Why Mountain Rescue Callouts Are Rising

This transcript was generated using AI and may contain minor errors.

Richard Prideaux: I'm all sweaty because I've just come in from scything Himalayan balsam which sounds like it's a harvestable crop but it's just this horrible thing I'm trying to get rid of from the meadow.

Richard Negus: I've been hedgerow management plans all day today on a driving around stubbles that were, I have to say, somewhat dusty. That 2mm of rain that we had barely even kept the dust down.

Richard Prideaux: Did you actually have some rain last night then?

Richard Negus: Well, I suppose in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. So therefore we had some rain, but was it enough new?

Richard Prideaux: We had a bit, sort of 0.3 millimetres, which is barely anything, but to get a sort of broader picture of what's happening out there, maybe we should ask renowned Herefordshire farmer, Martin Williams. I mean, can we get hold of him?

Richard Negus: Let's ask him. Martin, are you there?

Martin Williams: Well, yes. After listening to you, I've got an image of Richard as Poldark scything away in the meadow with his shirt round his waist. Unfortunately, I've been doing something completely different and hauling bales with a Merlo, which is hardly as romantic, but much less Dickensian.

Richard Negus: Did you have your shirt off while you were doing it though, Martin?

Martin Williams: Thankfully for those around me, no. I don't think anybody deserves that.

Richard Prideaux: For me, for the Poldark bit, I'm sort of Poldark after he discovered the cider and pasties diet. Really, it's there's more there than there should be. You said Merlot.

Martin Williams: It's Poldark, Poldark pre-Mounjaro.

Richard Prideaux: Have you said Merlot there? What's A Merlo?

Martin Williams: A Merlo is one of those sort of telescopic handlers and it's a green one and it comes from Italy. Yes, I wasn't there with a bottle of wine.

Richard Prideaux: Right, this is what I wanted to lay out now because I did have an image and it was the incorrect one.

Martin Williams: Yes, I was sitting under a hedge with a bottle of wine looking at bales. No, that wasn't what I was doing. Yeah, let's get that straight before we start. We started this really badly, haven't we? Let's face it.

Richard Negus: Martin, can you tell us, harvest is, I assume, is over here. Is it over with you in Herefordshire? And how did it go?

Martin Williams: Well, I'm an unusual one to ask how your harvest went because I took the decision last year not to grow cereals because I didn't think there would be a margin in it. And so my harvest has been looking at other people having a bad harvest so far because I took the decision to plant energy crops, maize, beet, a little bit of SFI and planted some grassland, hence I was hauling bales earlier, because I just felt cereals weren't the way forward. If you look at the harvest across the country, and I've been to Essex, I've been to Scotland, I've been to all over the place looking at different farms, I think the presumption or the assumption is that the wheat harvest, the cereal crops are down by about 30% if you're south of Manchester. I was in Scotland a couple of weeks ago and their crops, you wouldn't know they'd had a summer. It's typically Scotland where it's still green. They haven't got the combine out the shed yet. And it looks as if nothing's ever happened and we don't know what we're talking about down south. But up there, they're still harvesting. But down here, it's all done and everybody's done and dusted, literally.

Richard Prideaux: It's ridiculous, isn't it, to think we're sort of in a September period, but without the rain or any of the mist or any of the sort of the seasonal markers that you'd get for September. It doesn't feel like September.

Martin Williams: It's quite astonishing. I imagine there are a lot of farmers wandering around their yards wondering what to do because normally they would be busy. They're not used to going on holiday in August and therefore, well, I've got to find something to do and it's too dry to be messing around too much with soil. So goodness knows what they're doing, whether they're all cutting Himalayan balsam or whether they're sitting under the hedge with a bottle of wine. I'm not sure, but this is uncharted territory, isn't it, to be fair?

