Farming Today

31/08/2024: TB controls; flood relief for farmers; harvest; cattle numbers; saskatoons

The government unveils its new approach to controlling TB in cattle which includes ending badger culls in the future.

Thousands of farmers who were promised financial help after the devastating floods of last winter have still not been paid.

This year’s harvest has been anything but straightforward, not just wet weather but high fertiliser costs and infection from fungus have all caused difficulties. Which means many arable farmers are facing poorer yields than normal and so less financial reward.

The number of cattle being raised for beef across the UK is falling, so could it mean a good future for artificial protein sources?

And it looks like a blueberry but isn't, it's a saskatoon, a new fruit grown in Scotland.

Presented by Charlotte Smith

Produced by Alun Beach

Duration:: 26m
Broadcast on:: 31 Aug 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. The most powerful designer drugs are the digital ones we use daily. And we get high off them when touch, tap, like, scroll at a time. You know, just like tech creators want us to, use digital without digital using you. Learn more at sink.itra.com. Hey, Pride members. Are you tired of ads interfering with your favorite podcasts? Good news! With Amazon Music, you have access to the largest catalog of ad-free top podcasts included with your Pride membership. To start listening, download the Amazon Music app for free. Go to amazon.com/adfreepodcasts. That's amazon.com/adfreepodcasts To catch up on the latest episodes without the ads. Hello, welcome to the Farming Today podcast with me, Charlotte Smith. In this episode, we'll talk about the government's newly unveiled approach to controlling TB in cattle. We'll hear from one of the thousands of flooded farmers still waiting for promised compensation money. Heard nothing. Absolutely radio silence. And it's coming up to a year when we flooded. I lost £30,000 overnight. Well, the rain's still going. It's now affecting harvest. We had 60mm rain in 24 hours. It just drowned the crop and nothing grew in here. So we've had to redress the situation and the wheat is completely gone. And we've redrawed the spring barley, which will go for molting to produce beer. And it looks like a blueberry, but it isn't. It's a Saskatoon, puzzled, or will become clear. We managed to get Saskatoon and try them, did a bit of research. We looked at the climate in Scotland versus Canada and similar, traditionally. So we thought we'd go for it and bought a few thousand plants from Poland. Let's start then with that unveiling. A new TB eradication strategy for England has been launched. Ministers say it will end the Badger cull by the end of this Parliament. TB in cattle brings misery for farmers. Animals suspected to have the disease are culled and the farms locked down. It costs taxpayers around £100 million a year in compensation and other costs. And under the last government, led to the culling of 230,000 badges. That's been controversial. But Conservative ministers saw Badger culls as part of the way to control Bovine TB. In its manifesto, the Labour Party promised to end the cull. Well, this new strategy announcement is a bit of a rehash of expected policy shifts and promises of future developments. It includes a survey of badges to see how many there are and also how many are infected with TB. A badge of vaccination field force and accelerated work on a cattle vaccine. The government says all this will be co-designed with farmers, vets, scientists and conservationists. The minister wasn't available for an interview, but the UK's chief vet, Christine Middlemus, told me that we are now in a position to stop the culls. We've achieved a huge amount through the actions both on cattle and badgers in the high risk area and the low risk area and really changed the epidemiology there. We need to understand better about the actual Badger numbers that are there and where they are. We haven't done a proper survey since 2011-13. We need to better understand where we have vaccinated what difference and how that is linking to the disease and be able to show that to farmers. And finally, wildlife surveillance, so more general surveillance beyond just badgers and understanding what is happening in wildlife overall. But there are contracts for culls over several years, so where does this announcement leave them? So the intention is that we will continue with culls already underway and the intensive culls and not stop them for now. We want to bank the good work or what we have achieved. We don't know clearly what the impact of stopping those early might be, but there is this clear refresh in a strategy and further intensification of protecting wildlife and protecting cattle both through the ongoing TBAS, the TB advisory scheme, which are really advised any farmer, not just if you have TB, but if you are worried about getting it, sign up to it and you will get explicit independent advice pertinent to your farm and how you manage your animals to help protect them. And then of course the work on the Badger vaccination continues at speed. But the Labour Party has been pretty clear and now it's in government and it says the Badger cull will end by the end of this Parliament, which is five years. So if somebody has a contract for a Badger cull, they will have to end it early, presumably, if it's for seven years, they'll have to end it in five years, will they? The licence is an eye understanding of the cull