Granny Bonnet

A fine display of poppies at the entrance to St. Mary's, Snettisham. Taken this morning as parishioners made their way to the service. It's a well attended church with parking next to a field of sheep. #churches #Snettisham #poppies

Kaleb Cooper, the farm manager on Clarkson's Farm, worked out his own hourly rate from the farming side of his business and it came to fifty pence. He said so on a podcast. His books pay rather better. Kaleb is not a television character. He is a working contractor who was farming in the Cotswolds before the cameras came and will be when they go, and he has done the sums that most farmers do in their heads and keep to themselves. - Hourly rate from farming, by his own count: 50p. - Hourly rate for the woman who stacks the shelf his wheat ends up on as a loaf: at least £12.71. - Price of the loaf: about £1.40. - What the wheat in it earns the farmer: about 10p. - The farmer's profit on it, measured in 2022: 0.09p. The whole chain is paid before the man who grew the thing. The supermarket takes its margin, the miller his, the baker his, the haulier his, the fertiliser company its, and what is left when the harvest has been through all of those hands is the farmer's. His share has been shrinking for decades, because he is the only link who cannot pass the cost on. He cannot hold out for a better price for long either. The seed, the fertiliser and the diesel were paid for months before harvest, and grain costs money every week it sits in the shed. Selling direct is the one place it is different. A farmer who sells off his own farm, through his own shop, to a customer who drove there, keeps far more of the price. That is why Diddly Squat had queues out onto the road, while Clarkson's first year of actually farming the place made him a profit of £144. Kaleb is in his twenties and has three children and is one of the best farmers in Oxfordshire, and his trade pays him about a 25th of the legal minimum wage. The country wants its food cheap, and it has got exactly that.