Farm Diary

WITH all the chaos in the financial world, I'm glad that I'm a farmer! With a financial system that has served everyone very well for the last sixty years or so, it was inevitable that there would be a 'correction'; just as it was pretty clear that more and more we were collectively living beyond our means.

When a country which has a population the size of Coventry springs to prominence and owns half the high street here, it should have been obvious. No one had heard of Reykjavik until President Reagan met Gorbachov there in the early eighties!

What has this to do with farming? Quite a lot actually; people need to eat whatever the economy is doing, and as we are re-evaluating what our priorities should be, I would suggest food comes near the top.

Farmers and agricultural businesses will find that borrowing money is now going to be very much more difficult and as investment is especially important on farms to meet stringent new environmental legislation, there could be problems, especially for tenant farmers.

Confidence will be affected, and as confidence is already fragile, the will to invest and take risks is not so apparent. Indeed, with the country now very short of milk (September figures a million litres a day below 2007), more factory closures are likely as processors find themselves in all sorts of trouble.

With volatility in world and European commodity markets, methods of minimising huge price swings need to be introduced, or more farmers will leave the industry as they fail to cope with the 'low's', after missing out on the high prices during the 'high's'.

Dairy farming is long term, with investments needed for the next twenty years for those who need to invest for the future.

For full feature see West Sussex Gazette October 15