contracts, which may not be completely correct because the contracting is not my specialty, as we have the contracts for the intensive culls and then the supplementary culls, they are separate and work in a separate way. So therefore they don't have to be the full seven years. And the next step, my view is the right one, is to protect both cattle and Badgers from them becoming further infection. And we're now in the position to do that because we have lowered the level of disease out there. The whole aim here is to eradicate Bovantibede by 2038. Yes, absolutely. Would you put money on that? With the current information we have, and that's taking us down to the recognised war .02% prevalence in cattle, then yes, I think we've made really, really good steps towards it. But it's nature and it's science and decisions are made politically, so there will be more parliaments in this lifetime. But I think we've made some really good steps and that's why we are now in the position to be able to focus on protection by security and vaccination. The chief vet there, Christine Middlemes. Thousands of farmers who were promised financial help after the devastating floods of last winter have still not been paid. The Farm Recovery Fund was set up by the previous government to support farmers whose land had been damaged by flood water during storm babbitt and storm hank. It offered grants of up to £25,000, which some earlier claimants have now received, but eight months on, a large group of farmers have yet to be paid. Reporting from a farm near Lincoln, here's Paul Murphy, the BBC's environment correspondent for Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. So, we've got some oil, radish, yeah, we've got all sorts in here, trittakele. These fields have not been sown with wheat this year, there's too much flood risk for that. These plants will be left as food for birds. Last winter when the local riverbank failed here, a large chunk of land was swamped. And that's going to basically feed the birds over winter if we aren't flooded. Farmer Henry Ward is still waiting for the promised government support. Heard nothing, absolute radio silence and it's coming up to a year when we flooded. I lost £30,000 overnight from inputs, trying to grow a crop. You see behind us, this field should have been winter wheat. There should have been a combine in there now, harvesting, there isn't. Henry's flooded land, his marooned farmhouse, they've come to symbolise the misery of extreme rainfall. Back in January when the previous government announced a support fund, some early claimants received money. But those who applied to an expanded, later scheme are still waiting. The local river has burst into these fields for five years on the trot now. And there's every possibility it could happen again, this autumn. And so what Henry Ward and many other farmers across the UK want to know is what is the new government's policy towards farming and flooding. What's pretty clear is that the extremes of rain and heat in a changing climate are rewriting the manuals of UK farming. Farm worker Fraser says it can sometimes be baffling. There's almost like there's no seasons anymore. The conventional ways of farming seem to be less and less important now. It is very much a lottery of getting the weather right and your establishment. You might have to have a stab in the dark and work something down and get it done for getting it done sake. Otherwise you might miss your window completely. The National Farmers Union says it's seeking clarity from the government on what's happening with the farm recovery fund. And Henry Ward says that clarity needs to come quickly. We hear there's 2,000 acres underwater, seven land owners affected. It's not just me and it's nationwide as well. But here I think we were the worst effects in the country. We should have been first on this anyway. Then they promised me, oh no, Henry, you're definitely going to get some money. Okay, fine. We haven't heard anything. I just feel like we've been completely forgotten about. I think it's quite clear that this government doesn't care about farmers and helping us out. Henry Ward there on his farm near Lincoln. Well, the Department for the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs, Defra, says that further information about the farm recovery fund will be provided in due course. They added that they're going to better protect farmland from flooding through a new flood resilience task force. The run up to this year's harvest has been anything but straightforward. Not just the wet weather, high fertilizer costs and infection from fungus have all caused difficulties. And many arable farmers are facing poorer yields than normal and so less financial reward. Well, if you've caught our sister program farming today during the week hits on at 545 every weekday morning here on BBC Radio 4, then you'll know that we've spent the week meeting farmers harvesting. And we started with our reporter Bob Hockenhol on a cereal farm in Shropshire. It's harvest time at Andrew Williamson's 900 acre farm near Bridge North where he grows wheat, barley, oats, beans and oil seed rate. Harvest is normally a time of year when it's full of excitement and so the culmination of the year's work and you look forward to it, but at the moment it's not something I'm looking forward to because I know the results aren't going to be great. Andrew takes me to one of his fields which illustrates the problems he's been having. So the field we're in at the moment is actually