’ve bred a high-maintenance cow – the high-yielding Holstein – that can’t thrive on the mainly-forage diets evolution adapted ruminants for. To support their chosen animal producers must now spend a sizeable part of their incomes on nitrate fertilizers, imported grain and protein crops, vet bills and replacement animals. The over-worked Holstein doesn’t live long.

If there are victims in the whole sorry saga it’s us, the consumers. Supermarket milk may seem cheap. But much of it is robbed of the health-protecting nutrients found in the milk of cows grazing pasture. At the same time our rivers and streams are polluted with nitrate fertilizers, our soils are degraded, and the biodiversity of our countryside is diminished. The winners in the system are the global corporates trading in feed grains, selling chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and peddling cow genetics.

Through all this the dairy industry maintains the fiction that milk produced this way is as good as milk from cows on pasture. The science of the last ten years shows this to be untrue. But still consumers are denied the facts to help them make a real choice. The industry refuses to separate and brand healthy, grass-fed milk. Now when plunging global cream prices expose the flaws in the dairy business model, Jay Rayner would have us believe that we’re to blame.

He might be interested to learn that there’s nothing new in UK farmers being exposed to global markets. Cheap food imports have been flooding into this country since the late 19^th century. In the 1920s cheap dairy products poured in from Europe and beyond. Then, as now, dairy companies were paying rock-bottom prices – if they bothered to collect the milk at all. Yet this was a period of huge expansion in British dairy farming.

Farmers responded to the crisis by cutting their dependence on bought-in feeds, relying instead on home-grown grass and forage. Many then cut out the dairies completely by setting up local retail rounds, supplying milk direct to the doorsteps of Britain. Even in pre-war austerity times there was a strong interest in healthy fresh foods like pasture-fed milk.

These same options are open to dairy farmers today. An increasing number are already switching to the more resilient model of grass-based production. Some like Tom Foot and Neil Grigg in Dorset are setting up brand new herds which will stay on grass all-year round. For a country like Britain – uniquely placed to grow grass, the cheapest and best feed for cows – it makes no sense to produce on the US model, with herds kept in sheds and fed on maize and soya.

No doubt the protesting farmers will see their pared back prices restored. But it would be good to see food writers like Jay Rayner taking an interest in the quality of milk in supermarkets and coffee chains rather than defending a destructive and uneconomic system of farming.

Since historic times grassland and grazing have been the basis of milk production in Britain. This was no accident. Grass is both the best and the cheapest feed for cows. And with its mild, damp climate, Britain is just about the best place in the world to grow it. Which means UK farmers could be producing the best milk in the world if they chose.

Sadly many have been persuaded to adopt US-style production systems with cows housed for much of the year and fed on cereal grains and soya. This is unhealthy for cows and unhealthy for people drinking the milk. It may make sense in America where there’s no great tradition of grass-based milk production. But for UK farmers to set up housed herds in competition with 10,000-cow US farms looks very much like an own-goal.

Even at current prices, pasture-based milk production is the most profitable. This is why many young farmers setting up new dairy farming businesses today are opting for grass-based production. Farmers like Tom Foot and Neil Grigg who have established a new Dorset dairy farm where the cows stay out on grass for much of the year. The yields per cow are relatively low, but the high quality milk is earning a good price at the local cheese factory.

With much of the US grain belt gripped by drought, maize and wheat prices are likely to surge this summer. This will make pasture-based production even more profitable than it is now. And it’ll mean more of the world’s food grains get fed to people who need it rather than to the livestock of rich western countries.

In London for a business meeting yesterday I called in at Starbucks in Islington for my morning coffee. As I sipped my cappuccino I wondered about the milk contained in it. I’d like to think it was nutrient-rich milk from pasture-fed cows, but I knew in my heart-of-hearts it was probably the other sort, the inferior commodity sort.

A couple of years back I had a phone call out-of-the-blue from the marketing director of Starbucks Europe. Having put high-quality Fairtrade coffee in all their stores, the company was now interested in introducing higher quality milk (many coffee chains spend more on milk than they do on coffee). I put the Starbucks exec in touch with a pasture-based dairy farmer in the West Country and subsequently met him to discuss milk sourcing.

I was happy to do this, but where was the UK dairy industry? What were they doing to reposition British milk as a high-value food rather than a low value commodity in competition with the world’s industrial-scale producers? Imagine that coffee shop in Islington having its walls adorned with timeless images of cows grazing lush British pastures. Imagine those same images in all the Starbucks stores across Britain – and the Costa stores and Café Nero too.

The supermarkets and processors have forgotten that the modern dairy industry was founded on grass-fed milk. In the early 1900s most city milk was produced from “town dairies”. It was pretty grim stuff, produced from cows kept in urban sheds and cellars and fed on brewery grains and other wastes. With the coming of the railways this dire product was replaced by fresh milk from cows grazing pastures in the British countryside.

It was this change which led to the great expansion in milk production, particularly between the wars when consumers – as now – were keenly interested in food and health. Recently the dairy industry has been trying to turn the clock back; taking cows off pasture and putting them back in sheds. They’ve even started feeding them the modern equivalent of brewery grains – the grains left over from the wasteful conversion of wheat into ethanol for biofuel.

Hopefully dairy farmers will soon seen their recent price cuts restored. But there’s a lesson here for all those friends who have supported them – the Women’s Institute, the Countryside Alliance, Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and the rest . To really flourish dairy farmers need to reposition their product in the market place. It’s not a cheap, global commodity. It’s a real and distinct British food – one we can all be proud of.

For more on grass-based dairy farming see our film on Pasture Promise TV:

http://www.pasturepromise.tv/video.php?videoid=34

The aim, says the UK-based John Innes Centre – recipient of the Gates largess – is to develop GM varieties of annual grain crops that “fix” their own nitrogen in the way that legume plants do. Poor farmers in Africa and elsewhere would be able to grow these crops without the need to buy costly chemical fertilizers. That’s the theory. But you don’t have to drill down deeply to find the argument’s bogus.

The fertility-building benefits of nitrogen-fixing legumes are already available. Around the world small-scale mixed farming systems incorporating legumes – and often grazing animals – allow farmers to grow plenty of food without relying on expensive bought-in fertilizers and chemicals. This is why the biggest ever study of global agriculture concluded that GM crops had little part to play in feeding a growing world population. (IAASTD, 2008).  Small-scale mixed farming can produce all the food we need.

Blowing millions on research into an un-needed technology is like blowing the household food budget on a 100-to-one outsider in the hope of winning enough to keep everyone living on caviar.

The whole GM food project is a clear demonstration of how farming in the west has been hijacked by large corporations. They’ve duped democratic countries into adopting high-input grain growing on the grounds that this represents “scientific agriculture.” In reality it’s a journey to nowhere. It wrecks soils, squanders water, degrades our food and pushes family farmers off the land. Those same agribusiness corporations now want the world to adopt GM crops, in part as a remedy to the very problems they themselves have created.

For someone with Bill Gates’s background it’s no surprise that he should be drawn to what looks like cutting edge technology. But GM can never feed the world. Only good farming can do that. Sadly good farming is something that holds no interest for geeks. What’s alarming is the geeks seem to have taken over agricultural research. We should all be very afraid about that.