Jeremy's Blog 16th December 2022: CAAV at Oxford - Focus on What You Can Control
This article by Jeremy Moody first appeared in the CAAV e-Briefing of 15th December 2022
The CAAV is presenting an event for those attending the Oxford Farming Conference, meeting in-person for the first time since 2020. This Conference has been meeting for many decades at the start of the year, bringing together farmers, advisers, policy makers and others from across the UK and further afield, looking ahead at policy and practice critical in these challenging times.
Last year, we used a remote presentation to look at the prospects for rural land use in the UK as new uses compete with old ones amid changing markets, climate and technology. That built on the CAAV publication, Future Rural Land Uses in the United Kingdom: A Review of Pressures and Opportunities, and can be seen on this link.
With this Conference’s theme of Farming a New Future, we will continue the theme of the farmer controlling what he can. The shocks of the last two years dramatise how the shifting balance of cost, risk and reward challenge every farm business. Pigs have been followed by poultry as well as fruit and vegetables, from field scale to glasshouses, as reward has not fully reacted to increased cost and risk. Avian influenza then adds risk to poultry and eggs, climate to other sectors. Combinable crops and livestock become more challenging.
Pandemic, followed by disrupted supply chains, massively increased energy and so fertiliser prices and then the invasion of Ukraine with its major food production have jolted national economies, especially in western Europe with the UK, compounded by a universal shortage of labour.
Within agriculture and the rural economy, each farm anyway faces and has to find its own answers in changing markets, changing technologies, changing public policies, environmental concerns, climate change and other factors. Businesses that have relied on area payments to protect them from change will have much to catch up, whether as England and then Wales withdraw them or Scotland makes them much more conditional. Again, the balance of cost and reward will make new schemes more a matter of rational choice for each farm.
It can be easy to be overwhelmed by the force and multiplicity of these pressures. It is equally easy, indeed seductive, to be distracted by topics that divert attention from what matters, sometimes with the appeal of displacement activity. The logic of public policy is for farms to see themselves more clearly as businesses, not to look externally, to government or others, for answers.
As we appear to be entering a new era, one of greater risk and uncertainty, that requires a focus on the central point of managing change, not be managed by it. Core questions include understanding what can be controlled and where value lies, can be protected or created. We hope to explore these issues at the Conference.