So, this is a statement that will need some more thought. Surely it’s the case that every business is run to make money, isn’t it?
On the face of it, the argument that all businesses exist to make a profit is very sound. However, it is only sound because of the way that the world currently works and how we think, placing money at the heart of everything. Instead of prioritising the real reasons that any business exists, which are the products or the services that they provide to customers (or end users).
We can take this thought further. The real reason for providing those goods or services are to help, support or enable people to live, in whatever way that product or service will help those people to do so.
At risk of stating what should be obvious to everyone but actually isn’t, UK Agriculture, Food Production and UK Farms are about or should be about providing the UK population with a secure, accessible, ongoing supply of healthy, nutritional basic or essential foods. And they should do this collectively on the basis of providing the UK Population with the widest variety that is available to us from being grown, ideally as local to the end user as possible, but at the very least, from somewhere from within the geography of the nation state that we all share.
I don’t know a farmer who isn’t passionate about what they do.
Farming isn’t just a business. Farming is a vocation and lifestyle choice for all those who are genuinely committed to the industry, in what I will suggest is a healthy way.
However, as we have moved further and further away from subsistence farming the scale of risk has grown at the same pace as the commitment to production growth.
It has naturally followed that the power that Farmers and Food Producers in the UK once had, has progressively been surrendered to whoever will guarantee the greatest longevity of income. Even though it has now been arguably many years since such guarantees have also offered anything like what we would likely agree to be viable prices.
One of the reasons that Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon Prime has been such a good champion for UK Farmers is that it has lifted the lid on just how precarious Farming in the UK has now become. Yet few Farmers have the opportunity to do TV work or lean on the marketing power of celebrity to make a new farm shop or a brewery buy-in an instant hit.
The reality is that for many Farmers, it has been the culture of payments and subsidies that have taken over everything in Agriculture, alongside the ‘deals with the devil’ that have been made with traders and supermarkets, that are the only reason that what should be ridiculously successful food producing businesses stay afloat.
It is impossible for Farmers to stand still at a static or subsistence level as it once was, as ‘growth’ and therefore growing ‘turnover’ is the only way that earnings can be kept static.
The alternative for many being either to sell up or go broke.
Farmers, Food Producers and the entire UK Agricultural Industry are vulnerable to whatever the supermarkets, retailers, traders and the establishment demands of them next. Because they have surrendered their power to money, and forgotten how to do what they really do best.
Current thinking and every message that we hear tells us that big and bigger are the only way that things can now go. That ‘growth’ equals progress. Yet none of this is in any way true.
The future of Farming is the return to being a predominantly local, community-focused industry with emphasis on the production of foods and goods that local people need. Not what some want and only they can afford.
I realise that the immediate argument that will come back from many farmers who are thinking about the situation that they are really now in, will be that the infrastructure, support networks and governance (laws, rules and regulations) simply don’t exist to make anything like this work without financial support, and that just this factor alone, before anything like the economies of scale are considered, make any such move one that would be impossible to work.
It certainly looks that way. But without UK Farmers, Food Producers and Agriculturally aligned industries taking back their own power by taking those risks necessary for themselves now, the reality is that within perhaps only a few years, Farming as we recognise it in the UK today, will simply no longer exist.
Adam Tugwell 
2 thoughts on “The priority of Farmers today is money. But farms cannot run profitably with profit being the priority anymore”