British food a thing of the past???

calleyw

N9eav wrote:

reading the old 'James Herriot' books, everyone had a cow or pig in their back garden one time but now with passports, TB testing, Vets, Slaughter fees, red tape

I know. My dad is a farmer and most of the paperwork falls to my poor mother to do and she always has a million forms to fill in.

And with animals, if one dies that can be the profit margin on all the rest gone.

Farming is in a poor state of affairs. We need to be proud of the food we produce and buy british where we can.

For every farmer that makes a lot of money by doing nothing there will be many others who are scraping by. And it is the farmers growing crops who seem to get the most amount of money not the farmers raising animals.

I always vowed to never marry a farmer. And I didn't as I know the long hours and the rubbish pay.

Yours

Calley

tr3mor

N9eav wrote:

We have an outlet store from the packing plant. It's all re-packaged Tesco stuff, but I can get 9lbs of best Rump for £10. Bargain.

Where is this? Sounds like a bargain, do you know if other places will have them?

VickyA_2

I always endeavour to buy british goods and they are mostly of infinitely higher quality to imported food. I do refuse to buy argentinian beef. At least in the UK the growing and breeding of food is regulated - who knows what pesticides or hormones are present in imported goods? Theoretically food is of a certain standard, but documents can easily be faked, especially if food is making a journey of a few thousand miles!

calleyw wrote:

I know. My dad is a farmer and most of the paperwork falls to my poor mother to do and she always has a million forms to fill in.

My mum does all my dad's paperwork too - he's an arable farmer. He's an intelligent person, but the new subsidy forms were a nightmare. He spent a whole month trying to figure it out, and they even give you a booklet. In the end he paid a consultant to come in and do it for him - he's only got 700 acres, which isn't enough to pay for a decent life nowadays.

calleyw wrote:

I always vowed to never marry a farmer. And I didn't as I know the long hours and the rubbish pay.

Same here! OH works in IT. According to one of her friends, my mum still wants me to marry a man with 2000 acres - probably because she didn't! Friend told her to stop being so bl**dy minded. By 29th July 2006 it'll be too late (we get married on that day!).

N9eav

tr3mor wrote:

Where is this? Sounds like a bargain, do you know if other places will have them?

I think it's only in Cornwall.

A company called St Merryn meat has 2 large meat packing plants in Cornwall. They have a factory shop called Tregagles. This sells off all the over stock goods. It's all pretty much tesco. I have seen them unwrap frozen packets of 'finest' mince and put them multipack bags in the freezer 8lbs for £4. It' s all local beef whcih is a nice thing

Jet

Farming has been in my family for nearly 400 years.

My great grandfather was a very rich man, a landowner with lots of property. If landrovers had been invented then, he would have owned 10 top of the range models!

The farm has now been passed onto my uncle who is now a tenant farmer, nearly all the land my great grandfather owned has been sold off along with all but 2 of the properties.

Now don't get me wrong, anyone that owns 2 properties outright, is not poor, in my opinion, however, my uncle works 15 hours per day, 7 days per week, 52 weeks per year. He simply cannot afford to employ anyone nowadays. He will carry on farming until the day he dies (he's 70) simply because it's all he knows. He's been doing the same job, every day since he was 14. I believe he has only ever had 3 holidays in his life!

He works soooo hard and I know it's so degrading for him to 'scrounge' off of the government. He simply wants a fair price for a fair product. That's not unreasonable is it?

VickyA_2

Jet wrote:

He works soooo hard and I know it's so degrading for him to 'scrounge' off of the government. He simply wants a fair price for a fair product. That's not unreasonable is it?

Not at all. My brother is currently travelling in Australia and wants to come back to the family farm next year (thank goodness I was a girl!). He's been told outright NO because there's nothing for him to do. My dad can't afford to retire, though he's only 59. The farm has been in the family for 6 generations, so it would be a drastic decision for anyone to sell up (though half the land is tenanted).

My dad believes that he is a custodian of the landscape for future generations, but he can't be a custodian if he isn't paid enough money from his produce to maintain it.

belleooo

Jet wrote:

He will carry on farming until the day he dies (he's 70) simply because it's all he knows. He's been doing the same job, every day since he was 14. I believe he has only ever had 3 holidays in his life!

This sounds like my 84 year old Farmer farther-in-law. Prostrate cancer and a heart bypass a couple of years ago never put him off working. Yet he gets by with just his pension so my husband can draw a wage from the farm. This is despite working 7 days a week, etc. I hate this farming lark, it is hard work for very little. We are not rich and struggle to get by with WTC and FTC, etc.

competitionscafe

Perhaps that is why some British Farmers are moving to Estonia (and others to Canada):
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/26/news/farmers.php

The fact is, if you come from a British farming family in 2005, you will probably have seen friends and brothers and fathers and sisters and mothers, people you always thought invulnerable because of their work capacity, reduced to silent, looming presences whom you discover silently weeping, alone, in a kitchen, or the corner of a barn. It is the loss of sense of self and culture, not money, that really destroys people, and these things did not need to be lost to farming, just as they did not need to be lost to the mining communities before them.

from last Wednesday's Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1564262,00.html

Jet wrote:

He simply wants a fair price for a fair product. That's not unreasonable is it?

Of course it's not - the same as sugar, coffee and cocoa farmers in developing countries want a fair price for their products and not have their home market flooded with heavily subsidised sugar from EU countries, for example. Hence the whole Fairtrade movement and growing consumer awareness of the disparity, for example, between the pittance paid for coffee beans to the people who grow them and the price of a cup of coffee in Starbucks - maybe there should be a FairTrade campaign for British farmers too?

However the fault must lie not only with 'greedy' supermarkets but also with consumers who demand cheap food without considering the real cost. Why do people happily fork out £2 /£2.50 for 1 pint in the pub and then expect to pay the same amount of money for the main part of their Sunday roast dinner for the family; eg: a chicken (an entire animal which needs to be fed and hopefully cared for with a reasonable regard for it's welfare) whilst still providing the farmer who raised that chicken with a reasonable amount for his or her work?

N9eav

competitionscafe wrote:

However the fault must lie not only with 'greedy' supermarkets but also with consumers who demand cheap food without considering the real cost. Why do people happily fork out £2 /£2.50 for 1 pint in the pub and then expect to pay the same amount of money for the main part of their Sunday roast dinner for the family; eg: a chicken (an entire animal which needs to be fed and hopefully cared for with a reasonable regard for it's welfare) whilst still providing the farmer who raised that chicken with a reasonable amount for his or her work?

We have been used to doing that for so long. It's hard to get people to change, so we try and source the product cheaply elsewhere.

Curry_Queen

N9eav wrote:

Surprisingly, Tesco do claim to do local beef. If you look on some of their packets, there is a nice picture of a Devon farmer and his wife.. Most is cut and packaged here in Cornwall too (By Portugese workers may I add, as no one locally will work for the meat packing factory anymore) But a lot of their cheaper 'on offer' beef is Argentinian.

We have an outlet store from the packing plant. It's all re-packaged Tesco stuff, but I can get 9lbs of best Rump for £10. Bargain.

I made the mistake of buying some "cheap" rump steak from Tesco a few months back (before I switched to free range/organic) and was so damned annoyed to find out it was Argentinian beef and not British, but I'd ordered online so had no way of telling until it was too late :mad:

Funny you mention about Portugese workers as I live in an agricultural area producing a lot of the country's fruit and veg etc and guess who does most of the work for the companies here, especially in picking/packing ... yup, the Portugese LOL!