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National
Shauna Corr

The Earth's Corr: Scare tactics around climate legislation won't help farmers beef up profits

Take a second and think about the veg on your plate, the steak you order on night out or the milk in your cuppa. How much does a good meal or a good brew mean to you? Does it leave a smile on your face as your belly fills?

Aside from air, water and warmth, there really is nothing more important to our survival and physical health than the food we eat. We’ve all seen and heard the ads on TV showing fields filled with happy cows; how the meat you eat is traced from farm to fork by supermarkets and how NI produce is among the world’s best.

But what if I told you those who are up with the birds in the rain, hail and shine, miss family holidays to tend their crops and animals and put in the back-breaking work to produce the food that keeps us all alive are coming under increasing pressure to stay afloat because of the paltry amount they take home for years of hard work. According to a few I’ve spoken to, farmers end up making very little from each cow, pig, chicken or sheep they rear despite funding most of the overheads and years of work.

Read more: Climate Bill NI: Agrifoods claim NI will lose 9 out of 10 cows and sheep if net-zero plan passed

According to Tim Lang, who penned Feeding Britain, Our Food Problems and How to Fix Them - primary producers (that’s farmers) take home around 5% of the total money in the food supply chain. His figures also show processors like Moy Park (*£31.6bn) and retailers such as Tesco (*30.3bn) get three times as much as agriculture (*£10.3bn) in terms of gross value added - which is an economic productivity measurement. (* figures in brackets indicate GVA for the whole UK for these industries, not the firms used as examples)

It doesn’t sound fair, does it?

When I heard a farmer say outright at the Irish Farmers Journal NI Climate Change Summit in Cookstown this week that 20 years ago he could have made a living from 70 cows, but now you would need 700 - I was horrified. They can sometimes even take a loss just to do a deal that will see the food they’ve produced used.

But what has all this got to do with the environment, you ask? Well, as our under-pressure farmers are forced to rear more and more animals and churn out more and more crops just to eke out a living - the cost to the world around us is getting greater.

According to the provisional Agricultural Census in NI for 2021, there were 1.6m cattle, 716,798 pigs, just over 2m sheep, almost 25m chickens and 11,320 other animals. We already know NI produces 80% more food than it needs and the growing weight of that burden is polluting our air, land, rivers, lakes and sea.

With the sheer number of animals on farms across the north hitting tens of millions each year, that means more slurry being spread on fields that cover around 80% of all land in the north. It also means greater imports of fertiliser and feed from parts of the world where forests and all their living things are destroyed to grow crops like soy.

It means more emissions from farm machinery, more gas-guzzling lorries to ferry the livestock about and a sector that is our largest emitter is having a huge impact on our biodiversity as well. None of this came up at the Irish Farmers Journal NI Climate Change Summit.

And when the farmer who raised the almost necessary intensification of farming to scrape by asked why farmers are not getting paid enough, no answers came. What the 400-odd farmers who turned out were shown was a few stats from an incredibly stark KPMG Ireland report on the impact a Net-Zero Climate Bill will have on the economics of farming.

The report outlined that night was commissioned by agri-food groups at a cost of around £40,000. It contained alarming figures like the loss of 86% of dairy cow, over 13,000 jobs and £11bn if NI aims for a 100% reduction on 1990 greenhouse gas emission levels. So it’s no wonder they’re all petrified and angry considering how they’re already being done over.

Despite the huge focus on money and what farmers will lose, I learned on the night it didn’t include farm subsidies (which make up around 87% of what farmers make) or the potential costs of climate change if we don’t act. Granted farm subsidies could fall dramatically because we are no longer in the EU - but it’s a glaring omission, all the same.

So what we have is a report outlining estimates - because that’s all they are - that doesn’t even take in the whole picture. It almost seems like the goal was to scare the life out of farmers.

I would argue that ignoring the cost of what climate change will do to farming is cutting off your nose to spite your face. We all know farmers face a litany of pressures, hence the stress course rolled out this week by Agriculture Minister Edwin Poots.

But instead of tackling the elephant in the room with how they are being ripped off on an industrial scale and practically forced into levels of farming that turned agriculture into the pollution monster it is today - they are being fed scary stories about how emissions reductions will ruin them altogether. There will always be a place for farming in NI - we are largely countryside after all.

But we should be aiming for an agricultural model that reduces the pressure on farmers, works in harmony with nature, supports biodiversity and crop diversification as well as improves soil health. Healthy land, animals, lakes, rivers and seas will only benefit those who make a living from the land, allowing them to continue producing healthy food well into the future rather than flogging a dead donkey on poisoned fields.

Irish Farmers Journal NI Climate Change Summit in Cookstown (Shauna Corr)

If almost 90% of farm subsidies come from government funding - why not pay farmers to let a large portion of their land rewild? We should also be paying them well to keep smaller herds that create less waste and emissions and changing legislation to reward farm improvements that help wildlife.

The industrialisation of agriculture is what’s got the sector in the pickle it is in now so the sector will have to change. What’s still up for discussion is how we help agriculture improve in a way that acknowledges the vital role of our farmers, while helping them do their part in the fight against climate change.

And as far as I can see, to get them there we need, it's time we had an urgent discussion about supermarkets and processors who appear to be taking advantage of farmers to boost their already monstrous profits. They both have a huge role to play in the emissions created through agriculture and it’s time they stepped up to the plate and paid fairly for the world class produce they slaughter and sell.

You can read the KPMG report here.

Read more: No environmental impact assessments on tree felling along Lagan

Read more: Tree planted by Belfast's first woman mayor to be chopped down

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