 | | | |  | | Thursday 8.30-9.00pm,
Sunday 9.30-10.00pm (rpt) | | | | Programme details | 11 September 2008 |
| | |  | | |  | | | | | |  | About this programme by Peter Day
Used to be a country boy. Lived in small market towns in Lincolnshire. Joined the Young Farmers; learnt how to judge sheep and cows for competitions (you turn the sheep upside down to look for worms. Not the cows, though).
But the best thing of all about living in or close to the country was walking over farms with the farmer. My father was a rural bank manager and he used to take me along to see clients. So on a long summer evening we would walk out across the home paddock and then into the fields ... big ones in Lincolnshire.
And of course the farmer would know every inch of his land; the place where a WW2 bomber had jettisoned its bombs before crash landing at a nearby airport, for example, where the disturbance to the earth showed up under the plough 20 years later.
(Years later in Holland a polder farmer showed me where a 16th century ship had sunk when his now reclaimed land was still at the bottom of the Zuider Zee.)
This intimacy with the land was both impressive and intimidating, a craft one was locked out of by not being born into it. Farmers owned their land and prospered along with it in the 1950s and 60s.
They inherited their chilly farmhouses and went on living in them, went on farming the land that had been in the family for generations. Fine way of life, but a trap : not much choice of occupation, big reliance on British, then world, commodity prices.
Only a few Lincolnshire farmers had then got entrepreneurial, though one of the bank’s customers had made a killing in 1940 by putting in a canning line when everyone else had gone off to war.
All this was 50 years ago, before fens farmers in pancake flat southern Lincolnshire started packing their own salad crops for supermarkets, and learnt how to add value to their crops via the magic of processing and logistics.
But for this week’s harvest festival edition of In Business I steered clear of Lincolnshire and ended up in North Yorkshire. The farmers I met in Thirsk Livestock Market were rather similar to the ones of 50 years ago, still feeling trapped on their inheritance by tradition and outside influences : the weather, market prices, the variances of EU farm policy on the subsidies that keep many of them alive.
But on a rare sunshiny afternoon we watched the wheat coming in on some of the 10,000 acres farmed by the JSR Farming Group. It’s a grownup agricultural business celebrating its 50th anniversary with a rather rare publication: “Stoneground”. It’s a professionally written history of the group, based on the 600-page Omnium Gatherum which the energetic founder, the late John Rymer, set down for his eighteen grandchildren. Fascinating.
John’s son Tim is now chairman of JSR, a farming business which has migrated into becoming an important producer of well-bred pigs for world markets ... well semen, if not the whole pig.
He told me not so much about the pressure on farmers but the changes still needed: larger and more efficient farms, a full use of technology (including genetically modified crops) and an increase in government funded research to enable farmers to throw off the subsidies most of them have had for 60 years ... a lifetime.
But as I experienced so clearly as I walked over the land back in the 1950s, farming is still a way of life, and that complicates matters. For better or for worse.
| | | Contributors:
Philip Huxtable,
Technical Director, JSR Farming Group
Carmen Suarez,
Chief Economist, National Farmers’ Union
Tim Lang,
Professor Food Policy, City University
Sean Rickard,
Cranfield School of Management
Tony Thompson,
Auctioneer Thirsk Livestock Market
Richard Heptonstall,
Farmer, North Yorkshire
Mel Verity,
Farmer, North Yorkshire
Alwyn Ellis,
Farmer, North Wales
Rhys Owen,
Head Agriculture and Conservation, Snowdonia National Park
Robert Campbell,
R-Oil
John Barratt,
Pig Producer
Tim Rymer,
Chairman JSR Farming Group
| | | About In Business
We try to make ear-grabbing programmes about the whole world of work, public and private, from vast corporations to modest volunteers.
In Business is all about change. New ways of work and new technologies are challenging most of the assumptions by which organisations have been run for the last 100 years. We try to report on ideas coming over the horizon, just before they start being talked about. We hope it is an exhilarating ride.
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