Group Activity By U.K. Farmers

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30959, 15 January 1966, Page 10

Group Activity By U.K. Farmers

A significant recent development in British agriculture has been group activity among farmers, according to Mr John Rowsell, an eminent British farmer of Stoke Charity, Winchester, who is visiting Canterbury. Miss Jane Bennett-Evans and Mr Rowsell were the first British Nuffield farming fellows to visit New Zealand about 1948 or 1949, and Mr Rowsell is a pioneer in grain drying and largescale bulk storage of grain on farms and is a past chairman of the Farmers’ Club in London, a non-political educational and social organisation.

Mr Rowsell described as a notable development a scheme whereby two or more farmers were able to borrow money for the purchase of almost any type of farm equipment. He said that what was known as Syndicate Credits, Ltd., was the scheme of a farmer in Hampshire, and it had been adapted by the National Farmers’ Union and had the support of one of the major banks. Under it money could be borrowed by a group of farmers for the purposes mentioned at 1 per cent above the bank rate, with 1 per cent operating charge, the principal being repayable over five years and sometimes over a longer period. Farmers who acted jointly in borrowing in this way were also eligible for any of the Government’s farm improvement grants that might be available.

The scheme meant that plant and equipment which might not be available to the individual farmer could be obtained by a group of farmers, and an item of cost that would be of some consequence to the individual farmer was much less noticeable when spread over five years among a group of farmers. Many groups of small farmers had acquired header harvesters. hay balers, and forage harvesters, among other; i items of equipment, under I this scheme. Mr Rowsell said j I he was a member of a syndicate which had bought a' complete herbage seed-clean-ing plant, of another which had bought a weigh-bridge, and of still another that had built a feedstuffs processing plant. He had just received advice of the formation of still another syndicate, of which he was a member, to purchase a new type of hedge trimmer which operated on the flail principle. The cost of this machine, at i £5OO. would hardly be noticed by the four members of this i syndicate when spread over I four years. This scheme was a wonderful development when it was i considered that farmers in ; Britain were notoriously bad i at co-operating with one ' another, said Mr Rowsell. In i Hampshire, where about 150 ; syndicates had been formed, jhe said, not one had failed financially or because its members had failed to I co-operate. In similar vein, Mr Rowsell said that there had been a large-scale movement into co-operative buying and selling. Apart from the old established co-operatives that had gone ahead very quickly, new groups had been formed which were for buying and selling on cash terms. Because of this development there was a tendency for a parallel rationalisation of smaller merchant firms which were either joining forces or being taken over, and there was a trend for the formation of big combines, which he did not know would be of benefit to farmers or the public. Mr Rowsell, who has come to New Zealand to attend the wedding of his son, Mr G. J. Rowsell, who is

taking a degree course at Lincoln College with the aid of a Commonwealth scholarship from the Drapers’ Company, an old British trade guild, is spending about six weeks in the country and will be visiting New Zealand Nuffield fellows and other New Zealanders who have visited him in Britain. At Stoke Charity, Mr Rowsell farms some 1150 acres of arable land on which he aims to have about 1000 acres of cash crops including cereals and herbage seeds, clover, beans, kale for seed and oil rapes. He is opposed to the practice which is currently popular in Britain of continuous cereal cropping and likes to grow no more than two or three cereal crops in a row as he feels that there is evidence of an

increase in disease and pests and also a falling off in yield as a result of continuous cropping. Pigs On his property there is also a herd of 200 sows which are run outside on clean, pure clover leys. The offspring are fattened in yards and in houses to 2601 b live-weight under contract to Walls, which are part of the Lever Organisation. According to trade requirements these pigs of which more than 3000 go off the farm a year, go into cutting or manufacturing. Walls, he said, had developed a new process of curing which ‘produced a very fresh-looking rasher which remained very red and attractive.

Walls, he said, were pioneers of progeny testing in the pig industry, and had their own progeny testing station. They were also engaged in a hybridisation project with a breeding station of their own, and he is co-operating with them in the production of the final gilts for sale to the commercial farmer.

Mr Rowsell also runs 20,000 laying poultry producing about 5,000,000 eggs a year. He also formerly ran a flock of Clun Forest sheep but these have been discarded meantime because they iiterfered with seed productin. Fifteen miles away there is another property of about 700 acres on the Hampshire-Berk-shire border in which Mr Rowsell is a partner. It comprises about 600 acres of farmable land and it is run in a similar way with about 500 acres in cash crops. There is a small Hereford herd on this property. Mr Rowsell had one of the first 100 header harvesters to be used in Britain, and in 1936 had one of the first grain driers in the country and was possibly the first to have large - scale bulk storage facilities. Now on the two properties he is interested in

thei’e is bulk storage for 2500 tons of grain. He has two continuous driers and a floor drier, and has been pioneering the handling of seeds in boxes which have hessian bottoms and which sit on holes in a ventilated floor. These boxes, he said, were handled with a foreloader and with a system of handling and tipping developed for bulk handling of potatoes by people called Kennett. Mr Rowsell said that now about 97 per cent of grain in Britain was handled in bulk. There was a great deal of improvisation and they did not use expensive equipment at all. The trend was towards simple systems where the buildings were easily converted to other uses. While he believed that traditional continuous driers were still the most popular form of grain and seed drying, he said that there was a lot of interest in floor ventilation, and quite a number of cold air ventilation plants i had been put in. As yet, he said, use of refrigeration for preservation of grain and seed in storage was only being used experimentally. He said he believed that the first such plant he had seen was one for seeds that he saw in New Zealand when he was here in 1948. Although New Zealand farmers might think that British farmers received high prices for their products, Mr Rowsell said, in many instances they were low compared with Common Market countries, and at the moment British farmers did not really know what was going to happen. At the last price review egg and cereals and bacon meat prices had been reduced, and many of these lines of production were now not profitable. Many egg producers had had to go out of business and only as a result of a fall in production had prices been better recently.' Bacon prices were bad and there was no money being made out of pigs unless the enterprise was very efficient and feed costs were extremely low. In their case, as a result of having their own feed processing plant, their feed costs were 20 per cent lower than if they had to buy proprietary foodstuffs. Although farmers in Britain as in New Zealand were being encouraged to produce beef, Mr Rowsell said that beef prices in Britain were at present very slack at about £8 per cwt to the producer, and were not good enough.

Mr Rowsell said he felt that producers needed to be aware of the problem of producing greater quantities of particular lines of produce but getting no more for them than when producing a lesser quantity. He had a feeling that New Zealand might be in this category.