Charity for North Wales farmers?

[Pale Rider]

Did anyone see the item on some telly program last night about an arable farmer from the eastern counties taking haylage and silage to North Wales.
Apparently, the bad weather has affected these farmers so badly they need this help.
On the face of it quite a nice gesture. Trouble is I can't help thinking about all the advantages there are associated with farming, subsidies and such, yet still they struggle.
On one or two shots of the farms you could see massive 4x4's, new tractors, quads, loaders. Does farming a few sheep and cattle really justify all this machinery?
I don't think I'd like the finance bill for some of these farmers.
Still a nice gesture from the barley baron part of the country.
I wonder if English tourists will benefit, and stop having the P taken in Welsh, when they're spending in the shops.

 

[Twinkley Lights]

Yes I saw this on the one show and thought that it was a really nice human gesture that might stop someone from going under. Said that some can't feed animals and kids which is tough if all your income is based on output from stock

 

[Pearlsasinger]

Trouble is I can't help thinking about all the advantages there are associated with farming, subsidies and such, yet still they struggle.

I guess you don't know the same tenant farmers that I know who live very much hand-to-mouth. The only advantage, I can think of, of farming round here is being your own boss. And subsidies or not, most of them seem to have to have a 2nd job to make ends meet.

 

[Sparkly Snowdrop]

You are welcome any winter to come and find out how hard it is being a hill farmer if you would like. Our subsidies total less than £2k per annum. We cannot afford large machinery, we do not even have a tractor! None of our neighbours have any machinery that is any newer than about 20 yrs old. Please tell me where all these farmers with new machinery and huge subsidies are because we might move there!

 

[Pearlsasinger]

Actually, I think the large machinery etc belonged to the farmers offering to help the Welsh hill farmers. The machinery seems far more suited to arable than sheep farming.

 

[Ancient Hacker]

Did anyone see the item on some telly program last night about an arable farmer from the eastern counties taking haylage and silage to North Wales.
Apparently, the bad weather has affected these farmers so badly they need this help.
On the face of it quite a nice gesture. Trouble is I can't help thinking about all the advantages there are associated with farming, subsidies and such, yet still they struggle.
On one or two shots of the farms you could see massive 4x4's, new tractors, quads, loaders. Does farming a few sheep and cattle really justify all this machinery?
I don't think I'd like the finance bill for some of these farmers.
Still a nice gesture from the barley baron part of the country.
I wonder if English tourists will benefit, and stop having the P taken in Welsh, when they're spending in the shops.

With respect, I think you'd adopt a different perspective if your food security is under threat. Farmers world wide are generally squeezed by the supermarket giants. And without all that machinery, the hay you need for your horses would have to hand-harvested using a scythe; probably cost 50 pounds for a small bale, then.

Sorry, but I do get frustrated when I see farmers being needlessly criticized. We are all utterly dependent upon the farming communities, wherever we are in the world, and so much is taken for granted; until one day you walk into the supermarket and there's no milk or tomatoes or whatever basic food you need every day.

 

[Missmac]

OP

As a welsh farmers daughter i find your post unspeakably offensive on many levels.

 

[Pale Rider]

Sorry if I've offended you Missmac, Perlsasinger the equipment I refer to is definatly from the hill farm.
I think the old 'food security' mantra is well and truely gone now. U boats are no threat anymore.
I was born and brought up on a Welsh hill farm, I milked cows after coming home from school then went to agricultural college so do have some idea about the life. My cousin owns a machinery dealership so I have a good idea what people are prepared to spend, or borrow to buy machinery.

 

[Alec Swan]

Pale Rider,

your opening post, and your subsequent effort to support it, are so wide of the mark, and would be considered as offensive, if those readers with an understanding of agriculture, actually took your thoughts seriously.

Alec.

 

[Pale Rider]

Really Alec, offensive maybe, but not wide of the mark. You'll be going on about what the countryside owes farmers and landowners next.

 

[hayinamanger]

PR, you're a case, aren't you?

 

[MerrySherryRider]

I wonder if English tourists will benefit, and stop having the P taken in Welsh, when they're spending in the shops.

Sad to say, the rudeness my family and I experienced on holiday in Snowdonia was not an experience I'd ever repeat.
Naively, I didn't realise how hostile locals are to tourists, it was certainly an education.

 

[RunToEarth]

Did anyone see the item on some telly program last night about an arable farmer from the eastern counties taking haylage and silage to North Wales.
Apparently, the bad weather has affected these farmers so badly they need this help.
On the face of it quite a nice gesture. Trouble is I can't help thinking about all the advantages there are associated with farming, subsidies and such, yet still they struggle.
On one or two shots of the farms you could see massive 4x4's, new tractors, quads, loaders. Does farming a few sheep and cattle really justify all this machinery?
I don't think I'd like the finance bill for some of these farmers.
Still a nice gesture from the barley baron part of the country.
I wonder if English tourists will benefit, and stop having the P taken in Welsh, when they're spending in the shops.

