Generous Andy "gives" farmers £65M to help with the drought

Showman Barnum's latest PR stunt is to announce £65M help for drought struck farmers.

Dig a little deeper into the headline and it's not really £65M.  £50M is for sustainable farming incentive (SFI) - ie helping nature - not drought contingency.  If you have watched the latest Clarkson's farm series  - Clarkson thought he could get SFI  grants for doing nature things eg damming rivers etc - the reality is there's lots of paperwork involved and is it really worth the effort?  The farmer can earn more working in McDonalds.

The remaining £15M of Barnum's £65M  is for help to build farm reservoirs - probably useful if drought is to become the new norm - although last year lots of crops were lost to too much rain....

There are 209,000 farms in the UK.  If each farm gets an equal share of this £15M that's £71 for each farm...I suspect that's hardly going to make a difference to drought struck farms. 

Wheat yields are down 14%. Oat yields are down 9%. In a typical year, the UK produces 12-15 Million tonnes of wheat. The typical selling price per tonne is £170-£210. So the UK will produce roughly 1.6 Million less tonnes so £268M less wheat.  There are 38,1000 arable only farms - lets assume they all grow wheat (which is not true) then each farm is £7,034 worse off due to the drought - the £71 is not going to make a difference.  I suspect there's paperwork involved with this £71 grant to build a farm reservoir. 

So to build a typical 10million gallon farm reservoir costs between £150k and £300k to build.  The upfront costs for planning approval fees and professional fees for a farm reservoir is £45k.  So let's assume this £15M is solely used for planning bureaucracy then that means he's helping just 333 farms - sod the other 208,667 farms....The farm still needs to find another £150k+ to build the reservoir...and don't forget the farm reservoir is an asset so will be subject to inheritance tax.

You need 770,000 gallons of water per hectare to yield 7.2 tonnes of wheat. Now - not all the water needs to come from a reservoir - in a normal circumstance it would rain.  So to yield 12 million tonnes of wheat you need 1.6 million hectares of land. Assume 333 reservoirs are built then there's enough water to water 3,300 hectares of land.  Sod  the other 99.9% of wheat fields....

The hot summer has not just caused problems for arable farmers. Pastoral farms (non arable farms) are struggling.  Animals are having to be fed additional feed and even the winter feed / silage is having to given to animals now.  Hopefully we get lots of rain and sunshine in September and October to help farmers feed their animals through the winter months. 


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