Skip to main content

European farmers

For years the green movement has tried to tame European farmers.  Probably because they view that farmers are conservative (e.g. they don't vote for the green parties) and partly because reading the ingredients in retail pesticides will make you doubt the justification farmers have for using the commercial version.

Here in the UK, since Brexit things have improved immeasurably for the average commercial farmer.  Government legislation that was imposed or suggested by the EU was immediately binned by the government.  Farmers had a freeer hand, aside from the eye-watering rise in the cost of pesticides.  

The European green movement has been adopting pesticide use legislation with little consultation with farmers.  Their recent target of reducing the use of pesticides by 50% was born in a think tank with political expediency and sound bites in mind.   The result of such legislation would see ordinary farmers face a massive yield collapse.  Farming is already a precarious adventure, reducing revenues by a third while keeping costs constant would lead to bankruptcy even for large commercial farms.  

We know that it is the large commercial grain farms that made the threat, amidst the protests, and projected grain shortage this year (future prices have trebled), commercial farmers have told EU politicians that they will hold off on planting this season (planting starts in a few weeks) unless the EU backs down.  A simple economic decision, the large commercial farmers were better off selling off their seeds instead of planting with a 30% reduction in pesticides and fertilizers.  The losses for the farms would be less.

This time the EU farmers won.  They will not next time.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ok so I lied...a little (revised)

When we began looking at farming in 2013/14 as something we both wanted to do as a "second career" we invested time and money to understand what sector of farming was profitable.  A few things emerged, First, high-quality, source-proven, organic farm products consistently have much higher profit margins.  Secondly, transformation accounted for nearly 80% of total profits, and production and distribution accounted for 20% of profits: Farmers and retailers have low profit margins and the middle bits make all the money. A profitable farm operation needs to be involved in the transformation of its produce.  The low-hanging fruits: cheese and butter.  Milk, generates a profit margin of 5% to 8%, depending on milk quality.  Transformed into cheese and butter, and the profit margin rises to 40% (Taking into account all costs).  Second:  20% of a steer carcass is ground beef quality.  The price is low, because (a) a high percentage of the carcass, and (b)...
Post a Comment
Read more

Spray painting Taylor Swift G650 aircraft (updated)

 First, a bit of paint will not harm anyone.  These climate activities are going to learn two things in the next few days:  (1) Trespassing at an airport is a felony almost anywhere in the world.  That means criminal prosecution.   (2) removing paint from an aircraft is expensive.   So these climate activists are about to find out the reach of the British criminal system and it will not be pleasant, the UK has very strict laws about that, I would be surprised if cleaning the aircraft of all the paint will cost less than $100,000.     I am sure that when they planned (premeditation) this little show they had a very valid logic to doing this.  Tonight, they are probably realizing the depth of their troubles.   I understand that in the UK it's a minimum one-year jail sentence.    Also, good luck travelling with a criminal trespass charge against you.  I am relatively certain that the airline industry will ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Janet Yellen from China supporter to Hawk...

There is rarely serious news in the world these days, it seems that most newspapers are filled with headlines and little else, and then Ms Yellen went to China.  Secretary Yellen has long been known in the Biden administration as the voice of moderation when dealing with China, yet as her trip which concluded yesterday a hawk was born:  She warned the Chinese against dumping goods in the United States.    fighting words! The American administration is very concerned about the lack of Chinese domestic consumption.   Even before the COVID-19 epidemic, there were already the beginning signs of a slowdown, automobile sales were off.   China is facing domestic deflation (a clear sign of collapsing demand) China imports few consumer goods, they import raw materials and intermediary goods.   It seems that the American administration is concerned that the Chinese administration will dump consumer goods abroad to keep its manufacturing machinery ...
Post a Comment
Read more