a crop of spring barley, but it should have been a crop of winter wheat. So he establishes winter wheat in October last year, but due to the weather and the situation and the consistent rain and essentially storm Bobette, which when we hit in 15 doctor, we had 60 millimetres rain in 24 hours. It just drowned the crop and nothing grew in here so we've had to redress the situation and the wheat is completely gone and we've redrawed it with spring barley which will go for molting to produce beer. The downside of that is that the spring barley crop is not as profitable as a winter wheat crop. Wheat is normally the dominant crop, but because of the weather it won't be this year. The years of expected for the crops we've actually got to establish are going to be okay. I think some of it with the exception of our winter barley, we've harvested our winter barley. That was sort of 25% below average I would think. Our oil seed rate was probably the worst crop we've ever harvested. It was probably 50% what we expect and that's on what we harvested. Some of it didn't even get to harvest, it made him worse. The wheat to the moment are looking good, but the trouble is we aim to establish 220 acres a week. We actually establish, we'll harvest 120 acres a week. So we're going to lose 100 acres a week which we would have come to harvest and from a monetary point of view that's going to be sort of round about 60,000 pounds of lost income that we're going to get on that area. Given that, what are the implications for your farm and your business? Well, the implications are that our overall output is going to be drastically reduced. At best estimate, depending on the year, we're probably going to be producing about 50% of the tonnage of grains of all the grains as we were normally in a normal year. There have been expensive crops to grow because we've had a very high fertilizer impact which stemmed back from the Ukraine war. Federalized prices are reducing now, but these crops have been very expensive to grow and we're not looking at great harvest. In terms of the price that you will get, has it gone down a lot or has it been consistent with, say, last year? No, so that's sort of the irony of it. Even though the harvest will probably have one of the smallest wheat harvest in the UK for a long time, the price of wheat is going down because it's a global commodity. It's the most expensive wheat we've ever grown and the price is reducing. So we're going to have lower yields and lower prices. Given that you have had to cope with a lot of wet weather, have you got other problems? Because I have heard fungus can flourish in crops where they have been exposed to a lot of rain. Yeah, it certainly is a problem with regard to if you're high rainfall at certain times of the growing season. And the two major issues to be wary of are fusarium in the year and also hearing quite a lot of instance of ergot as well, which is another fungal disease in the year. The problem with ergot is it creates these little blooms on the ear and then if you get those in your grain sample and it goes to a mill, the whole load will get rejected even if they find one because of it's got hallucinogenic properties. It's been a challenging year for farmers like Andrew, but he's confident he can survive. In his hoping next year you'll see better returns and better weather. Bob Huchenhol reporting from Shropshire, more on harvest on BBC Sounds, just search for farming today. The number of cattle being raised for beef across the UK is falling and figures published earlier this week for the first six months of this year in Wales show a fall of 4% compared with the year before. Meat promotion Wales, which supports beef production, says the fall is significant and claims it puts the future stability of Welsh beef production in jeopardy. Well, how serious then is this reduction? Nick Allen is Chief Executive of the British Meat Processes Association. The reason we've seen that drop is historically on the back of the extra costs we've had on the back of Ukraine and one or two other things that have happened. You know farmers have not been making any money and they were moving away from beef production. We've now got some really high prices for the farm gate prices and actually it looks as though without that increase in numbers, it looks as though we've got some stability in those prices going forward for the sort of farmers. Have we seen similar figures across the rest of the UK? Yes, it's pretty much reflex what's happening right across the UK really, even in our competing countries in Ireland, Ireland are relatively short on numbers as well, so there's a similar story there. So there's a good long term signal from the market here that there's a good future in beef production, so hopefully that will start to turn these figures around. Are farmers being attracted to alternative food production at all? We've heard a lot about farmers being offered under the Sustainable Farming Incentive, you know, more money for wildlife options, things like that. Do you think beef farmers have looked at that? Oh, undoubtedly, and that is obviously a temptation for them really, you know, these figures there and interestingly enough that certainly the English government has actually been capping some of these schemes, you know, because they recognise the damage it's doing to food production really. Are fewer people eating red meat? One of the things that actually is a feature and one of the reasons why the farmgate price is so high actually sort of