Responding to Linlithgow’s insistence on the need for market data to be available on a regular basis, a senior MAF official, Mr RJ Thomson, submitted a more detailed version of the government’s reservations over broadcasting raw price data without a standardised format or structure. Thomson told the commission that MAF was working on a “comparative index” that would somehow make sense of wholesale and retail price movements. It couldn’t be done in the 1920s and I’m not convinced we could do it in 2025. Take the example of a pig producer with slaughter weight bacon pig to sell in 1925. The creature is sold to a curer, who kills the animal and splits it into two sides of bacon. So far we have two mirror image halves of the same animal. One side of bacon goes to a Drury Lane emporium, the other to a Tyneside grocer on the east coast. The cuts that are taken off a London side of bacon, sold in a well-to-do part of London will earn more than the side of bacon shipped to Newcastle, even when the higher shipping costs are factored in. It is so predictable, but illogical, and index numbers won’t explain it.
It is not difficult to spot a flaw in M AF’s argument: the cumulative effect of the changes made at each stage are not counted as part of the process. Is this the only structural flaw?
It is easy to make a case for raising insects as a food crop, the farming industry done this sort of thing all the time for some pretty unsavoury byproducts. However, it is hard to persuade western consumers that it could be cool to include insects in their daily diet. In parts of the world where insects are on the menu, the trade is a local business, more local loop than long haul. Ironically, increasingly affluent countries such as China are pushing up their meat consumption and cutting back on traditional specialities.
Writing in Sustainable Production and Consumption 49, Dustin Crummett notes a lack of food industry research into plant or insect products that might challenge meat in the weekly shop. The head of the insect institute, Crummett draws on philosophy and religion for a lot of his work: but his disappointment is unmistakeable.
His frustration arises from the difficulty of making one meal ingredient replace another. His argument is simple: lower resource ingredients mean less costly food. However, the additional habitat requirements and changing user profile can add costs that were once disregarded by economists. Counting a price calculation differently does not necessarily mean something costs less, it just costs differently.
This diagram from a US army manual issued in 1916 shows the standard loading for a pack animal.
It is time to review how draft animals are connected to their loads. The simplest example would be a pack horse or a mule, in the days when mule trains carried clay to pottery workshops. The Devon clay that was transported this way earned the name of ball clay, since it was shaped into large balls and carried in a double bag carried on the animal’s back, where a saddle might otherwise have gone. Pack animals are often quite light, enabling them to cross rugged terrain, where roads were not available. It is important to keep a regularly updated note of a draft animal’s weight, taking care not to expect them to carry more than 15-20% of their current weight.
Take a half ton horse, hitch it up to loaded lighter, and you’re off!
Carts redistribute a load, but slowing down or stopping can be more demanding, particularly when going downhill. The most efficient means of transport, particularly for heavy consignments such as building supplies, is the canal barge. This can be hauled by a (large) single horse, even when loaded with several tonnes of goods.
The relentless development of machine guns and heavy artillery from the turn of the twentieth century raised the stakes of warfare in previously unimaginable ways. Just as there is a case to argue for a wider interpretation of margins, to reflect a product’s costs and value to the economy, there is also a case to be made for revising the criteria by which these items are judged to be of use. Agriculture brings together a number of inseparable variables just to survive, let alone be profitable, making complex trade-offs on the way. Take animals, for instance.
From conception to weaning successive generations of pigs, producers face a steady pull on their resources. In the case of pigs, there will be little prospect of selling from a new litter until the new arrivals can leave their mothers’ sides and feed independently. Once this milestone has been passed, options will become available for breeders.
Animals that are to be raised for slaughter will have a target slaughter weight, somewhere around 100kg for pigs. Any heavier than that and the earning potential will drop steadily, as more feed is consumed and overheads rise. This brings us to a vital distinction that is easily overlooked. The pig producer will generally earn average money by the standards of the sector if the young animals wean successfully and go on to gain a hundred grams per day for the next six months. The market is front-end loaded and is run like clockwork down to the final 24 hours.
The opposite is true for draft animals, which earn their keep by staying alive and working to whatever age their breed can manage. The lead times are longer, the resources needed are greater and in the early 20th century users like the British army were buying extensively for matched pairs and teams of six and more. It is quite clear that by sending draft animals off to battlefields, their value will be turned into an increasingly expensive remounting cycle of the military’s own making, in which the animals can perish within hours of arriving behind the lines. Even if brood mares are kept away from warfare, the early years of the twentieth century effectively wrote a series of blank cheques for the makers of commercial motors and trucks, to fill the haulage gap caused by modern warfare.
