An off the cuff and possibly naive rant/blog based on reading today’s Guardian about the mega pig farm being planned for Derbyshire by people who ought to know better…in fact we all ought to know better, but lots of us forget!
Actually, i am sure that good farmers do care about their animals’ welfare; and they do care about their immediate environment. This is more an argument about growth, prices, costs, and people’s jobs and the structure of the the rural environment in the future, if anybody is really bothered about it.
I have asked this question before, and it will be one that i probaly ask until the day i pop off. Why do we do all this stuff in the name of bringing food prices down? I am not advocating food price increase, I just ask that people in a bigger society ask why, and how important in the whole scheme of things, it is imperative to produce bacon or pork chops or sausages for tuppence a pack less than we are currently paying?
Who benefits from this tuppence (or five pence, or whatever)? The pig? No. A life outside would be their choice of existence.The farm staff, who often work in conditions that 95% of people would find intolerable? No. They won’t be getting a pay rise, i can guarantee that. The farmer and his fellow company directors? Probably not–they will sell more pigs, probably, but at a lower price almost certainly (that’s the aim)–so they will work harder, have more financial worries, and end up roughly where they are now. They would argue that to do nothing, to carry on as currently, will take them financially backwards.
So will others in the industry benefit? No. Actually they will be worse off. Big places like the one planned will drive down the competitive costs of producing pigs, and so the smaller farmer will go out of the pig business. He will lose his enterprise and his staff will lose their jobs. Another farm will possibly become empty. This is the rub–the continusing concentration of this industry–any industry–in fewer and fewer hands means fewer viable farms, fewer farm jobs, emptier rural communities, closing schools and losing public transport and other services, because people don’t live there anymore.
This is a considerable price to pay for the ‘benefit’ of possibly cheaper bacon or pork chops–and even that might not materialise because the shareholders in the major retailers who sell the majority of these products might take every opportunity to increase their own margins!
We are talking pennies here, literally. Food is an essential, it is the most important aspect of our daily lives–along with water and air–yet lots of us think nothing from time to time of spending hundreds or thousands on holidays, furniture, cars, or filling up the tank of petrol or diesel twice per week. It always strikes me as bizarre, these priorities, and the lengths we go to, to get food more cheaply.
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Tags: Animal Welfare, Blog comment, Eastbrook Farm, Organic Meat, organic pork
This entry was posted on January 19, 2011 at 11:53 am and is filed under Animal Welfare, Helen Browning Organic, Organic Farming, Soil Association. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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poor pigs, poor people
An off the cuff and possibly naive rant/blog based on reading today’s Guardian about the mega pig farm being planned for Derbyshire by people who ought to know better…in fact we all ought to know better, but lots of us forget!
Actually, i am sure that good farmers do care about their animals’ welfare; and they do care about their immediate environment. This is more an argument about growth, prices, costs, and people’s jobs and the structure of the the rural environment in the future, if anybody is really bothered about it.
I have asked this question before, and it will be one that i probaly ask until the day i pop off. Why do we do all this stuff in the name of bringing food prices down? I am not advocating food price increase, I just ask that people in a bigger society ask why, and how important in the whole scheme of things, it is imperative to produce bacon or pork chops or sausages for tuppence a pack less than we are currently paying?
Who benefits from this tuppence (or five pence, or whatever)? The pig? No. A life outside would be their choice of existence.The farm staff, who often work in conditions that 95% of people would find intolerable? No. They won’t be getting a pay rise, i can guarantee that. The farmer and his fellow company directors? Probably not–they will sell more pigs, probably, but at a lower price almost certainly (that’s the aim)–so they will work harder, have more financial worries, and end up roughly where they are now. They would argue that to do nothing, to carry on as currently, will take them financially backwards.
So will others in the industry benefit? No. Actually they will be worse off. Big places like the one planned will drive down the competitive costs of producing pigs, and so the smaller farmer will go out of the pig business. He will lose his enterprise and his staff will lose their jobs. Another farm will possibly become empty. This is the rub–the continusing concentration of this industry–any industry–in fewer and fewer hands means fewer viable farms, fewer farm jobs, emptier rural communities, closing schools and losing public transport and other services, because people don’t live there anymore.
This is a considerable price to pay for the ‘benefit’ of possibly cheaper bacon or pork chops–and even that might not materialise because the shareholders in the major retailers who sell the majority of these products might take every opportunity to increase their own margins!
We are talking pennies here, literally. Food is an essential, it is the most important aspect of our daily lives–along with water and air–yet lots of us think nothing from time to time of spending hundreds or thousands on holidays, furniture, cars, or filling up the tank of petrol or diesel twice per week. It always strikes me as bizarre, these priorities, and the lengths we go to, to get food more cheaply.
Like this:
Tags: Animal Welfare, Blog comment, Eastbrook Farm, Organic Meat, organic pork
This entry was posted on January 19, 2011 at 11:53 am and is filed under Animal Welfare, Helen Browning Organic, Organic Farming, Soil Association. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.