Unlike most of my peers, I am new to farming, having been in the business for only 5 years, I remember a time when I worked in the City and had an entire compliance department...
I mentioned that on the third Thursday of the month, many of the local farmers meet at a specific pub, and discuss general farming concerns, a few months ago our local MP was present. He's a bit of a libertarian and mentioned the scourge of paperwork for farmers and that blablabla...Anyway, he asked what I thought of all the reports we prepared and how I was affected. I told him, that on my farm we are unaffected, virtually 99% of all our reporting is done automatically, collated in the cloud, and that we spend less than 10 minutes a week worrying about agency reports, but that I doubt that anyone anywhere ever reads any of the 25 weekly reports we sent.
We are an industrial farm, and we produce 5 reports a day for various UK agencies, there are more than 200,000 farms in the UK, and assuming that 2/3rds are commercial farms, that means that on a good day, various agencies receive more than 600,000 reports from UK commercial farms. What do you think are the odds that agencies are set up for dealing with big data from farms? How about zero!
Farming and dealing with money are not the same thing, every minute of every day someone is trying to pull a fast one in the financial district. Just check your Junk email folder, aside from certain appendage growth miracle products, most of the stuff is get-rich-quick schemes.
The problem with agriculture is that some of our products are fungible; without a label can you tell if the broccoli in your hands is organic? It's even worse for tomatoes. Yet the difference in price is significant. Transforming an ordinary broccoli into an organic one will dramatically improve your profitability if you are not an organic farmer. If that was the objective or paperwork, the day-to-day result of regulation then I could get on board, but none of it is concerned with that aspect. And yes if someone offers you a 20% return -- it's a scam!
The number of reports being generated on a farm is substantial, and we only got the tail end of the European Union reporting requirements (We never reported to the EU for although we were a farm, Brexit had already passed and the implementation date was known). But also our farm, from day one, received no subsidies of any kind, from any level of government.
Note: As a young man I travelled to India, with my then-girlfriend. At one point for an unremembered reason, we were in a government official office in New Delhi. We walked in and I noticed the wall at the back of his office, you could not see the wall to a height above my head, it was stacks of files, each file was tied with a red ribbon.. seriously
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