Our market town is used to the ways of the farming fraternity, with dogs leashed outside the supermarket, lots of green wellies on the high street and muddy four-wheel drives that actually work for a living. While many of the residents are not involved in agriculture, you can’t help but get caught up in it all.
So the foot and mouth epidemic is very real around here and it’s causing chaos, as well as probably being the last straw that some of these families will see. Worse still, even after it’s eradicated the ongoing problems of lost export markets, low consumer confidence and even lower prices will probably ensue.
Why is this relevant to us? OK, we’re basically an agricultural business, but this is very distant from our industry – or is it?
In early February one farmer in northern England appears to have sent infected livestock to Essex and created a huge problem. It seems that he may have had the disease on the farm for some weeks before it was found. Maybe he was scared to report it, knowing it would be the end of his livelihood and, as he was probably already finding the market tough, this was just too much to contemplate.
In our industry many are finding the market tough and might be clinging on in the hope of an upturn. So, when asked if it’s WBP, KD or C16 the temptation to say ‘yes’ is huge. Then it’s found that products have been misrepresented and, hey presto, the whole industry has a problem and, guess what, plastic, steel, concrete or something else whips what’s left of the market away from underneath all of us.
We continue to sell on price and miss the trick of adding value. Why not sell grading, regularising, correct glueline or the hundreds of other benefits that are out there, instead of trying to shave another per cent off someone else’s price?
We can set endless amounts of legislation to try to monitor this, but if you send your pigs to market, knowing they might be dodgy, just consider what you’re doing to all the other people in your industry.