The arable farmer you refer to is our next door farmer Andrew Ward. Farming over here is almost exlusively arable, Lincolnshire lends itself very well to agriculture and whilst it isn't an easy industry to be in, we do very well. Having said that Mr Ward himself has struggled this winter in a lot of his OSR crops establishing, having a couple hundred acres failed completely and having to be sprayed off.

Over here we do not have the same shortages/worries of forage/straw that other parts of the country have, and therefore it is great that farmers can help eachother out - compassion is something which should never be judged. We might be in an area that has a lot of large machinery (which is certainly not unecessary when you are farming a good few acres) but a lot of the upland farmers live completely hand to mouth and cannot afford this, no one predicted the weather patterns we have had this year and no one predicted the serious implications it has had, but it is thanks to the good will of those more fortunate that the industry has seemed to ride out the worst of it.

If you think you can live a comfortable life off of subsidies you are very much mistaken, and farming in the uplands of this country is a very difficult and thankless task.

 

[Ancient Hacker]

Sad to say, the rudeness my family and I experienced on holiday in Snowdonia was not an experience I'd ever repeat.
Naively, I didn't realise how hostile locals are to tourists, it was certainly an education.

Horserider, I'm saddened to hear that you didn't enjoy your time in Snowdonia. I'm half Welsh, and we go to Wales for our annual holiday whenever we can - all the way from South Africa - and we've only encountered friendliness and kindness from the locals. It may be that they are distracted by our weird accents? We have no living relatives there, so we are simply "tourists" and we really enjoy our trips, which we do at different seasons so we have felt the full gamut of weather conditions, over the years.

I would do anything I could to avoid being a farmer in a Welsh winter, that's for certain. Frankly, the summers aren't so hot, either. We also happen to be farmers, but our climate is rather different. We also do not benefit from any sort of subsidies, so farming is a vocation for the brave, where we live!

Pale Rider My understanding, certainly in North Wales, is that many farmers don't own all the necessary machinery, but work together to share - for example when bringing the hay in, the locals will pool the machinery and skills to get the job done. Just as well .... the summer often looks like a three-day event between showers of rain.

 

[Bertieb123]

Speaking from personal experience and living very close to the Welsh border, we have holidayed in North and South Wales many times (plus worked there) and I have always found the Welsh people friendly! Pale rider, even if the Hill farmers did have the most state of the art equipment it would have no bearing on the very harsh winter they have had, plus a shortage of fodder.

 

[Goldenstar]

PR ,you really are the most strange and perplexing indvidual .

 

[Pale Rider]

Probably, Goldenstar, because I was brought up on a Welsh hill farm, lol.

 

[gmw]

Palerider how do you know that the p..... is being taken out of you when you shop in Snowdonia?

 

[Goldenstar]

Well I assume PR speaks welsh and spent his time taking the piss out of the English when younger .

 

[Elsiecat]

I wonder if English tourists will benefit, and stop having the P taken in Welsh, when they're spending in the shops.

Have you ever spent any time in North Wales?
I moved from England last year and everyone I've encountered has been lovely. We're extremely close with several Welsh families and are treated like old friends. They have in the past laughed at this whole 'Welsh hate English' thing. Yes, a few do - just like someone everywhere will hate 'outsiders'. But the majority could not care less..

Ridiculous post.

 

[Bertieb123]

Probably, Goldenstar, because I was brought up on a Welsh hill farm, lol.

So you should realise the problems the Hill Farmers have had this winter and spring then? I really don't get what you are saying in your posts.

 

[hackneylass2]

In these hard times, weatherwise as well as fiscal, I think that anything that the more 'fortunate' can do to help the less so should be applauded and publicised.

If only the farmers' good and compassionate deeds could be extended across more industries, and indeed, across the whole social spectrum, the UK would be a much better place to live.

 

[Alec Swan]

Probably, Goldenstar, because I was brought up on a Welsh hill farm, lol.

That's a statement which would stretch credibility a bit! I agree, LOL.

Alec.

 

[Ancient Hacker]

Perhaps Pale Rider has forgotten about foot-and-mouth. (foot-in-mouth, in this case?) And all the other crises that beset framers. Looking in from the outside, it seems to me that the bureaucracy and red-tape of farming in the UK generally would drive me to drink, without the assistance of floods, snow, ice, etc.

It's heartening, though, to see farmers helping each other out. In summer, I've seen young guys still in their office clothes helping out with the baling of hay in North Wales, after work, and I was touched by the sense of community amongst farmers.

