The priority of Farmers today is money. But farms cannot run profitably with profit being the priority anymore

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.

The need for a collaborative approach to the UK Farming and Food Security Problem

FOOD FROM FARMS GUARANTEED | Full Text

Who controls Our Food controls Our Future (Full Text)

It’s not just British Beef at stake: the future of U.K. food production and our food security is on a knife edge

So obsessed have we become with tech, the next big thing and the apparent ease with which we can get everything that we want, that we have forgotten what’s actually important in life. And when it comes to the basic essentials for life, there’s likely to be nothing more important than what we eat.

Just like the air that we breathe, it’s easy to take the supply of food for granted. Unless you are already one of the growing number of us who cannot always afford to buy enough.

Yet, it’s not even as simple as having access to the food that we genuinely need.

For half a century and probably more, the food we eat, the systems, the supply chains that provide it and the governance that is supposed to be there in place to maintain supplies of the things that meet our basic needs have been changed, manipulated and replaced from top to bottom and from left to right. For no better reason than to allow someone somewhere to make more and more money, without any regard for consequences or what for us – and for our farmers and growers, is already becoming a very high price.

To really grasp the horror story currently unfolding, there is need to have understanding of our political system, of human nature and how money runs the world and makes everything work. Not in the sense of how we see it or how we talk about it. But in the sense of how it all really is.

This past weekend saw Channel 4 give a platform to yet another attack on meat production and specifically beef farming, leaning very much upon the narrative that to tackle global warming, cutting down and ideally stopping eating meat is the best place for everyone to begin.

Never mind the queues of private jets lining up at the very same time to fly an ‘elite group’ of very rich people to a meeting where they can all work out plans to force more of their green rules on the public, all in the comfort of luxury hotel suites in Dubai.

Regrettably, many of the people gifted high profile platforms to speak passionately about the guilt people trying to eat a balanced diet should experience for eating properly have become the useful idiots of a very cynical strategy. One being pushed by people who were never elected to their roles and so recognise that to have control over everything, they must gain control of any basic essentials for life that everyone seeking to exert their own freedoms and will must automatically prioritise first.

What they forget to mention – even when these same people have responsibility for public health, is that good, healthy and nutritious food, as part of a balanced natural diet, is the essential building block and foundation of a happy life.

So, why would anyone of sound mind want to destroy or kick the foundation of good, healthy and nutritious diets away?

You can be sure that its not anything to do with the methane that animals, humans and just about every natural biological process produces. But it certainly has a lot to do with money and the two things that come with it: power and control.

Yes, it sounds like a conspiracy theory. But everything that the world is doing to itself today is thoroughly unsustainable.

The irony is that it is the same people, businesses and financial minds that created the false ‘need’ we have bought into who are responsible. On one hand, they have normalised unsustainable behaviour that has depleted the planets resources for no good reason. On the other they have systematically destroyed the governance and infrastructure that would make it easier for us to choose and adopt alternative ways of living that would be much healthier, affordable and sustainable too.

It is these same selfish and self-serving minds that are now determined to dictate the solutions to the problems they caused, so that we change and then behave in ways that will work better for them.

Food is power

Whilst it will make uncomfortable reading for farmers, including many great friends that I know, an entire industry populated by some of the most creative and entrepreneurial people imaginable has been reconditioned to accept grants, subsidies and ‘guaranteed’ contracts with big business and retailers as being ‘normal’. Instead of using their own freedom to do all the things that only British farmers and growers know how to do best.

The consequences of what is happening because of greed and self-interest are very serious indeed.

Yes, farms are going out of business and land is being taken out of production at an alarming rate. But the fact the food the U.K. grows or is capable of growing doesn’t often find itself into the mouths of the very people who live closest to the farms where it was grown is both part of the nightmarish reality that people in food poverty are suffering obesity and diabetes, and the accompanying reality that basic healthy fruit, veg and and high quality meat and fish that resembles its origin in an unadulterated form is now for many, simply too expensive to eat.

It shouldn’t be this way. Yet the travesty doesn’t end there.

Whilst we should all be able to depend on the public representatives that we have elected to put our health and the security of UK food production first, the reality we all have to face is that whether it’s the Conservatives this year, Labour or anyone else occupying No. 10 and the green benches to the right of the Speaker, next, none of these politicians have any idea of just how fragile the UK food supply is right now. Nor how serious even a few shortages of outside food supplies could make things get.

U.K. agriculture has reached the point where farmers, growers and the industries that are inextricably linked to U.K. food production will either choose to accept the risk of taking the steps necessary to facilitate its own revival or wait perhaps no more than just a couple of years and see everything that still exists swallowed up by some impractical idealists 2030-based agenda of some kind.

Farmers and the public are the two key stakeholders in U.K. food production and accompanying supply relationship. Yet neither farmers nor consumers have anything like the genuine say and influence that they should have.

