How can we ensure that Britain keeps farming?

Agricultural journalist, smallholder and Editor of the Ferguson Heritage Magazine Jane Brooks, joins us for her regular look at the world of agricultural machinery.

As many British farmers stumble further down the rabbit hole of being price takers not price makers, grumbling as they face an uncertain future, I've sat glassy-eyed in front of YouTube, watching what seems to be a brand-new Farming Today programme.

There have been tractors, machinery and ground preparation in the strangest of places, seed drilling on French motorways and loads of straw on the move through major cities. Very entertaining, until you realise it's due to protest's taking place in countries such as France, Belgium and the Netherlands. It's been compulsive viewing, but not on the mainstream news channels, they're preoccupied with former game show contestants and the cult of celebrity.

European farmers have form for airing their grievances in a highly visual and occasionally effluent-driven way. Here in the UK, I've no doubt that such behaviour would have the Rozzers down on the miscreants within a minute of a tractor setting wheel on a motorway.

The EU politicians, caught up in the protests are squirming around in the aforementioned effluent and the current EU CAP reform consultation is finally looking at what the EU's proposed climate change policies will do to armers livelihoods and taking national food security into account.

CHEAPLY SOURCED FOOD

UK food producers face a similar dilemma, with worries climate change targets will be met by reducing production, seemingly at any cost to agriculture, our own nations food security and the economy.

The political solution seems to be a call to import even more food, which in these unstable times beggars' belief, and anyone that thinks the rest of the world can produce and send us cheap food into perpetuity, well in my opinion, they're delusional, and furthermore it would appear that on both sides of the house the UK government and farming have become completely detached.