Richard Negus: It's quite interesting over this way. There's been a sort of 50-50 split. So harvest was over and done with ridiculously quickly and everything all came at once, you know, when people were sort of doing oilseed rape, barley, wheat, bang. It just one after the other in one seamless sprint. But it seems 50% of guys have thought, okay, I'm just going to leave these stubbles well alone. I don't want to knock up my kit by cultivating it. There's been a few who have gone over, I guess, hoping that they're going to chit some black-grass or something like that is the only thing I could think of and they have gone over and everyone who has cultivated have gone my God, look, I've broken everything that I've got on the back of my tractor because it's just so hard that working anything up is the soil, what there is of it, this boulder clay that we have here is just killing bits of metal. So yeah, it's been interesting.

Martin Williams: I don't really know what is the definition of recreational tillage? Is there one?

Richard Negus: I think it is because I think your point is that farmers are always going, well, I'm supposed to be busy right now, aren't I? And they don't know what to do. So their sort of brains have fried in the sun and said, well, I've got to be doing something. So yeah, so therefore they climb in the tractor and try and find something to do. Now, can I come back to the fact that you took the decision last year that you weren't going to sow any cereals? Did you have a crystal ball or what influenced that?

Martin Williams: Well, the fundamentals of it just didn't look very exciting. The changes in policy from government meant that there was sort of no support payment for anything of the sort. The SFI looked quite attractive, even though it's supposed to be public money for public goods for a service, which it is, it's turned into a sort of regularised income, which it shouldn't. And I just looked at it and I thought, I just don't think the reward is worth the risk. The risk is just too great. And I'm not sitting here gloating at all in any way. But looking around the countryside, I think it was probably a good move for me in particular, for me anyway. I haven't got animals to feed the crop to, so I can't add a value. So I'd be selling into a commodity market.

Richard Prideaux: And the economics of that, is that due to the price of what you can sell it for? Is it the input costs? Where does the reduction in margin come from?

Martin Williams: Well, right the way through this heart, let's start at the beginning. It looked, so we start with a reduction in any support payment or anything like it. So there's one little black mark. Secondly, we got into February time and all of a sudden the fertiliser price went berserk because it was the Strait of Hormuz occurred. And then the diesel price went up. And you think, my goodness, there's just simply one tick after another in the no box here. I'd already taken the decision, so I watched that pass by because I wasn't having to go and spend on bits and bobs. I had actually bought fertiliser, funnily enough, and I sold some of my fertilizer to a couple of neighbours because they hadn't bought and the price went up. And so I was relatively charitable and sold some to them at slightly more than I paid for it, but not much. But it just looked like a not great scenario to be growing. And you'll ask me in a minute, are you going to grow this time? And I can't see any reason why I would this time either, to be honest.

Richard Negus: If all farmers did that, sensible farmers like yourself start saying, there's no margin in it for me, I'm not going to do this. At what point does, I suppose, the end users start thinking, hold on a second, I can't get my bread, my, when does it start affecting Joe Public, that sort of decision making you're talking about, they're not growing cereals.

Martin Williams: Well, it's a, It's a funny church farming in that it's got a lot of parishioners and each of them come wearing different clothes. And so you've got farmers who've got livestock who can add value. You've got farmers who haven't got livestock who live in areas of land that isn't perhaps as kind as Herefordshire where I live. And you've got farmers who are traditionally, I am going to grow food. And you see lots of those on social media. Why are we not able to grow food? Well, first and foremost, my raison d'être isn't to feed the world. It's to feed me. And so If somebody doesn't want to buy my product, if I was selling shoes, I'd probably close my shop, wouldn't I? But as I live in Herefordshire, closing my shoe shop, growing wheat, it just means that I can grow something else because the land here is so good, you can diversify into all sorts. There's lots of things growing in Herefordshire and everyone's going to shout at their radio to you, our county is just as good. But you can grow asparagus, tender stem, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, hops, lambs, sheep, goats, pig, you can grow anything in there. And so we're very, very fortunate in that respect. And so maybe those areas where you can grow something else will be the first ones that think I don't really want to grow that. On the other side of it, if you're looking at a land bank where you need a rotation and you need a crop to put in a ground, to make sure you've got the land until you do grow your high value crop, then people will grow wheat because it sits them in a land banking situation, doesn't it? means they've got it for next year, even though it's not perhaps as profitable as it might be. And that happens in Herefordshire. So some larger potato growers, they need a land bank and so they grow wheat, but it's a nuisance to them. It just means they've got to do this nuisance combining thing. So going back to it, when does it affect consumers? I think it'll be some time before it affects consumers. I think our average wheat harvest is around 12 million tonnes. I think this year it might be 8 or 9. It could be one of the lowest we have. If you look at Russia's wheat harvest, it's about 85 million tonnes. So we're actually like this little corner shop. We're not really effective at changing a global price. We're not effective at anything much really, unless we can add different values to it. So our little corner of England, we might love it and cherish it, but on a global perspective, I don't think we change the price of food a great deal, if I'm being brutal about it.

