Farming Today

My Dear Wife was attending her first meeting as a bona fide councillor last week, so I tagged along. I went partly because I wanted to offer moral support, partly I’d heard a rumour of there being wine and brioche on offer after the event and partly because I had a question to ask my friend Richard, a local farmer who also masquerades as the village’s première adjutant – deputy mayor, as it were.

The meeting itself threw up a few interesting points, but first off the opposition “rump” thought it would be fun to get in a few digs about the fact that the date on the agenda (which had been posted to My Dear Wife and her new colleague in advance of the meeting) predated the formal confirmation from the Conseil d’Etat that no appeal to the case heard by the tribunal (see passem) had been lodged.

It was a bit off, the leader of the group said, to presume in advance of receiving this letter that these upstarts whose only claim to be on the council was that they had been properly elected should be included on the distribution, conveniently ignoring the fact that it was his complete misunderstanding of some very simple instructions that had precipitated the balls-up in the first place.

There was a brief, moderately heated, exchange in which it was fairly forcibly pointed out that the latter was merely the confirmation of about five earlier ‘phone calls and faxes and that the month’s grace observed by the two properly elected representatives was  as a courtesy, not a requirement. At some point someone mentioned something about growing up and getting out of the playground, which went down awfully well.

That out of the way the rest of the meeting went fairly smoothly. The perilous state of the commune’s finances were made clear, but I’m not going to dwell on them here for the time being, though I will mention the 10000-odd euro bill from an architect commissioned by our previous mayor for a “study” of the village square (which, I believe, concluded that we do have one, but offered little other useful information). The contract for this was signed back in 2006, but the final instalment of 4000 euros has only just been billed.

I’ve heard it said that a nephew of our previous mayor is an architect, but I have no idea if he has anything to with this pointless study.

Either way, there was a certain amount of mutinous muttering about paying the balance, but it was pointed out that the contract had been perfectly legally entered into and the commune had no choice. It rankled particularly since the council then went on to discuss whether 700 euros could somehow be found to replace some windows in one of the social housing units in the village, the existing ones being in such poor condition that the family living in the property couldn’t use half of it.

There was more of this sort of thing, and I’ll probably revisit some items at a later date.

But like I said, I had a question for Richard; which was this: what has been planted in the field next to us and what is it for?

The answer, it would seem, was flax, and it is being widely planted around here this year. There’s always a bit – easily recognised by its beautiful blue flowers – but this year there is an awful lot of it. But it isn’t being planted for food or for fodder, or even for linseed oil; it is being planted for fibre that will be turned into home insulation, which is more profitable.

Last year was not a good one for farmers. It is often thought that modern farmers in general (and, in some people’s mind, French farmers in particular) mostly harvest subsidies these days, but reality is rather different.

It doesn’t take an observational genius to notice that most French farmers are not driving around in new top-of-the-range BMWs. Certainly all the farmers of my acquaintance – with a single exception – have wives who work full time, either on the farm or elsewhere.

Farm incomes have plummeted in the past year. Grain prices have fallen to the point where for many farms each tonne harvested was worth less than it cost to produce. For mixed farms and livestock farms buying in feed, this should have meant lower feed prices, but the market for processed grains is dominated by a handful of big players, which doesn’t make for real competition, and feed prices stayed relatively high.

Similarly, the “purchasing power” (read “market distortion”) of the big supermarket chains kept a lid on meat and dairy prices low, building in yet another structural lose.

France receives about 20% of the payments made under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) but has about one third of the EU’s agricultural land, which looks like quite a good deal, in some ways. The purpose of CAP is to underpin domestic production of food for obvious strategic reasons and to defend it from rapacious competition from nations where production methods fall a little short of what is expected in Europe.

Brazil, for example, where cattle ranchers have taken to murdering local Indians to get their hands on more land, as in this article.

But, in practice, what CAP mostly does is subsidise supermarkets and food processing companies at the expense of the taxpayer and the farmer.

Little wonder that farmers seem so pleased to find alternatives to growing food.