All Saints', Wrington 
Being a farmer today
Freddie Ford

FREDDIE FORD

Egg and Pig farmer aged 46, of Yeowood Farm, Iwood Lane, Wrington.
Freddie's family have been farmers in this area for five generations.
Today he has around 24,000 free range hens and 1,000 pigs.
He is married to Debbie and they have two young children;
their daughter Naomi was baptised in All Saints' the previous Sunday

The role of a farmer is the same today as it was for my father in the past, and hopefully will be for my children in the future: we are producers of quality food and custodians of our glorious countryside. What has changed is the perception of what a farmer is and what he does.

Whereas in the past farmers were regarded as pillars of the community, producing food that was considered good and wholesome, and our father's were paid a decent return for their toils, we are now required to produce food to ever more demanding and onerous standards, for ever decreasing financial returns. That is because we have to compete with cheap imported food that does not match our standards of production or our quality assurance schemes. This is not sustainable! Importing our food from all over the world is also very environmentally unfriendly.

You may have noticed your food going up in price recently. This is the result of the last 20 years of retailers buying solely on price. Now the stocks of the world's staple commodity, wheat, are at an all time low. Consequently the price of wheat is reaching unprecedented levels, which is forcing up the price of production of all other commodities. Ironically we are only now getting back to the incomes we received 15-20 years ago, yet in that time all our other costs have been increasing relentlessly**.

The future, and I hope there is one for my children and Haydn's and Ali's, lies, I believe, in reconnecting with our customers, and lets face it, we have 60 million of them right on our doorstep.

Only this week, in this the Government's "Year of Food and Farming", we have had Wrington Primary School visiting my farm, when we showed the Year 2 pupils about local food production.

So as you sit down to your Sunday roast— think local and think, sustamable, It doesn't have to cost the earth, but it might just save it!
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** In the last few weeks the price Freddie has had to pay for the cereals he feeds to his chickens has increased £80.00 per ton. Since he uses 3 tons per day, that means his_costs have risen_£240.00 per day, with no price increase from the_supermarkets to compensate.

These increased prices are caused by 3 factors outside his control -the Americans now converting up to 20% of tlieir cereal crops into bio-fuels, the Chinese eating more cereals in place of rice, and the very wet summers in this country, in Russia and elsewhere, resulting in much lower and poorer quality yields.

Like all poultry farmers, Freddie also has the spectre of "Bird 'Flu" hovering over his farm, whose consequences could he devastating.