Richard Prideaux: I suppose there's another factor here, because you mentioned the Straits of Hormuz earlier there in one of the factors that You've got the war in Ukraine and the ongoing war in Ukraine, and very recently Ukraine attacked one of the big grain ports for Russia in the Black Sea. And it's not necessarily, I suppose, just the harvest. Is it the availability, the ability to get that grain out of Russia into the world or out of England into the world?

Martin Williams: Well, yes, it's a logistical problem as much as anything, isn't it? I mean, go back to the 1980s when we were singing Feed the World and it was a job to get grain to Africa. Logistical problems are more prevalent than perhaps food shortage problems. And I'm generalising now and people will also be shouting at the radio. But Russia, there were some reports on the social media, I love social media. Everybody's sort of down a rabbit hole of Instagram of an evening. But there were some things on there suggesting that the Russians were sort of tipping their grain on the floor and not harvesting it because it wasn't worth it. And I felt it seemed a bit odd that they were bothering to harvest it and yet tip it on the floor. So I'm not quite sure that the story on social media as portrayed was quite as true as it might be. It might have been they were waiting for a trailer and it was easier to tip it on the floor and scoop it up again. But I was talking to Ed Barker from the AIC about said social media and he said, yeah, there's certain areas there that it is a little difficult to move the grain. It's not expecting any shortage. And so You can read what you like into social media. You can read what you like into bits and pieces, but there is a sort of step back and have this sort of, yeah, okay, I'll take this. I'm not going to take this at face value. I'm going to step back and I'm going to ask a grown up or I'm going to look around me and see what is actually happening. And I think the truth is there's probably a fair bit of wheat about. I know everybody would love it to be £300 a tonne. I don't really see it myself.

Richard Negus: Do you think there's ever going to go back to those days? Because I speak to a lot of my clients and it's now starting to dim into almost distant memory, that idea of the 300 pounds a ton. I mean, what were we, 220 was the average or something like that this year, 200? It seems like something that people are farming a decade ago in their minds, those who are still growing it. Is that something that you think that they're almost got rose tinted memory spectacles on?

Martin Williams: Well, again, farmers are fantastic breed and there is nothing like the farming community. There's a local farmer to me and he's grumbling all the time and you know, he's never got a smile. And I was walked into the pub one night in Hereford and he was sitting there sort of with a stool underneath him somewhere, but you couldn't see it. And he was bemoaning farming. And I said, come on then, Richard. His name was Richard. It's handy. There are another two of you in here. His name was Richard. And I said, what would you do if you won the lottery then? Oh, I'd buy more land. And you think, oh. This is one of those face palm moments, isn't it, where, you know, what are you moaning about then? Just get on with it and enjoy it. And there are farmers making money, aren't they? I mean, one of the interesting things I've learned messing around in a bit of politics lately is the loan to value on UK ag. Do you know what that is? Do you have like a straw poll around the room?

Richard Negus: Loan to value.

Martin Williams: Loan to value as a percentage. What would you think that might be? Bearing in mind we're all moaning.

Richard Negus: Gov, I don't know. I'm not very good with stuff like percentages. I had to take my maths O level three times before I got a grade C. It's actually around 9. 9%? 9%.

Martin Williams: Yes, I know you were expecting some sort of headline figure of my God, it's everything's finished and it's all over. No, it's 9%. There's a lot of places that haven't borrowed anything ever and probably never will. So it's quite strange, isn't it, to when you put some of these numbers?

