Farmer Diaries

 The Americans have chosen Donald Trump. He won decisively he even won the popular vote why Donald Trump won is an interesting question. A few weeks ago, a man found an old shopping list of 2018. The price of fulfilling that same order today was nearly 4 times as high in the last 12 months general mill has increased the price Cereals by 20% because of higher expenses or they failed to say, of course, was a massive soldering increases that the senior management of general Mills gave each other in In the order of 300% the reality today is that the US stock market has never been higher because profitability by US corporations have never been higher I have not eaten at McDonald’s restaurant for more than 20 years but when I heard last week that a big Mac french fries and a Coke was $17 it was evident that something was very wrong. Price gouging has become the norm in North America. The true lack of competition makes it possible for delivery points to jack up their price dramatically with n

 2024 will probably be our best year ever.   The numbers for the third quarters are now in, and while prices are on track with 2023 figures, the budgeted volume is almost 25% higher than last year.   Undoubtedly, the increased volume of produce and our new-ish high tunnels have had a major impact.   Demand from distributors remains strong and we are entirely satisfied with this segment, but where as in 2022 it represented nearly 80% of our volume, this year it was down to 45%, excluding the business that is channelled via our wholesalers but is destined for our subsidiaries.    One thing I had not counted on was the quick reproduction rate of our pigs, first pigs are very very good at reproducing, and that has increased our labour costs, but our direct-to-consumer business there has proven very successful and the 44 hams we have aging, are looking delicious.   Not the AAA equivalent to what the Spanish produce but a very attractive solution at a fraction of the cost.  Our current 44 ha

 So for some bizarre reason our farm has become a bit Of an outlier, what happened is that our farm is no longer tied to the electric grid. The reason has little to do with the cost of energy electric in particular and everything to do with our slurry and waste treatment plant that has become a bio digester. The new European rules on clean water are such that when we built our farm installing a bio digester was a very reasonable solution to a ongoing environmental problem It was not so much out of conviction that green energy was better, but we needed to transform the slurry into something that was useable and non-toxic, especially we need to make sure that the water was clean before it went back into the water system That is a big advantage of a Bio digester The reality is that all our cattle produce enough waste at our farm, produce enough waste that it made sense for us to have some redundancy and two bio digesters with the waste gas we heat our high tunnels, the houses, and all the