Farming Today

03/10/24 - Crisis in dairy recruitment, deer damage to trees, imported carrots

Dairy farmers are finding it a real struggle to recruit new staff, according to the farmer-owned dairy coop Arla. They spoke to nearly 500 UK dairy farmers and just under 90% of them said they had advertised jobs and had few or no applicants at all. So what’s holding young people back from a life working with dairy cows in a career that can also involve robotics, veterinary science and data analysis to mention just a few of the skills involved in modern milk production?

The UK is 97% self-sufficient in carrots, according to the British Carrot Association, but poor weather over the last year has meant supermarket shelves stocked with bags of carrots imported from China, Israel and other countries. Is that a trend that’s likely to continue?

We’re talking about deer all this week, their impact on the environment and how to manage their growing population. Trees and woodlands are a key tool for combating climate change, improving biodiversity, building flood resilience and increasing the UK’s supply of homegrown timber. But rising numbers of deer make planting more trees, and maintaining existing woodlands, a challenge because deer both graze on them and cause damage with their antlers.

Presented by Caz Graham and produced by Beatrice Fenton.

Broadcast on:: 03 Oct 2024
Audio Format:: other

"This is the BBC." This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently, I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those onerous to your contracts, they said, "What the f**k are you talking about? You insane Hollywood s**t." So to recap, we're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. $45 up from payment equivalent to $15 per month, new customers on first-three-month plan only, taxes and fees extra, speeds lower above 40 gigabytes of details. Do you ever wonder where your favorite foods come from? And like, what's the history behind bacon-wrapped hot dogs? Hi, I'm Eva Longoria. Hi, I'm Maitre de Gréin. Our podcast, Hungry for History, is back. And this season, we're taking in a run bigger bite out of the most delicious food and its history. Everything that the most popular cocktail is Margherita, followed by the Mochito from Cuba and the Pinucula from Puerto Rico. Listen to Hungry for History on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever we get your podcasts. BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. Hello, I'm Kaz Graham and this is the Farming Today podcast in which we will be hearing why UK carrot growers are confident there'll be no need for imports to stock supermarket shelves this autumn. And as Britain's biggest dairy co-op highlights a crisis in recruitment, we ask how can the dairy industry attract new staff? I don't think they understand the extent to which, in modern day, that it's extremely technologically advanced, that the hours can actually be far more flexible. I think the industry's come round to that. It is very, very hygienic. More on that later. But we are starting with DIA. We're talking about them all this week, their impact on the environment and how to manage their growing population. Trees and woodlands are key tools for combating climate change, improving biodiversity, building flood resilience and increasing the UK's supply of home-grown timber. But rising numbers of DIA make planting more trees and maintaining existing woodlands a challenge because DIA both graze on them and cause damage with their antlers. It can be done though. Border Fiona Clampin has been to Prudow Place, a stately home in Cornwall, where Jim Hocking showed her how by using protective guards and fencing, their estate team is successfully planting new woodlands whilst also caring for their historic herd of more than 100 fallow deer. This tree here, this is an ome-hulk that kicks off the acorns and they love to eat them. The small ones, they'll push yourself underneath the gate and stand on their hind legs. So they're actually trying to climb to get them. They're not going to be patient and wait for them to fall on the ground. Well, some will, but some more. If you see the height, all the same height these trees are, these branches, right? If we look down, we'll see it better when we go down there. They're all roughly the same height because they stand on their hind legs. And you'll see them as we go around them and come in there and stand on their hind legs and take it out. Ivy. They love Ivy. It's like chopped up to them. They're chocolate. Yeah. They love it. Absolutely. Yeah. These are the old English oak trees. And the reason we put these guards around is to protect them from damaging the tree. So what you're doing to protect the trees is the main challenge because deer like to rub their antlers? They will. Or is it because they want to eat them? No. Because they want to just, obviously, in the rut, take out their flustration and take the testosterone high. And they just either rake their antlers up and down a fence, which you'll see later on. Yeah. Or they'll come and just rake their antlers up and down and take the bark completely off. And you'll see, there you are. Oh, yeah. And just rake it up and down there. And what does that do to the tree? Well, it kills it because there's no protection for it, you think? It'll die, eventually. It's the same there. We can't afford to do that. We've got the different guards. This one, the antlers, just slide up and down. They don't do any damage, you see. It's like a wooden square frame with up and down bars. It's got four sides to put around there and a post in each corner to hold it severe tight, you know? This one is not as effective as we've wanted, but we've learned through experience that this is nowhere near as good as the other ones. The wooden