BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to the Farming Today podcast with me, Charlotte Smith. In this episode: the costs of clearing up after being culled out with bird flu. To be honest, it's been such an emotional roller coaster that I just can't bring myself to think of putting myself through that again. Sir James Dyson on farming and inheritance tax. Well, there's much better ways to avoid inheritance tax than spend 140 million trying to make farms work, so that's ridiculous. And Trump's trade tariffs: what do they mean for world trade and us? Just the chaotic nature that makes it incredibly difficult for businesses to plan ahead and make decisions.
Let's start though with new rules for the pig supply chain which are due to be introduced this spring to help even up what DEFRA describes as a power imbalance between farmers and processors. The rules have been developed after a crisis in the industry caused by a combination of Brexit and COVID when back in 2021 a shortage of staff at processing sites left farmers unable to send their pigs for slaughter. So even though farmers had contracts with processors, the pigs stayed on farm, costing extra to feed and getting too big for supermarket spec. Well, food supply chains are something we've been focusing on all week on Farming Today. That's here on BBC Radio 4 every weekday morning at 5:45 and available during the hours of daylight on BBC Sounds. Anna Hill went to meet outdoor pig farmer and chair of the National Pig Association, Rob Muer, on his farm in Norfolk.
I think if you look back to 2019, a lot of our contracts were dubious to say the least. They weren't well worded, they weren't, wasn't things written down. A lot of it was nearly done on a packet and it's strange. And the handshake used to work well for many people, but considering now that we're dealing with multinational companies, it's not like dealing with someone you've known all your life who's got a small slaughterhouse up the road. I mean, we deal with a multinational company and we must have proper contracts that are well worded so it works for both parties.
You've been working on it quite closely. What sort of things do you need?
It's really just to tighten up on how contracts are worded. We're not looking to restrict the flow of pigs or change the market. We're just looking to make sure that these contracts actually do make a difference and when things are difficult that there is protection for both parties in the contract. It should say if I don't meet what the processor requires, this is what should happen, and if they don't take the pigs that I actually am producing, this is what should happen.
Transparency, that's the word, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah, transparency. And there's also got to be wordings in the contract for force majeure. I mean, if touch wood it doesn't happen, we get hit by foot and mouth or something like that that sends the markets into a spiral, and you can't expect the markets to work normally at that stage.
Tell me a little bit about that supply chain from the farmer to the processor to the shop. Yeah, well, is it, is it a three-stage supply chain?
Yeah, well, it is a three-stage supply chain. And the slight reservation I have about the review is the fact that it doesn't include everyone within the supply chain. I would like to have seen supermarkets included in the supply chain as well because it's us and the processor and then to the supermarkets. That is one of our regrets, but we are very pleased that we will now have a review of how the producers work with the processors. There's only really three or four major processors left in the country, so that, that is the issues and that's why the supply chain review was needed so badly. But what we're not trying to do is, we're not trying to write contracts that are set in steel. There must be, people still got to be able to negotiate their own contracts as to what they want, but it's just the government are putting forward things that should go in that contract to actually protect both sides when the market's unstable.
Then I caught up with Ash Gilman, director of agricultural strategy at Cranswick, one of the UK's largest pork processors, at a rather noisy Norfolk farming conference.
I think the regulation, you know, we welcome, we're absolutely supportive of it and we'll work with government as best we can, you know, to make it work. The important thing that we recognise is that the crisis post-COVID that caused all the labour shortage happened then and there was a lot of emotion in the sector. We've never been hit by such a shock ever. The industry is already squared up, recognise how it needs to align, put more sort of cost of production type based contracts in place. The industry has already done a lot of that alignment and actually gone further in terms of looking at what producers need to deliver in the future.
Ash Gilman from the processor Cranswick. We asked the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs why supermarkets haven't been included in the new supply chain rules. A spokesperson told us: 'Our new regulations will correct the power imbalance between pig farmers and the businesses they supply, which for most producers are processors rather than retailers. We also support the work already undertaken by the Groceries Code Adjudicator which is responsible for regulating the relationship between the UK's 14 largest grocery retailers and their direct suppliers by enforcing the Groceries Supply Chain Code of Practice.'
Now, if you live in the countryside, it may not come as much of a surprise that broadband speeds in rural areas are 26% slower than they are in urban areas. That's according to the government, and that there are still parts of the country that have no mobile phone access at all. Well, these are just two of the areas the government aims to tackle in its digital inclusion action plan it recently published, the first steps. Ministers also aim to improve the digital skills of the 7.3 million people, that's 18% of the population, who say they lack the minimum essential digital skills for work, and the 3.8 million people who lack the essential digital skills for life. C. Graham asked Chris Bryant, the minister with responsibility for digital inclusion, how they're going to deliver those skills to rural Britain.