It’s money, self interest and other people’s agendas at every step of the way.

The UKs Farmers shouldn’t have to lead the revolution of reality. But the reality is that a meaningful commitment to changing U.K. food supply and recreating the local infrastructure that would be able to make that work, will soon gather growing public support once the work has really begun.

Its then and only then that our hapless politicians will have no option but to follow.

Who controls Our Food controls Our Future (Full Text)

The need for a collaborative approach to the UK Farming and Food Security Problem

Food From Farms Guaranteed | Full Text

Its Not Just British Beef at Stake 5Dec23 PDF_Vers2_17Jul26 Download

The introduction of Price controls on foods, goods and services may become essential as this cost-of-living crisis develops. We would be fools to rule out rationing becoming necessary too

Yes, it does feel a bit like being the voice of doom and gloom as I write and produce videos about all the things that are going on and talk about what we can realistically expect as being likely to happen next.

The point is, that if someone like me can see what is happening and what is likely to happen next, the people we have elected as MPs have absolutely no excuse not to do so too.

In fact, our public representatives should be well ahead of the curve in both their horizon scanning and thinking than most.

Regrettably, they are not.

To be fair, the complexity of the growing problems and how each and every one of them interacts with the others is mind bogglingly scary to say the least.

Yet it is the culture of ‘let’s always take the easy option’ that exists, top to bottom within the British Political System, that has made the difficulties that are only just starting for us, significantly worse.

There are many people in this Country today who cannot afford to feed themselves, home themselves, clothe themselves, transport themselves or function normally in any way on the wages or income they have, without debt or benefits – or what is really a subsidy from the Government and therefore everyone else in some way.

Prices of the foods, goods and services that provide the basic essentials for life are spiralling out of control. Living at the standard we are experiencing even today, will soon become unaffordable for most.

Yet the complexities I mentioned above, all come back to just one thing: That the economic system we have today has been developed to benefit the self-interests of the few. That those driving it have continued to push prices up in the pursuit of ever-growing profits for as long as our stupid politicians have printed money and kept handing it out. When instead good politicians would have faced up to reality and dealt with the problems for wider society that have been caused by that same greedy few.

The Covid Pandemic has caused out of touch politicians and greedy business and financial leaders to overplay their hand.

In fact, the inflationary spiral they have created together is now out of reach of any form of control they possess. Indeed, the only actions our politicians have to address the issues are only serving to make the whole problem worse.

Events, or a coming chronology of them – which will have been caused by so many different profit-driven people with influence behaving in the same way, will combine to make basic food unaffordable where it is available. It will be absent from the supermarket and shop shelves where it would otherwise be not.

Food riots, as the system collapses and the old order makes way for a new one that will work for all will settle the mind of many. Especially the politicians that we have for the time that their waning power remains.

Greed, hoarding and any kind of self-driven prioritisation will have to go out of the window.

That will mean supermarket rationing as we experienced during the early Lockdowns. There will be an immediate need for Government to step in and fix prices along the entire food and essential goods supply chain, so that nobody can use this time of crisis to profit off the backs of us all.

Some of the more economically minded will baulk at the idea of any kind of price fixing, price regulation or price controls, because of its non-capitalist and non-market-friendly nature.

But the reality is that the epoch of easy money and making massive profits by exploiting the many to benefit the already bloated few, is now reaching its end.

A new system will emerge that will be fair to all. But it will not resemble anything that we’ve seen or experienced before.

As we walk the pathway to get there, it will be necessary to ensure that what we still have available – which will plenty for all of us without the influence or intervention of ongoing greed – will be made available fairly to all.

Money as we know it is likely to become only one of many different ways to make payment as change takes place. And it is therefore just as likely that rationing of the essentials that are available will also be necessary for everyone.

The times ahead may prove to be painful. But it’s the future which is possible for everyone once the change has been completed that we should look forward to.

The opportunities for a fair and just way of living, where everyone and everything matters are not just a pipe dream. They really exist and are there for us all.

After the pain, we have much happier times in store.

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The introduction of Price controls on foods 8Feb22 PDF_Vers2_24Aug26

Small business cannot afford the escalating wage growth that the Government has fuelled. As we face a financial crisis, the greed funnelling money out of everything without putting value back must finally be stopped

We are constantly hearing about staff shortages and wage rises. Yet very little is being said by anyone about the real reasons underpinning what is happening.

There is no discussion about what we are seeing now being just the beginning or thin end of what will be a very thick wedge. There is no mention of how dealing with the problems we are now facing will require a lot more leadership and creativity on the part of our politicians rather than barking commands at businesses and demanding that they just put wages up.

Our Politicians, the media and a lot of other people too are taking for granted that everything will just keep rolling on ‘like normal’, certain that after a few temporary changes to deal with Covid here and there, things will carry on as they always have and that in no time at all, everything will be back to where it all was before.