 

[Freddie19]

just catching up with h and h forum... Pale Rider pm and I will take you to many farms in Northern Ireland, whose owners are at the end of their tether, how dare you suggest that their money goes on big 4x4's etc... I have a small amount of ground 6 acres which is looked after by my neighbour a young dairy farmer, who works on his own....we are now at the 18th of May and he is yet unable to put his dairy cows out... he plans his year so carefully, stockpiles silage in the good years, and went into this winter with two huge silage pits full, two months earlier than he should have had to, his dairy cows (who he loves) are eating the rest of the silage, his youngstock are eating straw (which he has had to buy in at huge expense)....How dare you, suggest that they are spending their money on other things, I am so angry with your comments, he is at the end of his tether....he loves his cows.....I am unable to continue this post, in case I use language which should be unacceptable....I can only hope when you are buying milk, butter, cheese etc produced in other countries by cattle kept in awful conditions you look back and realise how wrong you where.

 

[Pale Rider]

The problems in farming are nothing new, we had foot and mouth in the 60's and the winter of 63, the drought of 76 and innumerable wet summers since.
Of course I have some sympathy for people struggling to make ends meet. At the end of the day lots are sitting on a huge capital asset, a benefit not many people have.
Is it right that subsidy payments, far from going to farmers who need them end up in the pocket of the likes of British Sugar, the Queen, the Duke of Westminster, who gets half a million o year from his UK farms and 6 million Euro's a year from Grosvenor Farms Ltd.
Of course lots of farmers over mechanize, pick fashionable systems and breeds of livestock because that's what's taught.
I remember a farm visit I went to in East Yorkshire where they were re planting hedges, having grubbed out every hedge on the farm the year before to accommodate larger machinery. The wind had erroded most of the light topsoil as a result of the prairie they'd created.
Don't get me started on Holstein cows.
Every UK household pays 300 pounds a year almost into the CAP, and it is certainly wasted, I resent that a lot.

 

[Alec Swan]

.......

Every UK household pays 300 pounds a year almost into the CAP, and it is certainly wasted, I resent that a lot.

Wasted? Without assistance, British farming would be bankrupt. It's hard enough as it is, to persuade the Supermarkets to pay above the price of cheap foreign imports, from unregulated sources, and without such Government funding, our food industry would cease, as would all capitol investment, and when we're entirely reliant upon imported food, then we will be held to ransom, with no chance of rebuilding an industry.

So the Duchy of Cornwall and the Duke of Westminster have massive incomes from the SFP do they? I suspect that if you were to research a little further, you'll find that most of their landed Estates are tenanted out, and it's those tenant farmers who are the recipients.

For those two specific Estates, where they have the farming in hand, I think that you'll find that the SFP income goes in to a pot, which enables the land owners to offer affordable housing, on a letting basis, and to locals.

Every household subsidises farming to the tune of six quid a week? Really? I'd say that the figure is greater than you've quoted, and that they're still getting a good deal.

You have a strange and distorted viewpoint, I'm sorry to tell you.

Alec.

 

[horsies4coursies]

PR

i am utterly offended by what you have written in this post - i work very closely with the farming community here in north wales and i have farms who if they have another long and bad winter here will go to the wall - i like others on here know farmers who have run out of fodder for their animals - and even the crop farmers here are roughly 6-8wks behind in their calendar due to the weather we have had - this on the back of a harvest last year where many fields were so wet that they couldn't get their harvest in and it had to rot in the fields - I think it's fantastic that some farmers who were more fortunate had the generousity of spirit to come down with fodder to help those in need out.

i think you need to understand that most farms don't make a profit because of the pressures from supermarkets to provide the cheapest food possible, against high criteria for animal welfare, and increasing fodder costs and it's people with the same thought processes as yourself who don't help the farming community in general.

 

[ribbons]

OP, I'm not actually calling you a liar, but I'm really struggling to believe the comments and opinions you've voiced are coming from someone who was brought up in any farming family, much less a hill farmer.
I can only assume you are aged in your 90's and got out of farming when a teenager.
The weather and disease always was and always will be extremely challenging.
The difference today is the greed and pressure from supermarkets and the hundreds of regulations adhered to by British farmers but flaunted when it comes to cheap imported food. Like beef that started life as a horse.
You seem to forget that in the times you are talking about Britain pulled together for the good of Britain.
Today of course, the profits of huge companies are the most important thing.
In comparison, far more dangerous than a U boat.

 

[fburton]

Every household subsidises farming to the tune of six quid a week? Really? I'd say that the figure is greater than you've quoted, and that they're still getting a good deal.

Monbiot says £245 a year (a bit less than £5 a week, in Nov 2011). He usually pretty good at doing his homework.

You have a strange and distorted viewpoint, I'm sorry to tell you.

Here's another for you then.

http://www.monbiot.com/2011/11/28/big-farmer/

(And some comment on hill farming: http://www.monbiot.com/2012/11/26/the-fat-of-the-land/)