demand is it's under pressure, but it's not dropping away sort of much at all really, it's pretty consistent. Our consumption is good, you know, production is down and therefore the farmgate sort of price is really high. Beef production is not something you leap into and leap out of, so therefore, you know, it's a good sort of long-term signal here for the market. But does that also mean then that if there is demand and there's not the supply, then would we be relying more on imports and does that mean that there's a gap for imports from those trade deals, for instance, that were signed some time ago with countries like Australia? If beef was going to sort of cut me in and it is actually coming in to replace some of the what we're not producing, you're going to look just across the sea of Thailand really, you know, who's a big beef producer right on our doorstep really. So people can get excited about the Australian deal and sort of further afield, but actually you just need to look over the IRC to see where probably a lot of our beef is likely to come from if we can't produce it here ourselves. Do you think any beef farmers might be looking towards actually switching to grow or produce protein alternatives other than beef? It depends on their farm, doesn't it really? You know, 70% of the UK is covered in grassland, really, and you know, we grow grass really well in this sort of country, so it's a really good place to produce room and livestock. Looking at alternatives of proteins, you know, really, you've got to be able to cultivate your lands and be able to plow them up and do things with them, and if actually a lot of your land is actually can only really grow grass, that's, you know, the only alternative really is to look at something like forestry or something like that. How compared to beef protection? Nick Allen from the British Meat Process Association talking to Anna Hill. Well, as he was saying there, there is still a demand for beef, but we're all being advised to cut down on red meat, especially highly processed things. So many people want to find protein alternatives. Research into those possibilities has been given a boost by the establishment of a new research group costing £38 million. It'll investigate how we could all expand our diets to include protein rich food made from plants, fungi, algae, meat grown in labs and insects, all grown in the UK. It's hoped that changing what we eat will cut climate change emissions from agriculture while improving public health. The new centre, the National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre, or NAEPIC, I suppose, includes a collaboration of universities, Leeds, Sheffield, Imperial College, London and the James Hutton Institute in Canada. In all, 102 different organisations, including commercial industry, are playing a part. Well, Dr Rob Hancock is Deputy Director of the Advanced Plant Growth Centre at the James Hutton Institute. He told Anna what NAEPIC is for. The job of NAEPIC is to try to create a national knowledge base associated with alternative proteins. So what we want to do is we want to link academia, we want to link regulators, we want to link primary producers. To try to generate a knowledge hub and a mechanism of creating best practice around alternative protein production, alternative protein processing. And also we want to understand how society feels about alternative proteins and whether these things are acceptable by the general public and consumers. So it's not just about the science and the growing, it's actually about connecting with consumers as well. Why do we need it? If you look at what the UK is doing at the moment, we're importing £15 billion worth of protein products every year. So this is meat, dairy, seafood. On top of that, we're importing about £3 billion worth of animal feeds. We need food security in the UK and we need to develop our own and nurture our own protein production. But we need to do that in a way that's economically and environmentally sustainable. We know that food production is associated with around 22% of global greenhouse gas emissions. And when you take into account post-production, so this is processing, it's transport, it increases to 35%. Obviously part of that's around imports. So if we can reduce imports and we can be more self-sustainable, we can reduce those GHGs. But that means that you've got to convince farmers and other primary food producers to go into these areas. What are those alternatives? It's from plants, from fungi, from algae, meat grown in labs and insects. I mean, how are you going to persuade farmers to turn their backs on the crops that they usually produce and start growing these alternatives? We need to encourage farmers and ensure them that the market place is there. And we've brought farmers and growers groups into this project from the very start. What we're also doing is part of this. I mean, there's huge investment coming from government, but also from industry and from the academic partners. And we are providing opportunities to trial things, to do innovation sprints, to prove the concept and demonstrators. And again, so there's money there available to farmers and other growers to save something works for them, to assess whether that's working. Is there a figure on this? What percentage of protein has to come in the future from non-meat products? Not from us, there's not. What we're here to do is to provide the evidence. I can't see a position wherever the government is telling people you must eat so much of