Another organic supplier calls time on supplying supermarkets

I had an interesting conversation the other day with Matthew Murton, a near neighbour in Wales but also, until last year, a large scale organic vegetable producer in Herefordshire.

Matthew used to supply several of the UK supermarkets, an organic wholesaler, Flights in Herefordshire, and some of the larger box schemes including Able and Cole and Riverford.

Matthew is a highly organised, efficient producer, but also has a strong ethical commitment to the quality of life of his team of workers and he built up his business on very high quality rented Herefordshire land to quite a large scale - around 150 acres, before the recession hit.  Since then he has been progressively reducing his area of production which was down to 45 acres last year and he has now decided to throw in the towel and sell up altogether.

I asked him why he had reached this decision, and he said that it had got to the point where he could no longer feel any sense of satisfaction from dealing with supermarket and other buyers in a cut throat environment where price was the only issue, ethics didn't matter and organic vegetables had become a commodity traded on international markets.  He told me that no one was immune from these pressures, even the larger box schemes, and that in his view market conditions were so depressing that he felt we would probably have to wait for some kind of a collapse of the existing position and marketing structures which are leading, quite literally, to the survival of the largest and fittest at the expense of the small, beautiful and ethical, before favourable conditions would exist again for his kind of project.

Although I was pretty shocked to hear this, on reflection I can't say I'm entirely surprised.  You only have to visit a few supermarkets (I won't name them since I think there are now virtually no exceptions) to realise that the recession linked response of the multiple retailers has been to pile it high, sell it cheap and compromise on the production story, to the point where, to use the infamous quote of Eric Schlosser, if you knew the real story behind the food you wouldn't want to buy it.

Sadly that includes organic produce which, although there are of course exceptions, is in the main now often supplied by conventional packers who are often part of multi national trading groups buying from industrial scale farms from all over the world.

None of the individual participants are responsible for this depressing scenario, it is just the inevitable outcome of a world where consumer ignorance is compounded by an economic and policy environment where the polluter doesn't pay and sustainable producers are not adequately rewarded for the wider beneficial outcomes resulting from their farming systems.  None of this diminishes my optimism that a 'tipping point' could lie round the corner, after which the surviving models of best practice will become beacons of inspiration and the teachers of the truly sustainable food systems that everyone will need to adopt at some point in the 21st century, but in the meantime it is dog eat dog out there in the marketplace.

Fighting the Fugg

4th February 2012

It is 4.30 am, my alarm goes, and I fumble to silence it so I can continue to stew in the toxic but somehow addictive juice of my own negative thoughts and anxieties. Every part of my body, is in revolt against the prospect of getting up. My mind is reinforcing the resistance, reminding me that I have had a hard week with much travel and that my poor, frail body deserves a rest. 

But my son Sam is coming to make cheese at 7am and I have to be finished by then, so I have no choice. Pulling on my clothes, I struggle, full of self-pity, across the freezing yard into the new milking parlour. It is minus 5°C and despite our attempts to insulate it, there are many frozen pipes and valves. At sixty one, why on earth do I continue punish myself in this way?  I get the cows out, rake fresh straw from our 2011 oat crop over the cubicle beds and scrape the cow manure out with our 1967 Massey Ferguson 135 tractor,  after which I manage to get the first four clusters working. It is still really cold, I feel turgid and ill, and I still can't imagine why I am such a masochist. 

Half an hour later, my blood is starting to flow, and out of nowhere, a positive thought arises. I imagine how we could grow better grass this year, and hang all the gates before the cows go out. By the time I have milked another 30 cows my mood has completely transformed. I resolve to ask my boys if they will help out this evening, they will be thrilled, and I hold optimistically to the idea that next week there could be a global transformation to more sustainable food systems. Suddenly, I am full of the joy which can only come from physical work on the land.

What is this strange transformation which has taken place in me, so quickly that I could hardly identify the second when it occurred? I can see that there is much here for me to observe, because this is, in a microcosm, the story of my life. I am constantly in the grip of changing states of positive and negative energy, and paradoxically it is only through conquering the intense physical resistance of getting up when my body absolutely refuses, that I set into motion this sequence of events which unusually for me, I've actually managed to observe, at least for a moment.

What is in question is my attitude towards the effort. Why do I spend so much of my life either avoiding this effort against what seems to be some kind of lawful resistance, when I have been given this incredible insight? It is a mystery, but I know full well in writing this that the effort required next time the alarm goes at four thirty will seem just as insurmountable.

That same evening, the battle ground between the mild Atlantic air and the continental frost has shifted, the air has become balmy and the boys join me to help with the evening milking. At ten, William still has to climb on the steps to open the doors to let the cows out, but he is actually starting to be useful. Ben and Harry also, although it has to be said that James who is still only four is less so, but since he is so delectable his company is enough. Perhaps one of the four of them will yet emerge as a replacement milker!

Milking Cows at Christmas

In addition to melting down into some sort of Christmas solstice soup; sleeping, eating, drinking and recovering, I have also been playing my traditional role of doing more than my usual share of milking and routine farm work. 

Many people, including me at 5am in the morning, would think of this as the last thing they would willingly want to do at Christmas, but it has to be said that once initial resistance is overcome three hours of milking invariably results in a transformation of attitude, not to mention a genuine appetite for breakfast! 
 

Our new milking parlour took nearly a year to commission and ironically, for all the extra gadgets, it hasn't yet cut our total milking time very much. Partly due to the challenge of getting to know the new equipment, but also because of recurring teething problems and things just not being in the right place.  That said, on Boxing Day morning, the force was with me, the cows udders were clean and I managed to milk around 65 cows in approximately one hour and 20 minutes which isn't that bad.

The other thing we do here is to nurse suckle some of our dairy calves.  As all informed consumers of dairy products will realise, the process of milking involves a 'tradeoff' where the cows produce more milk, the calves have less and we drink the surplus.  At the modern extremity, most dairy farmers these days don't even rear their calves on milk at all, preferring to use reconstituted milk powder which is cheaper and more adapted to mechanised feeding units.  We are veering in the opposite direction, preferring ideally to suckle our calves, either on their mums or on foster cows, although at the time of writing perhaps only 25% of our annual throughput enjoy this luxury, the rest being bucket fed on whole milk.  

The system we adopt is to allow the suckler cows to run with the herd during the day and just before each milking we let them in with the suckling calves.  It is very easy to do this since the sucklers actually cue up to go into the pen.  Interestingly when they have finished being suckled they are more than happy to leave them for the next 10 hours or so to join their colleagues, eat silage and lie down in the cubicles without be hassled by their adopted offspring.

However, even the mothers of foster calves do bond quite strongly, so when the time comes for weaning, which we normally practice at around 12 weeks, there are generally a couple of noisy days and nights with cows and calves calling for each other.  This of course is what gives dairy farming a bad name and ultimately there is no getting away from this, milking cows almost inevitably involves separating calves from their mothers at some stage.

As mentioned before, just about all our milk is being made into cheese by our son Sam and his wife Rachel, although on Christmas day and Boxing day they did have break so we had a rare visit from the milk tanker who collected just over 2000 litres (we're producing around 1000 litres a day right now) destined for Rachel's Dairy.  So if you buy Rachel's Dairy yoghurt products over the next week or so it may well be that a percentage of the milk comes from our cows!