When the first world war started in 1914, the world’s armies were accustomed to seeing imposing troops on horseback leading charges across open ground and engaging in the thick of the action. By the end of the battle of Verdun, in December 1916, the former cavalry units were to be found changing their sabres for machine guns and driving armoured vehicles instead of riding horses.
Verdun marked a pivotal point in the first world war, claiming so many lives that it was known as the “meat grinder”. To this day, farmers are still digging up horseshoes from the former battlefield. After decades of developing increasingly powerful artillery and with the arrival of mechanised warfare, the twentieth century battlefield witnessed the massacre of draft animals on a scale never previously imagined.
The British Army did not appreciate just how few horses it could afford to lose. Moving artillery pieces, carrying munitions to gun emplacements, at the turn of the century, modern armies could not operate without horses. From the front line to the billets, draft animals were ever-present. The first world war was deadly: on a particularly bad day, over 7,000 were killed in a conflict that lasted for years and claimed millions of equine lives around the world. Of these, nearly half a million were attached to the British army in some way. Faced with the eye-watering costs of procuring and transporting horses, the government set up the British army veterinary corps. Its skilled veterinary surgeons treated nearly three quarters of a million draft animals.
Despite going to war with extra horses to keep the army supplied, the German government had problems procuring fodder and some animals starved to death. Importing horse-related items was particularly difficult since traders were refusing to take German currency.
Around the world, the heavy losses of working horses created strong demand for alternative transport capacity. In Britain, the War Office pushed up demand for commercial vehicles by dumping 6,000 war surplus lorries and trucks on the market at bargain prices. It is hard to gauge the full extent of wartime losses and their impact on the wider economy, but many businesses that used to be horse-based changed to offer engineering and driving skills.
Horses were among the first animals to be domesticated during millennia of prehistory. You can be sure that the energy needed to build the monuments and cities of antiquity came from horses, mules and donkeys, if it did not come from slaves.
A cornerstone of Urban Food Chains crystallised this evening. Fundamental to the structure of a supply chain is the basic unit of transport and energy. Taking three major themes of this blog, let’s unpack the topic. First, before the dawn of time, generations of early agriculturists worked for millennia to domesticate species and crops that we would recognise today. They also tamed fire, an evolutionary trump card. Their lasting achievement was to breed forerunners of today’s strategic ungulates: cows, pigs, sheep and horses. Fast forward to the early twentieth century, when the first world war slaughtered millions of draft animals.
This high tech cull of horses, in particular, damaged the bedrock of the agricultural world. Livestock numbers would take decades to restore, if indeed there was either the economic resources or the political will to do so. The first world war was a reset that made way for change on a global scale, for humans and animals alike. Thousands of years spent establishing stable working relationships turned to dust in the heat of battle.
The penny dropped when I read Christopher Turnor, an author of the time, complaining that the UK had too many pastures, they were blocking food production. The origins of all this empty grassland are to be found in Edwardian England, but the wartime cull of draft animals accelerated the trend. The rest is not so much history as a race to plug the economic gaps left by the ravages of war.
From the soaring concrete cliffs of Brussels there is an impending explosion of anger. The reason? Look at Charles Sharp’s impressive picture of a puffin, just about to enter the home burrow with a beak full of sand eels. It is the fish, not the bird, that is fanning the flames, by the way.
For all its comical looks, the puffin is an important indicator in the monitoring of the marine environment around the British Isles. Researchers are particularly interested in the fish stocks that support this distinctive seabird. The term sand eel is a generic label for a group of about 200 fish species that resemble eels but are not related. They burrow into sandy seabeds and hide from predators while keeping an eye out for their own lunch. Hard to catch in open water, they are easy to scoop up in a dredge, as Danish fishermen have done for centuries.
Puffins are far from being the only bird species to be tracked by scientists. It just happens to be the cutest one of the bunch. The puffins’ lunch, by the way, is at constant risk of damage from bottom trawling, that is to say beam trawls or dredgers and other devices. Scallops is one species to be caught in dredgers, while cod is a target species for many beam trawls.