this kind of protein. But there's a question to pull, isn't there? There's already people being told eat less meat. And then there are stories like you must only eat this amount of ham per week that actually, for the consumer, it's quite confusing, isn't it? Because you're being told not to do things, but the alternative at the moment in the shops, plant, protein, et cetera, it's ultra processed food. Some of this is highly processed food, that's correct. But there is very little evidence at present that processing itself causes harm. Clearly, if you have processed foods, which contain a very high energy density, if they contain a lot of sugars, a lot of salts, because these are very cheap ingredients, clearly. There are many mixed messages coming out. It's very difficult, I guess, for the consumer to navigate some of those. But again, by providing that evidence to the regulatory bodies, to people like the Food Standards Agency, hopefully we can provide that evidence to them, and then a more consistent message can come from those regulatory bodies. Dr Rob Hancock from the James Hutton Institute. Now here's a new variety of fruit for me, and maybe for you too, the Saskatoon. It's a small, purpley blue coloured berry that, as the name suggests, is native to Canada. In fact, the city is named after the fruit. Well, it's been hailed as a superberry, high in antioxidants, fibre, and vitamin C, as well as low in sugar. Muir fruit farm, just north of Aberdeen, reckons it's the only farm in the UK growing Saskatoon's, alongside another rather unusual berry, the honey berry. Rachel Stewart from BBC Scotland's Out of Doors programme has been to find out more about them, and started by asking Charlie Carnoken how he ended up growing them. We wanted to grow a unique fruit that isn't currently grown in Scotland, that we predicted would be ideal suited to our climate and our soil. So we did a test trial in the first year. We had an area that's one and a half acres where we grew lots of different plants. All the plants came from Poland, because to buy them in the UK they probably would have been seven or eight pounds, whereas we got them for a pound from Poland. And one of the benefits was that we were in the EU at the time, so getting the plant in was very, very easy. And the honey berries and Saskatoon's survived well, so we thought, okay, that's what we need to focus on. Yeah, I've not heard really of Saskatoon's before, because they're not commonly grown in Scotland or really not grown at all, are they? Saskatoon is a Canadian berry. We managed to get Saskatoon and try them, did a bit of research. We looked at the climate in Scotland versus Canada and similar, traditionally, so we thought we'd go for it and bought a few thousand plants from Poland. I am desperate to try one. We're just right at the end of the season, so we're actually having to rummage about to try to find one. Try and find one that the birds haven't eaten. Here we go, here's one here, look. Oh no, it looks just like a blueberry here. So it's purple in colour, but it has an almondy cherry flavour to it, a bit of an after taste. It goes really well with cooking, so in Canada they make pies from it. It's not as sweet as a blueberry, but that has a lot of health benefits, because it's lower in sugar higher in fibre. We're used to sweet berries in the UK, whereas if you go to Europe, for example, they're picking wild lingon berries and they're used to tartar fruit. You can try it and see what you think. That's actually really nice. I think I was preparing my taste buds for it being quite sour, but there is still a sweetness there. And as you see, a nutty flavour. The other thing that's interesting about these is because they haven't been grown commercially, they are very high in antioxidants. And the reason for that is fruit that's grown commercially, we use chemicals effectively to protect them from disease, so they have evolved to not protect themselves from disease. Whereas the more natural fruits that are closer to the wild varieties are very high in antioxidants to protect themselves from disease. And Saskatoon's we know from Canadian research are very, very high in antioxidants and vitamins and minerals and fibre. What do you do with your berries? That's interesting, so honeyberries are very popular. We are right next door to Forest Farm, which produce ice cream. So all the honeyberries we can pick go into honeyberries sorbet. We received a grant to help us set this up, but it's always a challenge to bring a new food product to market. And the difficulty of fruit is you pick it, you have to get it in the shop the next day, so the logistics is a huge challenge. The Saskatoon's are a pick-your-own, so people book on our website and people come down and pick, and then they donate to a couple of charities that we've chosen. And sample something they've probably not tried before as well. Exactly, yeah. I'd be very surprised if any of these tried Saskatoon. Saskatoon's in Aberdeenshire there. That's it from us, I'm Charlotte Smith. The producer is Alan Beach, and farming today this week is a BBC audio Bristol production. I'm Azadee Macheary from the Global Story podcast, where we're looking at the dramatic series of pager explosions across Lebanon. As security experts scramble to piece together the paper trail, armed group Hezbollah firmly believe Israel are responsible and say they intend to retaliate. So what's next? Find us wherever you get your podcasts. (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]