One of the things that we're doing is we're setting up an innovation fund so that local authorities in different parts of the country, and my guess is that quite a few rural areas are going to take us up on this, can come to us and say, 'Look, the single most important thing we could do to tackle digital exclusion in this particular area is, you know, run projects around skills for older people or it might be people who work in particular industries.'
Yeah, well, we would say, I guess, that giving people these essential skills for work digitally is of course really valuable, but it's not much use for those farmers and workers in remote rural areas where reliable internet connection just still isn't a given.
Aha, which is why, of course, first of all, we've got Project Gigabit which is rolling out decent broadband, by which I mean gigabit-capable broadband. And I know the vast majority of people in the country haven't the faintest idea what the difference is between 2 megabits per second and 1,000 megabits per second, but it is basically the difference between the wheel of doom, that circling thing going round and round which means you can't get anything done being there on your screen or not. So we're rolling out a gigabit-capable broadband to everywhere across the country, 99% of properties is what we're aiming for by 2030. 2 billion pounds worth of money we've invested in that, but we also need to make sure that there's a proper mobile signal.
Yeah, I mean, people living in rural areas have broadband speeds that are 26% slower than in urban areas and that there are still places that can't receive any mobile reception. I mean, that's in the text of your action plan. How are you going to turn that around? Because it's proved really difficult for previous governments. What are you going to do differently?
So first of all, we've got a significant amount of extra investment coming from the private sector for mobile masts. Secondly, I think we need to change the law to make it easier for people to roll out masts. Sometimes it's about planning decisions which take far too long and make it difficult in rural areas. But I'm very conscious, I represent an area in South Wales in the Valleys, they're on the door, which is essentially four valleys, and I know precisely these problems. It's difficult geography. One of the things I've tried to focus things on a bit more is instead of just putting masts on the top of mountains, why don't we just make sure that we track where people actually live and work?
How do you get around the lack of reliability? Because I think that's the thing that causes people in rural areas real problems. We hear from farmers who, you know, they lose their broadband connection halfway through a form that they need to fill in for DEFRA, for example, it goes, they lose everything. We hear from farmers who've diversified, it can take them ages to pick up a signal to take a cash-free payment, say, at a farmer's market, all kinds of things like that, or upload a photograph of the new yurts that they've put in the field or whatever it may be, so that they've got a decent tourism offer as well.
No, I fully understand all of these issues. That's why, as I say, we're determined to make sure that there's better connectivity. We are aiming to get to 5G standalone, which would be much more reliable than what we have at the moment. But I've also been saying to Ofcom, I'm sure this is something that your listeners will have heard many, many times or will have said to you, they'll have said, 'Well, theoretically it says that we've got 99% mobile coverage from all four mobile operators, but I can't get a signal and I'm waving my phone around all over the place, I've leant out the bathroom window and I still can't get a signal.' And that is because, I think, Ofcom's reporting has not been as reliable as people would like. That's one of the things I'm determined to change.
Chris Bryant, the minister for digital inclusion. Bird flu continues to hit poultry farms across the country with 41 cases in England, four in Northern Ireland, and one in Scotland. Poultry farmers in a number of areas across England must now keep their birds indoors and all farmers are being asked to maintain high biosecurity measures. Well, last week we heard from Jerry Saunders from Orchard Organic Farm in South Devon about the emotional toll of having all 5,000 of his birds culled after getting bird flu. The financial impact too can be severe. Well, earlier this week we caught up with Jerry who told Anna more about the hidden costs of bird flu.
I mean, one obvious and immediate cost is that we had a lot of eggs in stock ready to deliver on the Monday morning. All of those, A, we couldn't sell, so that's, you know, circa £10,000 worth of eggs that can't be sold. And then, B, we've had to, you know, pay for the privilege of getting those disposed of via a, you know, a licensed route. The government does provide some compensation.
How much does that actually cover?
We have to negotiate with their value, but the reality is, if we're lucky, we think we'll get roughly half of what it would cost us to restock with hens anyway. But obviously, the cost of the hen isn't, isn't the value of the hen. You know, the value of our hens was the 300 eggs they were going to lay us.
What about insurance? Were you insured and can you reinsure?
No and no. So the early days when avian flu was first sort of around, which is probably 8, 10 years ago, insurance was readily available. Obviously, insurance companies have, you know, have had to pay out more and more, it became harder and harder to get to the point that for an organic outdoor setup like ours, we couldn't realistically get insurance. Some of the supermarket chains now, Waitrose etc., very kindly are self-insuring or paying for insurance for their producers because they're obviously very concerned about their supply chain. But for independent people like ourselves, it is extraordinarily hard to get.
I know that you have a 12-month quarantine period now. So what does this actually mean for you?