Richard Negus: No, it's something actually that I asked Ed Barker, who you would talk about. He's a neighbour of mine and a good pal. And I was talking to him about that. I said, you know, because land prices haven't fallen, you know, if you've identified cereals are making no money and we've lost BPS, so there's no guarantee of any money. So you would think in any other commodity, when there's no guaranteed income to it, it's always struck me as, well, why haven't land prices plummeted? And I asked Ed that and he said, well, he said, because they're not making any more land. And so then I spoke to Ben Makovich, who's the head of agriculture for Lloyds, and he said of just how many percentage of farm mortgages that they have on their portfolio. And I realized is that actually if you devalued land, to possibly the true price of what it's worth with what you can make from it from growing food would crash the banking sector. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I think that's probably why land prices are high, but it still doesn't explain to me why cereal prices as low because we know we use a heck of a lot. So let's use for sake of example that 3.5 million tonnes or so goes into making beer every single year and we all like beer. So with malting barley, I mean, because it's been down this year, are we suddenly going to have A, a beer shortage or are we B, going to have very expensive beer because it's become a rare commodity? Is that something that's going to happen?

Martin Williams: I don't think you'll see a difference at all. Malting barley is most famous in Scotland where they have sheds full because the malting barley up there is used for whisky and the whisky consumption is way down. And if you recall King Charles travelling to see Mr Trump in America a couple of months ago, he managed to secure 0 tariffs on whisky, which was quite a fillip for the whisky trade. because it is in dire straits and they're struggling to sell it. And so the farmers in Scotland and I was up in Tariff a couple of weeks ago at Turriff Show, which is a lovely show on a beautiful area up north of Aberdeen. They've got acres and acres of this barley and they're moving it around the sheds from last year to make room for this year because they haven't sold it. And so the talk was that you wouldn't need to grow any malting barley for 12 months and you'd still have enough. It seems a bizarre situation, doesn't it?

Richard Prideaux: So we were talking earlier in the week about the dairy side of this as well. And something you said in there, which was about a neighbour who was looking to the next bump in the milk price. We've got a neighbour here who's gone very heavily into the dairy side of things. One of the things they're finding is that they're struggling to find enough land to rent to get the silage from. So I suppose that's sort of another hidden economic part of this where it's not just the input price or cost, it's not just the sale price. It's sort of, is there enough space to do the economic bit in between for the machine to run?

Martin Williams: For that type of farmer? Well, 100%. I mean, we were talking in the week about the dairy situation. A couple of lads up in Cheshire, they're selling cows because they haven't got fodder to feed them through the winter and they felt it was easier to sell the cows to manage cash flow than it was to buy the food and equally my name just 10 miles away, he is buying cows because he feels the price is going to go up on milk. And I think the spot price of milk went up by 10p amount 3 weeks ago. Not that the spot price helps because most people are in contracts anyway, but I think they've been producing milk below the cost of production, but a penny on a litre of milk makes a big difference to a milk check. And so when they're sitting underneath the cost of production, as soon as they can get above it, I think they'll be very happy. And I think that's going to come. I think the milk price is being set around now. I think they're waiting for some of the prices to come this week. And so hopefully those milk prices will go up. Because personally, I don't know about you, but if I go in to get milk from the shop, The last thing I ask is the price of it. I don't like coffee black and I'm not struck on, keep tea black, but I don't like dry corn flakes. It's one of those things that it's not the first thing I'm going to look at. I might look along the wine rack and think, my God, that bottle's 14 quid. I'm not going to buy that. But I never look at milk and think.

Richard Negus: You can't afford the expensive Merlot because you bought a big front loader. Yeah, exactly. That's why he made your area, you see.

Martin Williams: Exactly. I'm more of a Chardonnay boy. Chardonnay boy.

Richard Negus: Now, look, we're over here in the East. We are nearly wholly reliant upon cereals, you know, cereals, root crop, oil seeds. But it wasn't always like that. We were mixed farming practices and the common agricultural policy sort of led us by the nose with a bit of market forces and some government changes. Do you think, is it ever possible to a slightly more return across the country to mixed farming models so you aren't quite so prey to such shocks when something like this keeps happening, the climate's changing, things are going all weird, the market forces are changing.