ones. Does it sometimes seem like a battle between deer and tree? If we can cover them in like we did just now, there's not a battle. But sometimes it can be. Any new tree is planted, obviously then they will be protected. Because eventually I can imagine some of those will be going and then we have to replace them. What I'd like to do is plant more out here now and make this a bit of a corpse as well. You see? Why have some of these trees got guards around them and others haven't? Well, because we just can't do all of them. There's so many to do and it's so costly, you know? We just do what we can because I'm the only person, oh, I get two people come to help me twice a week. I'm on my own and you just can't do everyone. You do need the cover for the deer, you need the trees. We do need the trees. Desperate. I'd like to put 20 or 30 trees in here. I really do. We do need trees here. As simple as that. I go in there seven days away, Christmas Day, Boxing Day. I know what it can be like in the summer when it's really hot. I know what it can be like in there in the winter when it's blowing it down, pouring, pouring my rain. Tough, but they still need cover. Jim Hocking, who looks after the deer at Prado Place in Cornwall. Now, I'm not sure if deer are a menace to carrot growers. It wouldn't be surprising, though, because we grow a lot of them, more than 700,000 tons a year across 9,000 hectares. The UK is 97% self-sufficient in carrots according to the British Carrot Association, or poor weather over the last year has meant supermarket shelves stocked with bags of carrots imported from China, Israel, and other countries, too. Is that a trend that's likely to continue? Well, some of the UK's biggest carrot producers are meeting today, appropriately enough, in a carrot field to discuss, amongst other things, innovation in growing techniques and new varieties. Roger Hobson is the chair of the British Carrot Growers Association, and I asked him first about how the weather has been affecting the current crop. This year's crop is looking great from a quality point of view and OK on a volume point of view. The floods last year were a nightmare, and so that led to late planting, so we thought it was going to knock on to this year, but the weather's been kind to carrots, so probably the unbalanced average on volume, but good on quality. Well, we had several emails from listeners over the last few months, really, asking why they were seeing carrots imported from overseas. Did growers find it really hard to keep up with demand when the weather has been bad, or are imported carrots just cheaper for retailers? No, no, imported carrots are much dearer. We lost about 15% of our crop to the floods, as a result, where there was a six-week period where we, on our farm, couldn't supply our customers, and customers had to import from France, Spain, Israel, some even came from China and Egypt. And is it the retailers who do that importing? You don't import them yourself to ensure that you are meeting the contracts that you have with your supermarkets or whoever? It's very often the packing company that does the importing, so we were dealing with overseas carrot growers and having foreign carrots into our farm for processing on for some of our customers, yep, keep them going. Typically, these imported carrots were working at three times the price of a UK carrot at that time of year. How challenging is it to make a profit from carrots? Because they have very specific growing needs, don't they? Like, for example, you can't grow them in the same field year on year. You have to leave a decade between crops because of disease risk, don't you? That's the challenge, and we have to plan a long time in advance to do this. You know, we're already talking to the farmers whose farms we grow in our carrots on just about next year, but the year after we have long-term plans in place, it's a long-term business. It's not the hardest thing to do isn't growing a carrot, because they're really suited to the British maritime climate as long as the weather plays fair with us, and we don't get sort of 40 degrees and the worst drought for a century or the worst floods ever like last year. I mean, the problem is that there doesn't ever seem to be a normal year and a normal climate. What kinds of mitigation a carrot farmer is looking at to try and accommodate the changing weather patterns that we seem to be having now? Here on my farm, we're doing more drainage. I've got a drainage contract in at the moment. I'm going to improve the drainage in the field where we're going to be growing carrots in 2026. We're covering more carrots up with straw to protect them against the frost in the winter. It's an expensive process, but we've had some serious pre-Christmas frost these last two years that have spoiled the quality. We've got to keep that carrot as good as possible so our customers want him. Roger Hobson from the British Carrot Growers Association. Dairy farmers are finding it a real struggle to recruit new staff, according to the farmer owned dairy co-op, Arla. They spoke to nearly 500 UK dairy farmers, and just under 90% of them said that they'd advertise jobs and had few or no applicants at all. Well yesterday, at the dairy show, a large industry event at the Bath and West Showground in Somerset, they devoted a whole day to seminars about finding ways to boost recruitment. So what is holding young people back from a life working with dairy cows in a career that can also involve computing, veterinary science and data analysis to mention just a few of the skills involved in modern milk production? BBC West's business and environment correspondent Dave Harvey was at the dairy show, and he told me that some rather outdated stereotypes around early mornings, muck and hard manual