Parkinson's Patter - Winter. Can spring be that far behind?

January is a long, dull month for everyone, but for farmers it’s especially grim. Everything is harder. Tractors, loaders and, quite often, you are reluctant to get going in the morning. We long for cold, dry weather to shift the mud and damp, only to find ourselves battling frozen water troughs when it finally arrives. It feels a million miles away from the sweltering summer we endured just a few short months ago.

January does, however, offer a welcome dose of agricultural escapism in the form of the LAMMA show. Since its move to the NEC in Birmingham, it delivers a couple of days of bright lights, shiny machinery and the chance to catch up with friends and colleagues. At the risk of sounding old, my generation had something similar in the Smithfield Show at Earls Court. A pre-Christmas fixture, it held real magic for a teenage lad from the Peak District heading to central London on the NFU coach with his dad and mates, all meticulously organised by Geoff Henshaw, our long-suffering group secretary.

When Smithfield disappeared in the early 2000s, there was nothing in this country to fill that mid-winter gap. LAMMA existed, but Newark showground in January was not for the faint-hearted. The site simply couldn’t cope with the show’s growth, and the move to the NEC was sealed after one year when the event nearly blew away and a second day was lost altogether.

The NEC isn’t perfect. The parking fees are daylight robbery and the so-called food prices are eye-watering. But the scale and buzz of the show rekindle some of that youthful excitement. While I can’t go back to my youth, it’s reassuring to see the next generation of farmers and farm workers out in force. I’m not sold on the mullets, but I can’t fault their work-hard, play-hard energy, usually wrapped up in a shoffle gilet.

They’ll need every ounce of that vim and vigour. Agriculture always seems to be at a crossroads, and I can recall several we’ve survived through sheer resilience and determination. I’ve always believed in spreading your eggs across several fragile baskets rather than one enormous, ultra-fragile one. The old adage of corn or horn still rings true: beef and sheep prices are high, but margins remain stubbornly similar to when prices were much lower.

It’s the dairy sector that worries me most. Reading this weekend about a specialist 400-cow herd losing £1,500 a day was enough to turn the stomach. Logically, the dairy crisis should be the easiest to fix. World prices are depressed by over-production, so surely processors and retailers should support farmers by nudging prices up at the checkout? Most consumers buy milk every week. It’s not a treat or a considered purchase, and few people buy it on price alone. Yet somehow, deeper into the supermarket, we find ‘smart’ water costing more than milk. That, I can’t help but think, says everything about the upside-down world we’re farming in.

And so, as the LAMMA lights fade and we resume the daily grind and dark morning starts, winter still feels long—but perhaps a little less dull. Farming has never been short of challenges, and it likely never will be, but it endures because farmers do. Through innovation, bloody-minded resilience and a stubborn refusal to give in, we keep adapting and pushing on. If the buzz of the Birmingham is anything to go by, the industry’s future is in energetic, capable hands. Let’s just hope that common sense, fairness and a bit of joined-up thinking can catch up, because without a viable farming industry, those bright supermarket shelves will look very empty indeed.

Duncan Parkinson - Agriculture Client Manager