Martin Williams: I think it's possible. I'm one of those people. When I grew up on this farm in Herefordshire, it was a milking farm and we had a bit of sugar beet, a few spuds, some milking cows, some sheep and a little bit of corn. My father didn't like cows and so they got out of dairy cows and we had a milk round actually. So I used to bottle the milk as a kid. I can tell people now because most of the people I supplied was probably dead by now and putting the bottles on in the dairy which is still in the house and straining it through an old sock. That was my job. And so That disappeared in the sort of late 70s, mid 70s. I didn't like sheep and so I thought, you know what, I can't be dealing with these sheep. So I got rid of sheep and arable seemed to be very easy. One of the things that you do in sort of a generational thing, would I want to go back to upturning a sheep? No, I wouldn't. So I'm very lucky that I live next to Wales where it's full of sheep. And so they like to come here on holiday. And so that makes my sheep farming relatively easier than it might have been if I'd got some. So The Cotswolds in particular, I mean, every church in the Cotswolds was built on wool, wasn't it? But I can't see everybody apart from Adam Henson having sheep in the Cotswolds because we're sort of generations away from it. You will get people with these sort of flying flocks or roving flocks, I know what they call them, flying flocks, where they come and fence your farms because a lot of the farms that have been in arable for the last 50 years They haven't got a fence on them, have they? I mean, everybody's got a bigger hedge or so they knock another hole in the hedge, which doesn't suit Richard Negus, obviously. Certainly doesn't. It does for gapping up.

Richard Negus: If there's a grant for it, suits me, yeah.

Martin Williams: You love a little bit of grant, yeah. 11 pound 42 or whatever it is. But so can I see that happening? I don't know if I can. Have we got enough people that would want to do that? How much do you love farming? Do you love farming to go back into sheep? Do you love farming to go back into cattle? Do you love farming to change a habit of what probably is a lifetime? I'm not quite sure. And if you're only borrowed at 9%, you'll probably borrow a bit of money and hope that it gets better. And that's quite a phrase really in farming, isn't it? Yeah, it'll be all right. It'll come good in a minute. There's that sort of hub phraseology that, you know, everybody had it. two barns full of wheat, even though they've only got a barn and everything's going to come good in a minute. So we're an optimistic race really, aren't.

Richard Prideaux: We? started talking about the, you know, what looks like a poor harvest and it'd be very easy to sort of look about and look out at the window at the very yellow grass and we are in a 50 year drought. Is the weather the big factor here or is that sort of a big distracting thing while there's lots more underneath? And what do we do next year overall? What do we do with the weather if it is changing like this?

Martin Williams: Unfortunately, policy drives decision making, doesn't it, as it has done with me over this past 12 months. I don't see anybody coming along on a big white horse to save us from poor yields. I don't see anybody coming along on a big white horse to save us with a cloud to feel the sun. And in the winter, we'll be sitting here moaning about the water, won't we? I think we've been caught, quite honestly, with our trousers down from probably going back to the common agricultural policy by living the dream for perhaps too long. I think that Common Agricultural Policy hasn't really helped us if we're being brutally honest about it. made us feel good and it was probably made us a bit lazy. I think that productivity, we're not very good. We all think we're great, but we're not. I think America knocks us out the park when it comes to productivity.

Richard Negus: I think it's a recurring The theme that I hear is that the Common Agricultural Policy made people lazy is BPS. You knew you had a check. Although I did see an interesting thing is that it said that, you know, since the war, that our food bill is 3 times less compared to earnings to what it was immediately after the war. Is that so, food has become a very cheap commodity. And the Common Agricultural Policy used to buffer that, because part of the Common Agricultural Policy was to me, I think the terminology was a fair price of food for all. I don't know what they didn't actually say what fair meant. but it does seem to me to be something that everyone's paying less. Is there going to have to be a point, do you think, Martin, at some point in the near future that food's going to have to go up or the government is going to have to bring in essentially a food subsidy, which is what the common agricultural policy was, wasn't?