labour are as much to blame as anything. Well if I told you there was an industry here that uses robotics, that uses artificial intelligence, that uses green tech, I wonder how many people would go, you're talking about milking cows. I think that's kind of the problem really, the perceptions and the reality. People still think it's a very mucky industry and yes, muck is involved, because after all muck is money in dairy, but there's also a lot of tech involved as well and what they're telling me is basically it's a real struggle to get young people to really get involved. Now of course there are some young people loving the dairy life, like for instance Emily and Georgie Paul, now they're sisters, they're both in their early 20s and they're now working very much on their farmally dairy farmhouse and Somerset on the Mendip Hills, really kind of working towards taking over from Dad who's increasingly doing less and less and I met them out on the hill, surrounded by their freezing herd. You can't beat being out here in the sunshine on a lovely day when the weather's nice with these beautiful creatures around us, it is great, a group of mental health, a great physical health. It's not a nine to five, it's a lifestyle but I really wouldn't be doing anything else, living anywhere else, working anywhere else. We're working racing for six, seven years after leaving school and that was great, I learned those, met some really good friends, travelled all over, done a stint in America and all up down this country and it was great but you just can't beat it here with the family and farming and cows, it's just the best you could ever find really. The price straw, the price of everything has just gone up incredibly and our milk price has just been so slow to rise with it, it just causes cash flow issues and generally it's hard work to make it keep it going but wouldn't change it, wouldn't beat it. Well if the dairy industry is really struggling to get new people, that family there, they are obviously the exception Dave, enjoying it as they are. What do dairy industry leaders tell you is going wrong? Well in a way, there's too much of that, Emily and Georgie are the daughters of the guy who owns the farm, it's just a small farm, they have a couple hundred head and that's the main way that young people are going into dairying now, it's very much picking up from mum and dad and they're trying to get people to come across who've never farmed, who've maybe been in totally different bits of agriculture industry or young people, students from an urban background who are interested in conservation, who are interested in science but haven't begun to think about going into farming. Load of seminars at the dairy show here down in Shepton Mallet at the Royal Bath and West Showground, they've gone for it, they've called them, standby, utterly agricultural careers, there's quite a lot of handball to be honest in all the branding, yeah, they obviously want the industry to get a move on, they're doing it all, they're doing it all, dairy has more puns than anything else, I met Ruthie Peterson, she is a careers advisor for an institute of agriculture and she told me that basically it's an increasing struggle to get young people to apply. I don't think they understand the extent to which in modern day that it's extremely technologically advanced, that the hours can actually be far more flexible, I think the industry's come round to that, it's very, very hygienic, you know, the technology's involved are incredible, we've got the carving sensors, we've got robotic milking, we've got gate analysis, we've got analysis of big data, all these things require a lot of skills to operate. And that message has now been taken to Westminster by amongst other people, the local MP, Sarah Dike, who's the MP for Glastonbury and Street and she's actually from a farming background herself and she really wants lots of people to think about farming in a very different way. I was working alongside Summer Science which is a STEM festival to encourage more younger people into STEM careers and agriculture is exactly that and we should be encouraging people who are looking for science, technology, engineering, mathematical careers to embrace farming as a potential career. And Dave, are there many young people at the show and any people who are going to be taking all that on board? There are some young people, especially some volunteers and what was encouraging to me, I thought, was people who've not grown up on farms. People like Azra Anzar, now she is a vet student from a big city, no contact with farms at all, she found she being a vet and then when she went on a farm, she found, she absolutely loved it. What has Azra loved most? Well, you're never going to guess. I'm probably scraping food. It's quite calming actually, but also just getting to help the animals and then see them running around the next day. The calves are just like overgrown puppies, I think it's really healing to just get to be outdoors all the time and then have that be part of your job as well. That's Azra Anzar, talking to Dave Harvey at the Dairy Show and that is all your farming for today. I'm Kaz Graeme. The program was produced by Beatrice Fenton and it's made by BBC Audio Bristol. Do you ever wonder where your favorite foods come from? And like what's the history behind bacon wrapped hot dogs? Hi, I'm Eva Longoria. Hi, I'm Maita Gomez-Rajon. Our podcast, Hungry for History, is Back. And this season we're taking in a run bigger bite out of the most delicious food and its history. That the most popular cocktail is Margherita, followed by the Mojito from Cuba and the Pinucula from Puerto Rico. Listen to Hungry for History on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever we get your podcasts. [MUSIC PLAYING]