Back in January this year, the UK government announced a ban on dredging for sand eels in UK-controlled Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). For the record, bottom trawling is allowed across 98% of the MPAs concerned, suggesting that the state of the seabed has not been a political priority for years. In the North Sea, with its sandy sea floors, there are still beam trawlers fishing demersal species and small number of Danish dredgers who, between them, hold about 90% of the 160,000 tonne sand eel fishing quota. (UK and EU total)
The origins of the Danish sand eel fishery go back to the soaring livestock holdings of the late nineteenth century, which set the Danes looking for cheap ways of feeding animals. Initially, small dredges were fitted to inshore boats, scaling up in the early twentieth century to purpose-built diesel powered vessels with an ever greater range. For some reason, as with a number of other fisheries, nobody imagined that the fish stocks would ever decline: until, that is, the catches started to drop. With growing numbers of animals on livestock holdings, the potential earnings from sand eels rose, as did the pressure on the fish stocks. Sand eels, along with other oily fish and suitable bycatch, are the ingredients of fishmeal, an industrial end product turned out in large quantities by refineries that earned a living clearing up after the high value fish processors in fishing ports.
In the early days of indoor livestock, fishmeal was added at two thirds to one third cereals. As researchers extended their knowledge of livestock nutrition, the proportion of fishmeal was reduced, making animal feed more profitable or cheaper, depending on your involvement in the process. To ensure an illusion of sustainability for food production in the late twentieth century, the European Commission devised the Common Fisheries Policy, which used its budget to subsidise a rise in the European fishing industry’s tonnage and horsepower, ensuring an ever more unstable fishing industry.
Fast forward to 2024, and the European Commission is threatening to trigger a dispute procedure under the EU-UK Trade and Co-operation Agreement (TCA). The Commission is acting on behalf of Danish sand eel fishers with fishing vessels to maintain. If agreement is not reached by mid-June, the Commission can request a judgement on the UK’s action. While any hearings may be carried over into September, the European Commission is calling for an “evidence-based, proportionate and non-discriminatory” approach to protecting marine environments.
“The UK’s permanent closure of the sand eel fishery deprives EU vessels from fishing opportunities, but also impinges on basic commitments under the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement,” warned commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius. “Measures are already in place to protect this important species, including by setting catches below the scientific advised levels and closed areas for protecting seabirds,” he added. London responded, saying that DEFRA had not authorised any sand eel quota for British vessels for the past three years. Marine protection NGOs across Europe have launched a campaign to end bottom trawling, which is still allowed in 90% of the EU’s marine protected areas (MPAs). Last year Europe agreed to an EU Marine Action Plan that phases out bottom trawling by 2030. This has some way yet to go.
According to the European Market Observatory for Fisheries and Aquaculture Products (EUMOFA) the EU produces between 10% to 15% of the world’s fishmeal and fish oil output. Tonnages of EU fishmeal range from 370,000 tonnes and 520,000 tonnes, while fish oil ranges between 120,000 and 190,000 tonnes. Denmark accounts for nearly half the EU’s total output. In addition to sand eels, EU processors use small pelagics, such as sprats, whiting or herring, all regulated with quotas and topped up with trimmings from fish processors. EU demand for fishmeal has dropped in recent years and is currently hovering around 450,000 tonnes/year.
Sky News is currently streaming an overview of British farming (https://news.sky.com/story/it-keeps-me-awake-at-night-can-british-farming-survive-13132220) which raises a number of questions that have been dodged for years and are coming home to roost with a certain inevitability. They are as predictable as ever, as intractable as ever and demand answers as urgently as ever. The only certainty is that the farming sector faces a crisis which has been ignored for years and will no longer wait in an orderly queue.
The first thing that needs to be made clear at the outset is that there is no such creature as an average farmer. The Sky presentation is very careful to choose visually tame representatives of a sector that is universally misunderstood. Sky’s lead journalist on this reporting, the west of England and Wales correspondent Dan Whitehead, would doubtless agree that despite the rapidly falling numbers of farmers in Britain, there is no such creature as an “average” farmer anywhere in the world.
The industrial world develops and markets a range of specialist vehicles and technology for a sector that has as many solutions for its many technical challenges as it has practitioners. The general public, in Britain and further afield, has no problem synthesising a stereotype notion of a nonexistent rural world. In the process, any suggestion of a viable business model runs counter current to the town dweller’s vision of a rural idyll.
It would not be productive to imagine that rural businesses are complementary to industrial or urban economic structures. Nor can the transport and distribution networks that link urban consumers to an imagined rural hinterland ever ensure that each business gets what it needs in a timely manner.
A frequent town dweller’s notion of a farm is more like a zoo than a production unit. Go back a century or so to George Orwell’s Animal Farm and you encounter a group of anthropocentric livestock: hens, pigs, cattle and heavy horses. Truth to tell, if it ever existed, this diverse community of livestock was a casualty of the first world war. The two million British equine casualties had a greater impact on warfare and industry than the loss of several millions of military personnel or civilians killed in air raids elsewhere. British army officers were required to supply a horse’s front hoof when reporting an equine casualty, whereas they did not need to furnish any such grisly evidence for human casualties among their ranks.
