From the position where I am looking at everything UK Farmers and the supporting businesses and sectors around them now face, I regrettably believe that a collapse of UK Farming and our Food Chain is now inevitable.

The accelerating downward trajectory of UK Farming will not be stopped until events take over, or the majority of UK Farmers step back and see everything they face differently.

Quite a statement I know. Not least of all because it flies in the face of a great many names that the industry respects, whom I have no personal quarrel with.

Somewhat disconcertingly, despite the bubbles of different interests that exist across the industry; when it comes to the answers, solutions and whatever we can expect to happen next, everyone – other than perhaps just a few like me – is looking the very same way.

Expectation vs Reality

Farmers, Farmers membership and advocacy organisations and even No Farmers No Food expect the problems the industry has to be solved by the same people and organisations that not only caused them, but are accelerating the problems being experienced right now.

Few Farmers agree with what I have to say. Because those who are Farming today typically see Farming, the role of Farming and how Farming is being treated by industry and government in a very different way.

To be fair, I wouldn’t expect anything else. Farmers are far from being alone when it comes to the questions over what we know, what we believe and what is normal to expect from the businesses and organisations that we have relationships with and most importantly, the people that we elect.

However, it really shouldn’t be hard for anyone to stop, step back and remember that what we see and what is happening can be very different things.

Power of the political and financial kind has always been open to abuse. Many will have heard the expression ‘Give them bread and circuses’ that dates to Roman times and demonstrates how the public have always been ‘played’. So that those in power can reduce the risk to their position, no matter what might be going on.

Unfortunately, we are navigating a period of human history where manipulation in the forms of marketing, narratives and fear rolled out in many peculiar forms, is used very effectively to create a situation where any one of us can find ourselves questioning our own common sense and what we actually believe.

The internet, smart phones and the arrival of the most recent forms of Artificial Intelligence have made the problem all the more severe.

The reality that we do question what we can trust at least peripherally has the rather perverse outcome for many of making it even more likely that we will trust people and organisations, because of who they are and how their roles are presented to us, when we really shouldn’t be doing anything other than steering a wide berth from anything they say or compel us to do.

In real terms, this means that anyone, including Farmers, no matter how well educated or experienced, is likely to believe and accept as truth whatever those benefitting from whatever is happening to each and every Farm want us or that Farmer to believe.

And they sure don’t like it when anyone questions the validity of what they say and what is likely to just be a partial truth might be.

What is really ‘in play’ today?

The attack on UK Farming didn’t begin on 30^th October, when The Chancellor unveiled the assault on Inheritance Tax Relief on the generational transfer of working Family Farms.

What it did herald however, was the step of taking the war to destroy UK Food Production as we have known it, into the open. Instead of the whole thing being hidden in plain sight, as it has been for decades before.

They have done this:

Either because the politicians we have and those who advise or influence them are now confident enough that the industry no longer has the clout or leverage to stop them.

Or more likely, because they are now desperate to contain the threat of power being returned to the Farmers themselves.

(Because the whole system that has been working and undermining everything for greed, profit and control since the early 70’s has now reached a point where the economic system that underpins it could collapse, and they could lose their control at any time.)

The outcry from the general public over Farmers IHT has taken the political classes more than a little by surprise.

They believed that the accompanying narrative that ‘Farmers must pay their way like everyone else’ would very quickly resonate with the general public. Given that the left has always happily propagated myths like ‘You never see a poor Farmer’.

What the establishment didn’t expect was a predominantly visceral response from so many different people. Where instincts have told even those not consciously thinking about it that any attack on Farming isn’t about Farming. It’s actually an attack on our Food.

Is Farming really about self-interest or public interest?

Regrettably, this is where maintaining the momentum for supporting Farmers becomes tricky. Because many Farmers see their businesses as being all about income and profit. In a similar way, if not in the very same sense as the politicians do.

With what seems impeccable timing and within a month of the Budget announcement, an initiative landed on social media that informed anyone watching that a new methane-reducing feed supplement initiative is about to be launched and underway using Farms that are contracted into the corporate system.

The relationship between Farms and a processor suggests that this isn’t a matter of choice.