In many respects, it certainly feels like business as usual. The problems that are being talked about are being blamed on Brexit, just as they have been at every opportunity for the past 5 years. And has always been the case without us paying all that much attention, the journalists, commentators and pundits are seeing everything through the lens of their own view of everything. The difference this time being that there is so much starting to happen that even the myopic nature of their supposedly broad thinking dialogue is quickly being exposed for being anything other than joined-up.

Yet we are now on the first steps of an accelerating downward spiral. A negative trend created by politicians and the banks cooking the books and getting away with it for such a long time, they genuinely believe that they could continue without risk of ever reaching a place called stop.

To be fair to them, the political class is so detached from the realities that face people outside of Westminster, it would be futile to imagine that this political class can suddenly develop empathy and understanding as another crisis looms. They certainly didn’t do so for the Covid Pandemic, and there is some irony that it is because of the choices that they have made in response to that, what comes next is set to be considerably worse.

In the coming months and possibly years ahead, we are set to experience a financial crisis of a kind that the world has never seen before. We are in the early stages of the descent towards it right now, and that thin end of the wedge – the employee shortages, empty shelves and the price escalation that we are now starting to see is just a small taste of what is set to come.

Our political class looks at every problem as being one that can be solved with money or a financial solution. But this is the same approach that politicians have been applying now for decades and all it does is make things progressively worse.

As our political class look at every problem through this ‘money solves all problems’ lens that many of they forebears have got away with – not because it works, but because there has been an awful lot of luck involved – they now see the staffing shortages as one that can simply be solved by telling business to put wages up.

Large supermarkets and hauliers have responded to the growing crisis by putting drivers wages up. Problems in other industries have resulted in large high street names like Costa throwing pay rises at staff ostensibly for their effort during the Pandemic. But this is the first sign of a panic materialising too.

There is no shortage of people to do jobs and to go to work in this Country. But no amount of money will solve what is now an out of control problem when employees are treated so badly and there are no controls placed upon what it costs and how much it costs the average person in this Country to live.

The rapidly expanding gap between what people earn and what it costs to live is an immediate problem for sure. But price inflation is now so firmly fixed in the hands of private interests who have seen the amount of money that Governments have created over the past eighteen months, that they will continue pushing prices up until the point that the system breaks. That is, if some other event hasn’t led to this already and proven to be one of the many straws that could so easily now break the camels back.

Perhaps the most useful example to illustrate the point is the cost of transporting a shipping container with goods to the UK from the Far East. Shipping costs have risen 1500% in the past 18 months, not because the costs of moving these items have become markedly different, but because world events have given the shipping conglomerate an excuse; together they have a stranglehold and ultimately, they know that they just can.

This change has in no small part led to goods shortages and price rises. And if you have already seen the presents that you want to buy for your children or family this Christmas, you might be very sensible to grab them now, whilst you still can.

What the shipping companies have and are doing is representative of how commercial supply chains now work. But what makes the situation even worse is the number of agents, speculators and handlers who have built ‘high performing’ business models, simply by handling goods – perhaps just buying and then selling them on at a profit – without adding any kind of value to the transaction. The end result being the unfathomable and unexplainable rise in the cost of living – with the end users and even the businesses one step removed from the end of the supply chain – struggling to keep going because all of the fat has been taken many times over and the prices of goods are too unrealistically high for anyone to afford or absorb.

Big name companies, that have a stake in how our broken economic model now works, can easily afford to pay their staff better than the living wage. They could easily absorb the rises with little impact on their bottom line. Yet the greed that drives them means that they would see the imposition of raising pay as one that gives them the excuse to raise their prices too.

Smaller businesses – and by this I mean the bedrock of our real economy and the ones that make everything work – don’t have the means or the economic scale to raise wages and then either absorb the difference or then pass on the costs to their customers and other without there being a significant cost the businesses that they own or run.

In fact, the demands that hapless Ministers have made last week for businesses to start paying more could easily result in people losing their jobs and making what were otherwise great small businesses no longer viable because the staff they need just to fulfil their normal order book has become a luxury they cannot reasonably afford.

In a prefect world, those small businesses or the trade organisations that represent them would sit down with the people running this country and be listened to in a way that counts.

Sadly, because we have the political culture that we have, that scenario is not one that is likely to ever play out. The system is literally going to have to break before those who should have been aware of the impact of what they have been doing will be ready to take note. And when then they do, then problem will be that we have the same people in power and pretending to lead us who got us into this mess in the first place.

Like everything Government in this Country touches or legislates for, the financial and economic system needs massive and comprehensive reform.

Money does not solve problems in the way that politicians would like and the process of the fat getting ever fatter by inflicting pain on everyone else without being forced to face up to what they have been doing is now over.

Things will not return to how they were before the Covid Pandemic began.

Small business cannot afford escalating wage growth 20Sep21 PDF_Vers2_26Jul26 Download