Wickham's musings from Chalke

I can understand why British farmers are in financial trouble. Everything conspires against them.

I have seen programmes about arable farmers in the States at harvest time. Harvest contractors work their way up from Mexico to the far northern counties over several months and the machines only stop to move from one farm to the next, and since all the farms have grain to harvest that isn’t very far. The combine harvesters work in teams 24 hours a day, workers work in shifts supported by maintenance vehicles and a mobile kitchen and sleeping vans. If repairs are needed a firm of mechanics is on 24 hour standby.

In eastern European countries like Romania and Poland there are also vast prairies and cheap labour.

I have been watching the combine harvesters and baling machines around here recently. They have awkward shaped fields so that they often seem to be fiddling about in corners, turning around and so on. The number of times I have seen a machine stop for no apparent reason is amazing. A few seconds wasted would have been a few yards gained if they kept going.

I met one farmer and he commented on the fine weather so I said he could work all night. He replied that he wished he could but he couldn’t. The three farmers I have seen near here seem to be using their own machines and staff so presumably overtime is either impossible or too expensive and hiring contractors also too expensive.

Planning restrictions mean they can’t alter the shape of their fields (and I support that) so inefficiency is bound to occur.

It is just symptomatic of problems across all British industry – how to be competitive with the economies of scale in the States or cheap labour in third world countries. Either salaries increase in third world countries or our standard of living decreases – it looks as if the latter is happening.