So, it didn’t come as any great surprise that the issues raised by the implications of ‘playing god with natural processes’ would immediately create a new division between those who ‘cannot’ say no to such ‘trials’, because of the financial implications of doing so, and those who see and are at least beginning to question the vein of commonality flowing through every attack on UK Farming.

The last minutes of a VERY long game

Whether its supermarket prices, chemical additive use required by processors, the freeing up of capital that invested in Land and Farms through new punitive taxes, the disintegrating financial support from government and the public sector, or the bureaucracy that has steadily transformed everything since our membership of the deliberately flawed Common Market and latterly The EU began, they all have a war on the ability of the UK  and more importantly our communities to run and thrive independently with Food in common at their very core.

In the world we are now being shoehorned into, Money talks and bullshit quite literally walks.

Food Production as we traditionally know it, is the antithesis of everything that those controlling our lives and businesses want and represent.

Who am I and why am I presenting a different understanding of the status quo?

I realise and understand why few can see or even agree with what I am saying here and what I write, speak and publish about Food, Farming and Food Security – amongst many other public policy related things.

Before 12 years in frontline politics, roles in professional charity leadership and years of being an entrepreneur and living the highs and traumatising lows of being in and around businesses, I began my career in farming – where I always had a strong affiliation with the Dairy Sector and made many friendships as a Young Farmer that I maintain to this day.

Farming and specifically Agri-contracting is a big thing within my wider family and beyond the proud heritage of my grandfather being a highly skilled wheelwright and pioneer in hydraulic farm trailer manufacturing, my great grandfather was a steam ploughman too.

My active interest in politics, or rather my driving belief in something better for everyone, in public service and for community working has been at the centre of so much of what I have done and what I still do.

That interest has taken me on a path that led me to appreciate how important the independence of local Food Chains to Our Future will now be. But also, to spend time completing a Postgraduate Certificate in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security at the Royal Ag, where my fears about the position and outlook of the industry and where it is being led were starkly confirmed and amplified.

The watershed UK Farming is now within

It is difficult for anyone thinking rationally or logically to believe the realities and mechanics of the position that Farming and the wider economy now find themselves in.

Not because of the expertise and knowledge that is there to be tapped into by those who need it suggests otherwise.

But because nothing that is happening to Farming, to people or in politics at any level across the UK as we know it today, is in any way that which it seems.

I’m sure that you will agree it is more than likely that anyone questioned would at least admit that they believe something is going very wrong. Even if they cannot or would not try to identify what that something is.

In the few days after the Budget bombshell was dropped, I began writing ‘Who Controls Our Food Controls Our Future’, in an attempt to open up the reality of what is happening and why within the UK Food Chain.

I did so in what does today feel like the forlorn hope that at least some of the people and businesses that I care so deeply about would at the very least conduct a review of what they currently believe to be true.

Within ‘Who Controls Our Food Controls Our Future’, I discussed the strange but nonetheless compelling ‘situational bias’ that is holding us back from looking at anything and everything differently to what we already know and do.

Because we have trapped ourselves with the belief that we can only trust the sources, systems, procedures, businesses, organisations and news channels that we already know.

It is this situational bias that today presents the greatest risk to the future of UK Farming and with it the UKs Food Security and our Food Supply.

All of which should quite rightly be placed at the heart and function of our Local Communities and everything that we know.

Sadly, most of us still believe that the mind of Politicians can be changed politically. When the game that they are playing and which the politicians and those who control them have framed, isn’t politics at all.

By continuing to engage in any way that shows deference to them and their system and their way of working, rather than just sticking to the basic level of adherence to the rules which the current way of working requires that we all respect, the power of change and control over our future remains firmly in their hands.

The option to save UK Farming and with it our Food Security and a future that will give us all much more besides exists.

But it is also a journey and process where there isn’t politics of the kind that Westminster controls involved.

Play it their way or play it our way.

The Food that UK Farmers can produce is a key part of Our Future. But the choice of whether Farms end up at the centre of that future, or die without anyone other than the politicians themselves knowing why is for Farmers to decide.

Like everything. Its all about the way that we think.