The Estate Diary - Back to all Estate Diaries

August-11-07 - The Challenge of Farming

For anyone who enjoys a challenge, why not try farming. So far this year at Rhug we have been hit by devastating gales, flooded out, had bird flu on our door step, the hottest driest spring on record, the wettest June and July on record and now the blow and worry of foot and mouth to contend with.

This has made things very difficult on the farm, sewing crops, slow finishing lambs, abnormal numbers of ewes lost from the weather, many man hours taken up with bio security and on the retail side 9% drop in sales in June and July because of the weather. All is not gloom, we are experiencing strong demand for our organic meat produced from the farms in Wales and Shropshire and strengthening commodity prices for wheat, barley, potatoes and other vegetables.    This is something we desperately need to help us balance the books against rising production costs and the tapering out of any government support. You can’t operate a cheap food policy without government support so things have to change.

I don’t like repeating myself but the government can not ignore that we import cheap meat from parts of the world that are known to have foot and mouth so whilst they expect us farmers to do our bit on bio security they should also stop these imports.

On the farm life is as hectic as ever making best use of this dry spell to make some rather late silage and hay before the corn harvest begins. The barns are all empty after the long wet winter and need to be filled again. We are also planting some rather late root crops for winter feed for the sheep. Lamb sales are gathering pace with the retail farm shop and wholesale business no taking 30 organic lambs, 30 salt marsh lambs, 160 chickens and 5 head of beef a week. Everything else goes to Waitrose and Sainsburys.

I am pleased to say that the Rhug brand is increasing in strength and recognition as restaurants and delicatessens realise the importance to their business to be able to demonstrate true provenance of what they sell. This is something that is being very much customer led. It is nice to have this recognition and a great credit to my team.

Our achievements over the last few months have been to obtain British retails certification (BRC) in the cutting plant, a gold award for our pork sausages in the true taste awards and to have the lambs from the Ty Mawr farm on the Welsh coast acclaimed by some of the top chefs in the country as “exceptional” and “outstanding” tasting Salt Marsh lamb.

Written By: Lord Newborough

Below are our other diary area. Click the links below to see what the various areas of the business have to tell.