Whilst I may not be following or even have spoken to as many of them as I might like, I have been watching the problems that UK Farmers are now experiencing as they have unfolded, since way before the first openly anti-UK Farming Budget in October 2024.
As the latest blows have landed, with SFI Payments abruptly ended, more talk of lab grown meat on supermarket shelves and the suggestion that some Farmers could now be required to sell land for less than market value, it is not difficult to understand why families with farming businesses are questioning their future like never before.
Whilst the fear, frustration and anger within the community is becoming clear for most from outside farming and its allied industries who understand the real value of traditional food production within the food chain, I find myself feeling numb.
Not because of any indifference to what the Farmers are experiencing. But because there is a direction of travel at work within what is now a growing crisis for British Agriculture that many Farmers still refuse to accept and open their minds to working around. Despite the growing trail of evidence and the most recent list of events that have now broken into the open, after everything previously having been manipulatively hidden in plain sight.
Many people, including business leaders and politicians, as well as farmers themselves, genuinely believe that government and the public sector are there to serve the public interest. That they will always deliver against the requirements of what most of us would recognise as being the public good.
But the government and the public sector aren’t there for the public good. Anymore.
Government and the public sector haven’t been there for the public good, for a very long time. And certainly not since the early 1970’s, when at least some will be able to recognise the beginning of a chronology of events that has slowly but surely caused havoc across communities and industries alike – and particularly for UK farmers.
If you can step back, see the history and impact of the European Union and the role that it has played in supporting globalisation; then consider the added political dimensions, set against the practical implementation of neoliberal economic policy across the West, which basically meant that the existence of money and the value that we attribute to it all boils down to what politicians’ and bankers say (or rather agree behind closed doors), you may be able to begin picking out at least some of the milestones that are leading towards an imminent fall or collapse. Not just for UK farming, but everything that the UK or Great Britain once was.
A general appreciation or overview of the wider context under which politicians are now operating is necessary to understand what successive governments have been doing and what the next ones will almost certainly do. Up to the point where the system they have been steadily destroying breathes its last breath and everything we know could be in an inescapable mess. Whenever that might be.
Regrettably, it’s much more than just being a case of managed decline. We all need to recognise that whatever the establishment has in mind, farms and independent food production do not have a place within the agenda they are working with.
When we can also then accept that the advocacy organisations that we have believed to be there to serve the best interests of the industries and sectors that they supposedly represent, have instead become no better than being licensed franchises of the establishment, because they work on the basis that the relationship with public officials and politicians is more important than anything else, it can be seen that farmers are today, effectively on their own.
Over a year ago, when the Red Tractor question came into daylight for what now feels like a very short period of time, I wrote and published Food From Farms Guaranteed (3FG).
Food From Farms Guaranteed is a suggestion or proposal for how farmers across the UK could begin to rethink, reimagine and rework the question of quality standards within the UK food chain and use it as the doorway of opportunity to reclaim control of everything that UK Agriculture should never EVER have lost control of. Whilst at the same time taking steps towards giving the UK population back the genuine levels of Food Security that an island nation like ours ALWAYS needs.
To read a copy of Food From Farms Guaranteed, please click and follow the links below.
Adam Tugwell 
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