Martin Williams: It? I don't think we're in a political landscape where that seems to be favoured and it seems to have been going that way, not just with this government, but with the previous one as well. We live in with free market politics, don't we? Unfortunately, unless you're Mr. Trump with his tariff, but I find it a struggle to see where we would justify going back to an acreage payment. I was lucky enough to go to Australia last year to be at a conference there, a farming conference. And Australia, they had a debate there at the conference about they're not they don't get subsidy for farming there. You're on your own mate, you're on your own dingo or whatever, how many sort of cultural appropriate, inappropriate comments I can make. And it was quite fascinating. If you'd held that debate in England and the UK, it would have been a different outcome because the vociferous crowd were all baying for the fact that they did not want subsidy. They did not want government support. not in a direct payment way, which was so far removed. You're on the other side of the world listening to this farming debate and you think, my God, imagine having that in my local village hall. It would be completely different. So when you look around the world, we're in a consolidating industry, aren't we? And I think just after the war, the NFU in England had 245,000 people in its ranks. at its highest point, it's now down to around 40,000. Admittedly, yes, there are those that are not members, but let's use it just as a barometer of numbers. I read in a paper the other week that American farmers were very grumpy because we're heading towards less than 20,000 milk producers in America. And meanwhile, in Little Blighty, those ****** we've just gone under 7,000 and we're probably heading for 5,000. And so it is a consolidating industry, but that's happened for years. It's not something that's new. It's not something that's happened because of inheritance tax or BPS or many of those, many different things we could, for the supermarket, it's happening because it's happening. It's happening because of economics and it's happening because of natural wastage and it's happening because it's modernization. If you look at, I'm sorry, I'm waffling again, but if you look at the car industry, there used to be like 20 car manufacturers and now you've got Peugeot who own half of it and General Motors who own the other half and Volkswagen who own goodness knows how many brands, it's a consolidated world that we haven't quite caught up with. And I think some of that comes back to the Common Agricultural Policy. If that had been sort of altered or changed a little bit sooner, I think perhaps we'd be a little bit more prepared than we are now. And I don't mean that, gosh, I'm pleased that we've got lost it. I think the way in which it was wrenched away could have been handled better and I think it still could.

Richard Negus: Right. Could we divert on to energy? So you're talking about growing energy crops. I've done a bit of work with Future Biogas. So we do have some of that over here where it gets turned into biofuels and maize has got a bit of a bad name. And whole wheat crops going into biodigesters and things like that, but it seems to make sense to me. What's your take on energy being produced from what fields which were growing food?

Martin Williams: There's a different figure and it doesn't vary much, but it varies a little tiny bit. in that it suggests that 8% of the farms produce 57% of the food from 33% of the land.

Richard Negus: Right.

Martin Williams: That's quite a stat, isn't it? It's quite a stat there. And that's a defra stat. I mean, it varies. It could be that 8% produces 62%. How do I feel about energy crops taking food? I don't mind at all. Go back to a previous comment. I think if that's creating a living, and it's a system by which it creates a living and a good living it seems on the AD. Why not? I have no issue with it whatsoever, especially when you go back to that stat.

Richard Negus: The thing that strikes me is that with AD, it can be part of a rotation. And so therefore the soil doesn't Yes, I know you could argue that maize does degrade soil, but if it's in a rotation and you're a good farmer and you're able to manage it, then having maize in your rotation is not the end of the world. It does just strike me that if you had a mono crop of exactly the same thing for 30 years in the same field as you do with solar, do you worry that solar is possibly something that We don't know what it will do to UK soils because we haven't got that sort of data. Do you worry that possibly putting, basically, baking the soil for 30 years may have a negative effect that we don't yet know about?

