Tag: Farming

Surviving The Great Reset: A helpful lesson from our Farmers on Preparing, Producing & Making Provision

If you really want to understand how the basics of providing for life work, look no further than the cycles of activity that take place on one of those farms that too many of us overlook for providing our milk:

  • The grass that grows in the early spring is cut in mid-late spring and early summer. The earlier cuts are turned into silage (fermented grass which in a process not unlike brewing, means that nutrients for the cows are increased). The later ones into hay (dried grass which you often see as very green looking bales).
  • Silage and Hay are stored over the summer and early autumn, whilst the cows go out and enjoy all of their fields, whilst grass continues to grow.
  • When the autumn and winter comes and the grass has stopped growing and the ground has become too muddy for the cows and their hooves, they move inside and under shelter, where they are fed with either their Hay or Silage, and sleep on beds made from the straw of cereal crops, so that they are all dry and warm.
  • The Farmer will have planned and made enough Silage and Hay the previous spring and summer, to make sure that the cows have more than enough to eat for the whole time that they have to stay inside.
  • Throughout this period, the herd of cows will be providing milk perhaps twice or even three times a day – that’s during spring, summer, autumn and winter, so that milk, cheese, yoghurt and anything else that is made with dairy products or ingredients of some kind can come and will continue to come your way.
  • The whole process is a cycle that goes round and round. It never stops or finishes, if the cows and we want to continue to eat.

The Farmers prepare, produce and make provision. That way, their cows are always fed, can always produce their milk, so that we can all be fed and not go hungry too.

Advertisement

Basic Clothing & Footwear

Perhaps one of the most challenging areas covering basic needs provision will be that of the supply of affordable shoes and clothing.

If there is one area of industry that has been outsourced to other Countries more than any other, it will surely be the production of clothes and shoes.

Whilst many today look scornfully on shops such as Sports Direct, the reality is that retailers of this type are today providing goods at a price that keep people on low incomes clothed.

The irony is that whilst cheap and cheerful, the price reflects the quality of the materials and the manufacturing. It is not uncommon for such items to require regular replacement and over time, for the customer to have paid out much more on multiple purchases of the same items at a lower cost, than it would have done over the same period IF they had been able to afford a better-quality version of the same thing.

Whilst cotton will always be imported to the UK as a raw material, wool and other materials are not. There will be a need to redevelop the British Textiles industry with a primary focus on the materials that we have readily available from our own production, or which can be supplied without significant reliance on international supply chains from our traditional trading partners.

Basic Foods

We do not need the wide range, nor the wide variety of foods that are available to us today, in order to survive.

In fact, the majority, if not all of the food that any of us require, to have a very healthy and nutritious diet, can be produced, provided or is already available to us all from not only within the UK, but in all likelihood from within the local areas around our homes.

The prospect of a ‘meat and two veg’ kind of lifestyle may sound abhorrent to many. But if you are hungry and have very little of anything, a good meal of anything will make you happy – if it is something that you can afford to buy and to prepare.

The thing that will surprise many, is that the issues we face with obesity, food allergies or food intolerances and the rise in many of the illnesses that people suffer as they go through life, are all related to the foods we eat and the way that we eat them. We have been actively encouraged to move away from very simple and straightforward foods, to highly processed versions that rely on many additional ingredients and that often involve massive supply chains in some way.

If food is grown or produced locally, and then only preparation which is strictly necessary is carried out locally too, the need for packaging, preservatives and further processing is VERY limited indeed.

We may not be living in a time where life can be put in a time machine and literally transported back to when we had a butcher, fishmonger, baker, saddler, blacksmith or any other specialist provider of the basic goods or services we need, located in shops or premises around the village green or in the Town Marketplace. But the reality of what we actually need AND what will be good for us all, will be a result that in 21st Century Terms, ends up being practically the same.

As quickly as possible and in order to alleviate the unnecessary pain that will come from delay, we need to refocus the priorities of food production to the shortest journey and shortest time possible ‘from farm to fork’.

Where possible, farms and farmers should be encouraged and supported to become able to make the foods and goods they produce available at either their own gate, or to work closely and collaboratively with other local producers and retailers through localised cooperative systems to ensure that any necessary supply chain is a local as it can be.

