A poster at this week's Kilnsey Show read: "In 1966, it took 25 minutes to earn the price of a loaf of bread. In 2007, it takes 4½."
You could read that as good news. The farmers see it as an illustration of the relationship between farm incomes and the average – and a summary of the difficulty of getting a government to act.
One reason food is cheap is that a lot of the farmers are living in other countries. Either their wages are lower or their production costs are – and their products can be shipped around the world on tax-free fuel, while British hauliers pay for our guilt about global warming.
Efforts to tackle global warming have also put up the cost of animal feed, by a roundabout route. Penalties on the burning of fossil fuels mean farmland being turned over to bio-fuels, so there is less grain on the market to cushion the shock of a run of poor harvests around the world. And the price of taking a cow indoors for the winter or giving a sheep a dietary supplement – both often necessary on the hills of Yorkshire – has suddenly doubled.
Kilnsey, in Upper Wharfedale, is one of the prettiest and most old-fashioned of the Yorkshire shows and, for trippers, a fashionable alternative to the Great Yorkshire. That is one reason it was chosen for the launch of a new campaign, Food and Farming 4 Real (FF4R).
The point of the campaign is to tell us we are all customers of theirs – through tourism, water supplies, grouse shooting, village craft shops or the rest of the farming industry.
The big sheep breeding sales are just coming up, at Skipton, Hawes, Pateley Bridge, Otley...
Lowland farmers will go to buy "store lambs", for fattening, from the hill farmers, who have plenty of space and not much else they can do with it. The hills are also, traditionally, where a lot of important breeding stock comes from. Some breeds just like it up there.
Steve Crabtree, one of the founders of the FF4R campaign, sums up: "The Swaledale ewe is crossed with the Blue-Faced Leicester to get the North English Mule, that is purchased by a lowland breeder to fatten or to put to a Texel or a Suffolk. Lose the Swaledales off the heather moorland and you lose the sheep industry."
The greener slopes of the hills do a similar job for the cattle business.
It has worked out that way because it works well. But one reason why using the hills made economic sense in the first place was subsidy. There used to be incentives to farm Severely Disadvantaged Areas, like the Moors and Dale tops. Then it was the Hill Farm Allowance.
Now that is on the way out and almost everything else is consolidated into Single Farm Payments which, roughly speaking, are based on area. By 2012, even the SFPs will be gone.
When the EU-driven reforms started, two years ago, the idea was to move towards paying farmers to nurse their land for future generations rather than to produce as much as possible. The new campaign is just one sign that the plan threatens to go badly wrong.
While the details of future funding are still being finalised, in slow discussions which give the RSPB as much clout as the NFU, the world food situation changes like the weather.
Two years ago, grain farmers were in trouble and subsidies were weighted in favour of arable land. Now grains fetch top prices.
A year ago, supermarkets were taking advantage of a worldwide glut of milk and forcing dairy farmers out of business. Suddenly they are bidding against each other for supplies.
The hill farmers once looked like a picturesque hangover from the past. But now that they are cutting back their flocks and herds, everyone is panicking about the consequences. The Duke of Devonshire, North Yorkshire County Council, the Country Landowners and Yorkshire Forward, were among those who stumped up to help launch Food and Farming 4 REAL – essentially, a PR campaign for the hills. REAL stands for Rural Business & Regeneration, Education & Environment, Agriculture & Arts, Lifestyle & Leisure.
The argument is that losing the animals means losing much more. Without grazing of the hills, walkers and hunters would be fighting through bramble, blackthorn and bracken. It has already happened on some Lakeland fells.
Without the need to keep livestock from wandering, there would be no incentive to keep up the stone barns and walls which complete the pattern on the picture postcards.
The whole of our "traditional" landscape, we are reminded, has been created over the past 900 years, since Cistercian monks demonstrated what could be achieved with organised hard work.
The FF4R team came together in response to a Defra plan to organise a farm visit for every child over the coming year. But what looks like a thoroughly inadequate funding figure for that project has now been announced and the campaign is in the course of switching direction to compensate – planning to go into the cities, for example, rather than waiting for the cities to come out to the country.
Beef farmer Steve Crabtree, 49, tenant at Bolton Park, Bolton Abbey, says: "Everybody thinks farmers whinge all the time. We wanted to do something constructive.
"We want people to understand what they support by buying local.
"We have to learn to do without subsidies and I don't really want to talk about them, but it is worth making this point – out of every £10 I still get in support, I make £2. The rest is subsidy for the animals. You won't get British meat that cheap again.
"We have seen what short-sightedness did to the dairy industry. We are asking people to make sure the same does not happen to the red meat industry."
He has it "on the best possible authority" that this summer's foot-and-mouth scare caused an immediate meat supply crisis.
Modern supply chain theory tries to keep storage to a minimum. Within three days of the livestock movement freeze, he says, the supermarkets were ordering the slaughter of Hungarian beef to keep their shelves full.
"Just imagine," he says, "how the livestock trade is going to look when China and India really get a taste for red meat."
Mike Keeble, another of the campaign founders, comments: "It has taken since Jesus Christ to put six billion people on this planet.
"The forecast is a 50 per cent increase in the next 30 years. Now is not the time to lose food production resources."
foodandfarming4real.org includes links to suppliers of Yorkshire produce.
What the hill farmers say
Farmer David Hugill and dog Blue
Now he has none. Keeping sheep on poor ground has simply ceased to pay, he says, since he lost subsidies amounting to £25 an animal.
He runs a reduced suckler cow business and a free-range poultry farm which has kept him afloat.
Some farmers get money from English Nature to keep sheep in the scenery.
Some hang on in because their sheep are all they have and they regard the new Single Farm Payment as a subsidy to carry on.
Mr Hugill doubts if it makes sense in simple cash terms to keep more than they need to continue qualifying as farmers.
Even the Single Farm Payment is on its way out. By 2012, it is estimated, four out of five hill animals will have gone unless market prices go up.
The Moors National Park Authority reckons it is losing 1,200 sheep a year.
Mr Hugill can see the gorse and birch coming back where his animals used to graze.
He is part of an NFU discussion group trying to advise the Government on how to reform hill farm support.
One suggestion is to pay farmers to keep down the kind of vegetation which catches fire in hot summers.
They might also be made custodians of the moorland peat – which releases big-time carbon emissions if it breaks down.
"Certainly existing policy is not working," he says.
"Farmers are not getting out of the business, because they can't afford to. But they are selling their animals, even before we can see what happens next."
Dick Addison, Deepdale Valley, near Barnard Castle: "I started farming on my own in 1947. And I would willingly go back to the conditions of 1947."
Alastair Davy, Marrick, near Richmond: "Lower and lower returns for livestock mean more and more time off the farm, doing a second job, so you haven't got the time to maintain walls or cut thistles."
Robert Lambert, Kilnsey: "Rebuilding dry-stone walls costs £30 a metre. That's an expensive hobby, compared to putting up posts and wire."
A Swaledale sheep farmer: "In my father's accounts for 1961, I can see a new tractor cost £650 and wool fetched £2 a kilo. Now, a tractor is £30,000 and I get 11p a kilo. They used to reckon the wool paid the rent on the farm. Now it doesn't even pay for the shearing."The full article contains 1584 words and appears in n/a newspaper.