Martin Williams: Depends on what you do with the soil underneath it, doesn't it? I think there is room and you're able to graze underneath it. So, you know, it's not as if it's on desert. I'm not sure that the UK is the best place to be putting solar because it's dark half the time and it's raining half the time. And if you're going to put it somewhere sensible, you put it somewhere a bit sunnier than here. I know we've just come out of the hottest summer ever, but it's not working all the time, is it? I've got solar at home, but on roofs. And for me, it's fine. I don't see a problem with that. Do I see a problem with it in field scale? I wouldn't want to see the whole of the country covered in it. I can just be madness. However, As a business decision, and again, skewed by policy, because it wouldn't be there if there wasn't a policy behind it. I honestly haven't got a problem with it. Yes, okay. If you want, if you're purist and you don't want it on grade one land, then so be it. But if, and equally, some tenants have fallen foul of it by having their farms taken from them or bits of their farm taken from them for landlords to use. for solar, which is a landlord's discretion, I suppose, but equally upsetting for the tenant. I don't see a problem. I think land is a valuable commodity, isn't it? I mean, every policy that comes out of government at the moment involves land, whether it's a planning and infrastructure, whether it's environmental impact plan, whether it be the habitats directive, whether it be 20 by 30, all of those different little documents that they're producing, everything revolves around land. And I'd like to see farming embrace that. I don't see that it's a problem in embracing those policies if that's the way that it keeps you farming.

Richard Prideaux: Yeah.

Martin Williams: You know, a diminishing market.

Richard Prideaux: For the next 10 years then, you know, we have climate change as one of the factors and, you know, we discussed that. The world probably isn't going to get more peaceful and more stable and there's all these external factors we have no control over. What can farmers do over the next 10 years to become more resilient and how do those big cereals fit into that? Are they part of the rotation then? They're just in there to fill in the gaps in between more valuable or higher earning crops? What happens?

Martin Williams: Definitely. I think everything starts with water and you've heard a lot been a lot on the news or in the papers about our water resilience and I was lucky enough to bump into Ed Miliband about 12 months ago in Parliament and he was in a meeting talking about net zero and the fact that you know everything's going to We're all going to die because we're 1 1/2 degrees above where we should be. And we've passed that by miles now and it's going to get worse. I think we're missing a point in this country in that we have got a maritime climate. We have got, actually we're getting wetter. Our winters are getting wetter, but we're not utilizing that water well enough. And so it's not a short-term fix, it's a long-term fix. And Ikato talks about the water retention in soil through organic matter, etc., which is where we're going, isn't it, with SFI and with the regenerative style of farming that we're being sort of pushed in towards. But that's a long-term game. Some of that water storage and water resilience will allow us then perhaps to trade water between ourselves, trade water with nature, and then also improve what we can grow on farms. I think we're very low, or we are very low on our fruit and veg production in that we rely on other countries to supply when we've got gaps. Well, we should be able to manage our water better to be able to allow us to grow more fruit and veg in perhaps different areas on different farms and rotate it round. And that's like a symbiotic way if everybody digs a pond and 15 million that was announced last weekend by the government isn't going to buy everybody a pond, by no means. But if we are able to be a little bit more flexible in our cropping, I think there's a way of collaboration, perhaps, where we can keep people farming, keep people profitable. I know it sounds like a very idealistic principle, but I think We have to look at those things now, much as we don't like collaborating. I think perhaps we should.

Richard Negus: Well, I couldn't agree more. I think that there is in collaboration. I'm obviously over here. We are part of myself, part of a farm cluster. And I see that. And funnily enough, one of the biggest projects we're involved in is returning so many farm ponds, which were here. back to being farm ponds. So, it'd be nice to go and get all that 64 million quid just literally diverted to the high Suffolk farm cluster. Thank you very much. I don't think that'll happen. Well, look, it's been absolutely fascinating and really honest to speak with you, Martin, because, you know, it's so often You speak to farmers and it's all just doom and gloom, but I think you've given us a huge voice of practicality and damn common sense.

Martin Williams: Well, I'm glad to surprise you.

Richard Prideaux: So on that note, I think we try and bring this one into Harbour. Martin, thank you so much for joining us. and all the links that we can share with the public about you and what you do and the wider things you're involved in, because you're involved in a hell of a lot of stuff. They'll all be in the show notes and you can go to that on your podcast app now and read all of those links and just find out more about, well, this situation and the wider aspects of arable farming and where we're going to be going to. Thank you to you and, well, thank you to Richard as well for coming away from the hedges for this.

Martin Williams: Yeah, thank you very much for having me. He's been quite fun actually.