A Greedy Man in a Hungry World: How. Jay Rayner
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had to find some way to sell, in a manner which might literally cut their losses. What they needed were customers, and in the British supermarkets that was exactly what they found.
‘It was just as we were about to harvest,’ Peter Kedge says. ‘All of a sudden we got a message from our agents telling us the supermarkets we normally supply had decided to bring in foreign plums.’ It didn’t matter that the orchards of Kent were bulging with the things, that Britain has an ancient and venerable plum-growing history, or that for years a debate had been growing around the importance of sourcing local produce where possible to cut down on food miles. The supermarkets were going to follow the money. British growers estimated that they had to sell each punnet of plums to the supermarkets at 65p to break even. Spanish agents were offering their plums at 45p a punnet, simply to get them moving. ‘We couldn’t pick and pack our plums for that money.’
And so Kedge did the one thing which to him made any economic sense. ‘We decided not to pick them all, to just leave a significant amount to rot in the orchards.’ Dozens of tonnes of perfect British plums fell from the trees and decayed where they lay, until the air in the orchards was heavy with the boozy smell of rotting fruit and they buzzed with the sound of happy fruit flies. ‘It’s hard to describe what it’s like watching your harvest literally go to waste,’ Kedge said. ‘It’s horrible. There’s nothing worse.’
Peter Kedge’s family originally planted fifty acres of plum orchards back in 1999. Over the years, as supermarkets’ buying policies had bitten hard, that had been reduced to thirty-five acres, as trees were ‘grubbed out’. In the wake of the disaster of 2011 the farmer once again made plans to grub out trees – to destroy the capacity of his orchards. It was, according to the National Farmers Union (NFU), a story repeated across Britain: tonne after tonne of perfect plums left to rot, prime trees cut down, orchards emptied.
This is one of the complications of the fruit-growing business. If you are in arable crops – wheat or barley or maize or rapeseed – you can follow the ups and downs of supply and demand, changing your crop from one year to the next depending upon who wants what. Fruit farmers can’t do that. ‘Planting a plum tree is a major investment,’ Kedge says. ‘It takes about six years from initial planting to recoup the investment. And after that you might have another ten years in which to make money.’ The killing of trees simply ends that story. A little bit more of Britain’s ability to feed itself also dies.
The brutal, clear-eyed, wake up and smell the prime, Grade A, dark roast Taste the Extra Special Finest Difference coffee is: this is just business. This is what supermarkets do. Complaining about a supermarket chasing the cheapest price is like wandering into a brothel and complaining about all the shagging going on in there. And it’s true, up to a point. These corporate behemoths have shareholders to think about and profits to make. In the short term that is exactly what they do, and they do it extraordinarily well. Tesco made £1.9 billion in the first six months of 2011, up 12.1 per cent on the previous year. Sainsbury’s made £395 million, up 6.6 per cent. Asda made £803 million, and that was a drop of over 10 per cent. But there is a bigger, dirtier picture. The business of food supply is full of consequences, and some of them are very serious indeed.
Consider the dodo. A butcher trading in prime dodo meat – such lovely animals, all free-range, look at the drumsticks on that – would have been laughing all the way to the bank in 1620. He would have had access to all the dodo he could possibly want. By 1681, however, when the last dodo was killed by the last scurvy-ridden Dutch sailor to feed himself, it might not have looked like such a smart business model. Right now it feels like the big supermarkets are in the dodo extinction business.
The buyers drive such hard bargains, under such extraordinarily unfair terms, that British farming is being decimated. (And the way is being opened to fraud. The scandal around horsemeat being found in processed food products labelled as beef, which first broke across Britain and then Europe in January of 2013, was attributed by many to pressures on price. With beef at an all time high of £2.75 a kilo deadweight on the international markets and horsemeat at around £1.85, the substitution by unscrupulous traders made economic sense in the face of profit margins cut to the bone by supermarket buyers.) In the summer of 2011 food journalist Alex Renton tried to get farmers to talk, on the record, about their dealings with the supermarkets. Most of them refused. They demanded anonymity. They insisted upon off-the-record briefings. Whilst they are obviously lawful companies, the supermarkets did come across less as food retailers and more like mafias, hell-bent on extortion. Anybody who has done business with them might not think the comparison over-blown: the supermarkets would insist upon legally binding contracts that would tie producers into supplying them, but without a specified price. The supermarkets could, with little or no warning, simply reject a consignment of produce, insisting it didn’t hit quality thresholds. The producers would be required to carry the cost of any two-for-one and discounting offers. They would have to get their harvests packaged at plants designated by the supermarkets, often at twice the price it might cost to get the job done independently. (In June 2011 Peter Kendall, chairman of the NFU, told a parliamentary committee that some of these packers and processors pay a portion of the premium extracted from the farmers to the very supermarkets who had enforced the extra charge, as a kind of kickback.)
Most of all there is the issue of price. The best-known sector of British farming to suffer is dairy. Not long ago I spent a day working on a dairy farm in Cornwall. It’s not easy. I got up at four o’clock in the morning, which surely must be regarded as cruel and unusual punishment in itself. I did so, merely so I could stand in a cow shed and dodge plumes of steaming shite being fired out of big animals under pressure. A lot of the job seems to involve shit – dodging it, hosing it off, scraping it up. I weaved my way around the stamping, clanking hooves to wipe down teats with disinfectant. I felt the suck and pull of the automated milking system as the rubber plugs went on. I washed floors, scraped yards, piled hay, interacted with more shit, and then gave thanks to the gods that my day job mostly involves sitting at tables, either eating or writing about what I’ve eaten or feeling smug about what I’ve written about what I’ve eaten while wondering what I’ll eat next.
For all this – the brutal, grinding hard labour of milk production – the supermarkets were at that point willing to pay, through their intermediaries, the princely sum of 25p a litre. The cost of producing milk is around 27p a litre. It’s not a brilliant business model, is it? It’s not even on nodding terms with a brilliant business model. The majority of dairy farmers had, courtesy of supermarket buying policies, been sentenced to make a loss on every litre of milk they sold. The farmer who let me onto his farm as the worst work-experience student in world history said he hoped they might make enough to keep their heads above water by renting out holiday accommodation or selling the calves from their herd for beef. In short, the only way he might make money as a producer of milk was not by producing milk at all, but from other things.
Having spent that day working on a traditional dairy farm, to me it was no surprise at all that one dairy farmer was leaving the industry every week, simply because they couldn’t make it pay. Obviously, a lot of farmers do what they do because they love it. There are easier ways to make money, most of which don’t involve close proximity to animal faeces. But eventually even that sort of loving relationship can get dysfunctional, especially when it occurs to you that you’re not making money any more. Britain, a country full of green grassy fields, a place that could hardly have been more expertly engineered for grazing cows and producing milk, was losing its capacity to do so. At the peak of milk production in Britain, in 2001, there were, according to DairyCo, which represents British dairy farmers, 2.25 million cows producing five billion litres of milk a year, but their numbers were dwindling, down to 1.8 million cows in 2012. We had always been self-sufficient in liquid milk and yet by 2010 we were finally having to import the stuff from elsewhere to top up our own supply.
It’s the same story in a branch of farming which is close to my animal-fat-drenched heart: pigs. It’s close to my heart because I very much like eating them. A couple of years ago, pig farmers took out full-page newspaper adverts announcing that they were being paid less by the supermarkets than the cost of production for their animals. As a result, like dairy farmers, pig farmers were simply giving up. Jamie Oliver dedicated a whole hour of (distinctly unsexy) television to the problem. It had a snappy