Flooding

When Perth flooded last, people whose houses were damaged were out of them for 6 months while their homes were dried out and put back together.     So my thoughts are with the huge number of people who have had to leave their houses in the flooded areas of England – they face long haul to get things back to normal.    It is a truly appalling catastrophe.

The plight of people and their homes, traffic trying to manage and boats sailing down High Streets is always first to hit the TV screens, and rightly so.     But the vast areas of countryside underwater represent acres of spoilt crops and grass.   The crops will be unharvestable, and the grass too waterlogged for grazing, meaning that livestock may have been brought inside into farm buildings and already consuming their ‘winter feed’.   Quite apart from the effect on individual farmers’ livelihoods, the flooding is bound to push up the price of food in the shops.

Like all farmers in the UK, I have to ‘set-aside’ some of my farm to take it out of production.    Set-aside has never been popular with farmers or the public, except possibly the environmentalists.    Farmers hate it because they know that they should be using their land for producing food, not weeds;   the public hate it because they see farmers being paid ‘to do nothing’.   (Actually set-aside does have management costs).   

Happily there is talk of set-aside being fixed at 0% for next year – although there is a tremendous amount of European red tape to get through to ratify this (and we are in the summer recess apparently).    Already the environmentalists are worried.

Actually, we have incredibly cheap food at the moment.   Food as a percentage of the family spend is much much less than it was 25 years ago.    We could be in for quite a shock as the damage to the countryside is added up over the next few crucial weeks as the main cereal harvest approaches.

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