A link to background information in an article about David Handley, chairman of Farmers for Action (below), has been included for visitors from other countries. The following article is republished in full, with permission.
DAVID HANDLEY (FARMERS FOR ACTION) ON RETIREMENT
Had farmgate prices kept pace with increasing costs it wouldn’t have been a problem
Mmmm . . . The one great thing about being a farmer is that there are always plenty of people out there ready to give you advice. To tell you how to do something you’ve been doing for years; or to tell you you’ve been doing it wrong all this time; to suggest improvements to the business which you know won’t work; and generally to tell you how to run your affairs.
Land agents are the biggest and worst offenders, known for regularly pontificating about farming issues, basing their opinions on what they learned in a warm classroom while gaining their land management degree rather than on any hands-on experience involving, for instance, shovelling muck at half-past five on a cold winter’s morning. They talk from the perspective of the top sector of the industry – those who own and farm a couple of thousand acres or more and are as a result of the flexibility that gives them (and a couple of decades of pocketing area-based payments from Brussels) pretty comfortably off.
Where the land agents’ advice ceases to have any relevance is when you get down the scale of the chap owning a couple of hundred acres – or to the tenant farming sector. And there, particularly when they start talking about retirement plans and succession deals, they might as well be discussing arrangements on a different planet. The fact is that many tenant farmers can not only see retirement age coming down the road it has arrived and they have passed through onto the other side. With little or no hope of an easy transition into a more leisured lifestyle, barring Boris pulling something out of the hat or – the more likely of the two – a pure miracle.
Most of us have been salting away what profits we can for years with the intention of accruing sufficient funds to enable us to retire into a degree of comfort.
Unfortunately the cost of complying with an ever-mounting regulatory burden has rather scuppered that plan. The retirement pot has had to be plundered time and again to finance improvements and alterations demanded by the system.
Had farmgate prices kept pace with these increasing costs it wouldn’t have been a problem.
Had the UK Government not insisted on gold-plating EU regulations to make them even more onerous and expensive to implement it wouldn’t have been so bad.
Had we managed to keep the Milk Marketing Board rather than allowing foreign commercial interests to take over our dairy sector things would undoubtedly have been easier.
But none of this happened with the result that we all face another five or ten years in harness as we attempt to build up enough funds to exit the industry with a degree of dignity.
All the while of course, seeing our chances of moving into a home in the locality becoming even more remote as wealthy commuters and second-home owners snap up every house and cottage in sight and keep the rural property market fizzing like a pressure cooker.
Not that the land agents, most of whom work for partnerships which also trade rural properties, are likely to complain about that. Naturally.
And presumably once the tenant farms have been split up, with the land going one way and the houses into a new life as a commuter’s rural retreat and the village streets are dark on a winter’s night because the houses are only occupied at week-ends they will sit back and congratulate themselves on a job well done.
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Food concerns 
Julian Rose emails:
That one really hurt – not a word that isn’t absolutely real. David did a sterling job with Farmers for Action and is unlikely to be bettered..
My only thought is: direct sales. Every farmer now needs his own customers and not reliance on a corporate.