The technology and understanding exists for all ancillary services such as abattoirs and such like to exist at the highest standards possible on a much smaller and much more localised scale than ever before, and it is here that the real support for UK Farmers, Growers and the Fishing Industry from government and our communities should now be.

Rationing: A way of sharing the basics fairly, so there is enough for all

The days of unnecessary food production and manufacturing, prioritised only on the basis of repeat financial turnover and profit-making are done – even if that doesn’t appear to be the case right now.

As we experienced being the case in the early days and weeks after the first Covid Lockdown was called in March 2020, foods and goods such as flour, some vegetables, some fruits and toilet rolls are likely to be in short supply. The reality is that they will be the first of a growing and ultimately extensive list.

The rationing that will quickly become necessity, will also be a sign of things to come. Our industries, production and manufacturing will have to be redeveloped and reestablished to support UK self sufficiency in its most comprehensive and practical form.

Yes, rationing sounds horrible to anyone who has never been without or has never known what it is like to not be able to eat a meal, because the food that they need is something that they cannot afford.

Yet there are real people – possibly people that you or I pass in the street each and every day, who are already living what to you might see your own worst nightmare AND they are forced by the way that the system = works now to make the best of it. They literally have no choice but to accept it and do whatever the world requires of them to at least try and get by.

The silver lining of the situation that we all face, where the foods, goods and services that are essential to daily life will be rationed at least temporarily for all of us, is that it will provide us all with a real-life understanding of what we and therefore everyone needs as a basic standard in order to ‘just get by’.

This level, or the accumulation of the different basic foods, essential goods and services that an adult needs to be able to obtain in order to survive and maintain their exitance, is the benchmark level to which a basic full time or weekly wage should thereafter correspond and then be maintained, once the Great Correction is complete.

Support local shops, farmers and suppliers today so they are there for you when other options no longer exist

If things about this new life we are living make you feel uneasy, you have good reason to be concerned.

Beneath the veneer of slogans, the false security given by social distancing and the Government’s big cash handout given with a manufactured smile that is meant to tell us it’ll all be alright, trouble is brewing on an unprecedented scale not just across the UK, but the whole World throughout.

Policies like the Job Retention Scheme are creating a false perception of the condition the UK’s economy and businesses are in.

There is a genuine belief that things will just go back to how they were up until the 23rd of March, as if the Prime Minister has a great big UK On/Off switch.

Regrettably, this picture has been echoed by political ineptitude across the World and if tackling the Coronavirus Pandemic the way they have chosen to really was the war that politicians like Boris would like it pictured to be, in hindsight, the Lockdown and all the Social Distancing measures will become known as the phoney bit.

What is only clear to very few today, is there has been no comparable event in history that gives anyone an idea of how any of this can now actually work and anything remain the same.

The Lockdown has set off a chain reaction that will not only break the back of many small businesses and destroy the jobs that they provide, it is also setting off asymmetrical reactions and consequences in supply chains and big businesses not only in the UK but right across the World.

Because we have for so long taken for granted that we can drive to Sainsbury’s, Tesco or Morrisons and that our milk, eggs and sausages will have simply materialised on the shelves along with petrol at the garage to fill our cars, we have forgotten to look into the processes that get them there and just how complicated the supply chains are that make it look and feel like only simplicity is involved.

Greed on an unimaginable scale has meant big is best and global is even better. We don’t question the fragility of a system that had already become so dangerously convoluted before the crisis, simply because everything in these shops appears to be so cheap.

In the coming weeks and months, the appearance of everything going on as normal is going to crash spectacularly to the floor. The real damage that the Lockdown has created is likely to mean that the experience we had with there being no toilet rolls on the shelves at the end of March will expand to include many other ‘essential items’. Yet this time the shortage will be very real because the manufacturers and suppliers that the Supermarkets buy from can’t get the things they need for production, or they themselves will no longer exist.

Nothing is too big to fail, as many of the big companies whose only focus has been on profit are about to find out.

So if you want to be sure that you can put food on the table and get access to supplies and services that you genuinely need when things begin to get really hard as they soon will, buy whatever you need from your local shops, farms and suppliers of every kind today so that they are there and able to serve you with the goods and services you need at a price you can still afford when you have neither the option nor the choice.

