Inverse Relationships in Farming

Farming in Britain is a bit like being in a three-legged race with a drunk badger – just when you think you’ve found your rhythm, it bites you in the shin and dives into a ditch. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the perverse dance of cause and effect that governs the nation’s fields and orchards.

Take heatwaves. Lovely for strawberries – they swell up all juicy and sweet like they’re off to a village fête to win Best in Show. But for dairy cows? It’s like sending a fur-coated opera singer to jog round Qatar. Milk yields plummet, tempers fray, and the poor sods spend more time loitering under shade cloths than actually chewing the cud. So while berry farmers are toasting their glut with rosé and a smug chuckle, dairy farmers are watching their profit margins evaporate faster than a puddle in Provence.

And don’t get me started on wet springs. Great news for pasture – the sort of growth that makes sheep frolic and silage men dream of a third cut. But if you’re growing carrots or tatties? It’s trench warfare. You’re one thunderstorm away from discovering your entire crop has succumbed to a fungal death sentence or decided to drown in solidarity.

Then there’s the late frost lottery. Cereals love a brisk April – it keeps the fungal spores at bay and makes the barley boys beam. But if you grow apples or pears? One whiff of icy wind and it’s game over. Your blossom’s been flash-frozen into something that looks like a garnish on a Scandinavian dessert. Cue orchardists weeping gently into their pruning shears while wheat farmers order another moisture meter off Amazon.

Click the above to enlarge for an overview.

Labour shortages, of course, are another seasonal farce. The berry brigade hoover up every warm body in May and June, luring pickers in with promises of sunshine and strawberries. By the time apples are ready in August, the workforce has either gone home, buggered off to a warehouse, or decided that picking fruit for 12 hours a day in a Herefordshire drizzle isn’t quite the bucolic dream they were sold.

Even storage has become a turf war. Apples and potatoes now wrestle for cold room space like two prizefighters in a meat locker. One grows too well, and the other ends up rotting in a shed or dumped on a roadside verge with a passive-aggressive sign: “FREE TO A GOOD HOME (NO TORIES)”.

And throughout all this, the media trots out nonsense about “global Britain” and “sunlit uplands” as if we’re all in charge of our own microclimate and macroeconomics. No – we’re at the mercy of jet streams, pricing algorithms, and whichever bloke at DEFRA last opened a file labelled “Contingency Plan – Do Not Ignore”.

It’s not farming anymore – it’s a seasonal, soil-based episode of Gladiators, with farmers leaping hurdles and dodging giant foam mallets of weather, market forces, and ministerial idiocy. And they still expect the shelves to be full, the prices to be low, and the apples to be shiny.

If you ask me, anyone still trying to grow food in Britain should get a bloody medal – or failing that, a guaranteed storage unit and first dibs on the pickers.