The wartime massacre of draft horses was beyond the breeding capacity of the northern hemisphere and cleared the way for mechanisation in both rural hinterlands and metropolitan centres alike. The British army bought in horses from as far away as North America, but they were ill-suited to military requirements.
Both agriculture and industry have exhibited huge appetites for energy during the past two centuries. The combined effects of converting the plains of North America into a grain exporter on a continental scale. This was accompanied by the relentless westward advance of the railroads through the 1850s and 1860s, hauling wheat back to the east coast and shipping it on to Europe.
The age of steam put bread on the tables of starving cities. It may even have given urban populations a passing curiosity as to where food comes from and what sort of people might produce it. But the only people that ever had contact with producers and consumers were traders with a limited interest beyond crop forecasts and spot prices. It is hardly surprising that during the intervening decades, a parallel web of dreams fed on pictures in books and magazines should inhabit part of the cultural vacuum between town and country.
Dan Whitehead’s rural narrative assembles facets of the agricultural world as a kaleidoscope might do. He starts by talking to Welsh sheep producer Rhodri, who has seen a 40% cut in his income, now shorn of subsidy. He is worried that his school age son will not inherit the family farm.
Outdoor pork producer Jeff laments the supposed passing of the British pig industry. Like many British pig producers, he believes his European counterparts are subsidised as generously as they have ever been. He can’t go into a supermarket without spotting foreign meat: pork chops from Spain, chicken from Poland and Brazil. He can sum up Brexit in one word: “atrocious”. From his farm in Kent, Jeff drove a tractor up London for a city centre protest. Like many in the pig sector, he is adamant that breeders have been thrown under a bus by a government that doesn’t care. “There’s an unfairness in British agriculture,” he argues. Looking at the deals the UK government signed with Australia and New Zealand, he might have a point.
Nearby, fruit grower Tim has built up a strawberry business valued in tens of millions of pounds. He needs a workforce of 2000 to pick thousands of tonnes of strawberries. Most of his recruits are from EU member states. When the UK was in the single market, workers could move freely with no time limits. Now they are limited to six months and have to move on regardless of whether or not they are a net gain or a net drain on their employer. Tim is frustrated because he cannot negotiate prices for his crop from a solid position.
There are plenty of British pig producers who will argue that foreign pigmeat is hindering domestic producers, but the story is a little bit more subtle than that. If British producers could earn a living off the sales of pork loins, they would cheerfully do so. Since loins are used for roasting joints or bacon, there will always be buyers for this cut. This often leads to a situation whereby British loin are sold through for roasting joints. Meeting demand for bacon packers, there is a steady trade in pigs from Dutch and Danish units. These have been raised to British standards for decades and are effectively competing on a level field, even if their British counterparts see it differently. The key to staying in business is referred to as balancing the carcase, ensuring that every saleable part of the carcase is sold. Hams or gammons are straightforward to prepare for the retail market and represent a good return. What British pig breeders often overlook, however, is that they will routinely export forequarters to cutting halls in northern Europe, which have skilled workforces that make short work of the technically challenging forequarters. These are home to the animal’s powerful jaw muscles. If a pig bites your hand, count your fingers as soon as you’ve stemmed the bleeding.
British cheese exports to Canada will face duty of 245% next year, once the third country duty-free quota is exhausted. Some 95% of this quota is already taken by products arriving from Norway and Switzerland, leaving very little for shipments to any other third country.
This slap in the face for British cheesemakers comes as Canadian negotiators came amid talks on the implementation of the much-vaunted bilateral trade deal. Refusing to roll over previous extensions to zero percent duty available under former EU terms, the so-called cheese letters, the decision vapourises pre-Brexit claims of extensive growth in UK food exports. These will in fact be treated like any other third country products, in the absence from specific terms agreed during the framework negotiations. Last year, the UK exported cheese worth nearly GBP 19 million to Canada.
Hundreds of acres of cultivable farmland will be cleared to make way for houses as far as the eye can see. In the coming months, Mid Sussex District Council will hear applications from developers wanting to build 1500 houses between the villages of Ansty and Cuckfield. As well as residential properties, there will be shops and amenities in addition to a headline-grabbing 30% allocation of social housing. Whether or not the developments will ever release as much as 30% for social housing remains to be seen, but it needs to be there at the outset..
This major development plan faces problems, however. To begin with the new homes will generate additional demand for water in a part of the world where demand for water is already comparabl;e to desert regions.The loss of 250 acres of farmland is nothing short of disastrous: the UK cannot afford to throw away productive land.