Our Politicians sold out our Farming and Fishing Communities to appease other EU Members when we joined. It would be as contradictory as it would be treacherous for them to do so again when the British People Voted to Leave

 

img_1911-1

I’m proud to be British. To be part of the whole Community which populates the whole of this, our UK. To know that by striving to put what is in our best interests first, will allow us to contribute bigger, better and more considerate things to the World all around.

Yet I know that as businesses and as individuals we all have our part to play. That we are as a Nation, the sum of all our different parts. That if we purposefully neglect any type of business, industry, individual or group of people, we will disadvantage ourselves not in part or as a fraction, but collectively, together and in sum total as a whole.

It is shameful that our Politicians have reached a place where they do not see any need to do the same, and that they put self-interest before that of the people who directly elected them.

They have outsourced the responsibility with which they have been entrusted, instead looking upon their position of influence as something for their own use which they effectively own.

Two of the Communities that have rightly expected to have a different experience as a positive consequence of Brexit are those in and around Farming and Fishing.

Because British Agriculture and Fishing and the control of both our related resources and their markets were so prized by the Europeans – and particularly the French who as now were one of the most influential and key beneficiaries of the European Project – they were both key targets for industrial subjugation by the Michel Barniers and Guy Verhofstadts of the day.

As with Theresa May today, her predecessors of the time were so hell-bent upon winning what they perceived as being a beneficial relationship with the EU, that they were not only prepared to, but actively sold out and compromised these two World renowned and identifiably British Industries purely for what they wrongly told us would be an overall gain.

Joining the Common Market and becoming enslaved by the evolution and thereafter legitimised assimilation of everything which was once under our own control, through undemocratic rule making, implementation and administrative control creep of the European Project has left both UK Agriculture and UK Fishing as mere shadows of what they would otherwise now have been.

There was no gain for Farming and Fishing.

UK Farming and Fishing have only experienced a net loss.

Subsidies have removed competitiveness from smaller scale specialist farming and created a dependent culture through the industry whilst making it near impossible to build a genuinely profitable business either without the scales of economy or without diversifying businesses into a range of areas which either have to be uniquely niche or have the ability to buck the online retail trends.

The travesty we have witnessed where fields stand idle because it is more cost effective for farmers to do nothing with them, and huge swaths of land have become more useful to owners for leisure rather than production has hurt our farmers, but the Country too. And it is clearly no accident that as a result of the requirements of EU Membership, we could not be further away from self-sufficiently as a Nation, if national emergency were to require that of the UK too.

Our Fishing rights were always prized by all the European Countries who have their own Fleets too and the EU must have thought all of it’s Christmases had arrived all at once, the day that an out of touch politician ceded those Rights and with them access to all of our Fishing, leaving greed on the part of Foreign Powers to lead to overfishing and abuse of our Fishing Stocks, without us having any ability to influence or bring a halt to this very unwelcome tide.

Many of our trawlers were simply scrapped to adhere to the EU’s implementation of quotas, where the idea of balance between 28 nations is to share out access to resources and markets. We are one, they are twenty seven. When we have great things which we give away to be shared, the point of balance move not towards the one and to a point which is not difficult to picture. Is this fair? You decide.

Within both industries and despite the buy-offs from The EU, which have ironically only ever been our own money, repackaged and sold as a form of benevolence which would otherwise be denied, Farming and Fishing communities up and down the United Kingdom votes Leave and instructed Politicuans to bring back their futures, like all of ours, to the determination of our own democratically elected politicians. They rejected The EU, it’s autocracy and inherent self-interest and said we have a much better future ahead.

Yet as Remsiners have taken ever step possible and used every opportunity possible to overturn the democratic will of the people and that which our farming and fishing communities displayed, they have continued to overlook and ignore the realities of the power and potential benefits that all of our businesses, industries, people and communities hold.

These lacklustre politicians want to sell us out yet again, completely oblivious to the many great worlds we have throughout the UK, dismissing the validity of anything they do not understand and attempting to create an even closer union with the EU whilst telling us they are delivering the will of the people with the assumption that what they say will be taken as being the truth, whilst the truth itself can from the safety of London always be cleverly denied.

Feeding the UK is a vital part of our future. We must prioritise UK Agriculture and Fishing once again and dismiss these destructive EU systems which have never benefitted any of us in the UK in any meaningful way. We know they aren’t good for us because we’ve had decades of them being tried.

Image thanks to the times.co.uk