When the fun goes out of farming

John Spence and his wife farm 647ha, all of which is in arable production.

10-08-2009 | Sandra Taylor

Northumbrian farmer John Spence does not have much to be optimistic about.

Two years ago he had to sell his dairy herd because it was making a loss and like other farmers in the UK, his arable farming operation in the northeast of England is coming under intense scrutiny from the environmental movement.

Spraying his crops is becoming increasingly difficult. The day a group of New Zealand farmers visited his operation he was watched by someone in a car as he completed the final rounds. He says the breeze was just starting to get up as he was completing the job and he was expecting a phone call or a letter complaining about his behaviour.

A recent attempt to fix a leaking water pipe came to a halt when someone from a government department tapped him on the shoulder. As Spence farms near Hadrian's Wall, he was told he needed a licence to dig a hole to fix the leak and an archaeologist would need to watch. Six months later he is still waiting for the licence to dig and the water pipe continues to leak.

This country, he says, is too interested in the past.

Spence says a lot of academics have moved to the countryside and have suddenly become aware of what farmers are doing and telling them how to run their businesses.

"What I don't understand is how the taxpayer is going to pay for all the non-productive people running around the countryside and stopping people who are productive."

He believes it will take food shortages before people wake up to the fact that the world needs food and he doesn't expect that to happen in his lifetime.

Spence and his wife farm 647ha, all of which is in arable production.

Most of the cereals grown go into Scotland for distilling, although any that doesn't make the grade is sold for feed, either in the EU or Saudi Arabia.

Break crops include oil seed rape, peas and beans (either for animal feed or human consumption in the Middle East).

Wheat crops yield around 1.6t/ha but there is uncertainty around wheat prices for this coming harvest; about three million tonnes of wheat from last year is in storage around the UK.

This year the harvest is expected to be poor, but prices remain depressed because of this stockpile.

Spence admits to being highly subsidised. Along with his Single Farm Payment (SFP) which amounts to £120,000 (NZ$300,000), he is also paid for environmental protection including leaving 6m strips of uncultivated "species rich" ground around crops, maintaining old farm buildings and tree planting.

In the past he has tried to run his business at a profit without the SFP, but this has been impossible in the past two years.

Spence says he tries to run his operation on a shoestring with local contractors doing all the crop establishment and harvesting while he and another labour unit do the spraying and fertilising.

The contractors he uses are two brothers. With an eye to succession, Spence has formed a business relationship with them. At this stage his two teenage sons have shown little interest in the farm.

Without the dairy cows Spence says he doesn't feel like a real farmer, but he was realistic enough to know his operation was not sustainable.

We were, he says, getting 17p/litre yet it was costing 20p/litre to produce.

Being in a relatively low annual rainfall area of 71cm, grass was difficult to grow so they relied heavily on bought-in feed to maintain production.

He had invested heavily in the dairy operation, rebuilding the herd after being hit by Foot and Mouth disease in 2001. Spence believed that being in a high population area there would always be demand for milk, but he had not banked on fresh milk being imported from the EU.

Today only 22 dairy herds remain in Northumberland, yet Newcastle alone has a population of over one million people.

Spence believes dairy farmers need to take some of the blame for the decline of their industry because after the disestablishment of the Milk Marketing Board in the 1990s, farmers failed to form strong co-ops. Milk buyers encouraged the fragmentation of the industry which resulted in falling returns to farmers.

There was a slight reprieve two years ago, but returns are now falling again.

He feels farmers now have no strength in the market, unlike the French and Dutch who have fantastic co-ops.

Spence says he has had some great years in agriculture, but he feels the fun has gone.

He had always thought that by complying with quality assurance, bureaucracy and traceability requirements they would have an edge in the market, but this has not been the case because supermarkets are primarily buying on price.

"They treat us very badly."

Sandra Taylor travelled to the United Kingdon and Ireland with the travel company CR McPhail.

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