The countryside in crisis

 By Cole Moreton

"I have thought of giving up,” says Peter Slater bleakly, and who would blame him? His low, stone farmhouse in the Lake District has been flooded three times since the summer. Half his fields are still waterlogged, which means he can only keep a minimum of sheep and cattle. Last year he earned just £5,000. 

“I basically work for nothing, me,” says this hefty 53-year-old with a bald head and quizzical eyebrows, who continues to farm as best he can, with the help of his son, despite having suffered four heart attacks in a year. “I did think after the last one, 'This has got beyond a joke.’ But what else would I do?” 

This is not just another grumbling farmer. This is a man caught up in a crisis that has hit British farming in an unprecedented way since the extreme weather of last year. The floods have combined with disease, falling profits and soaring costs to drive many out of farming and some to despair. 

Peter Slater lives in a farmhouse that was built in the 1800s and looks like it. The house is damp and cold, except for the room in which he sits, beside a coal fire that burns all day to heat a boiler. At his elbow are photographs of Gwen, the girl from the same village school who became his wife and worked at his side to build up Bellart How Farm from nothing, until she was taken by cancer six years ago. 

“That put a big hole in my life,” he says, tears welling up suddenly. “I’m sorry. It’s hard, you know?” 

He was struggling to cope without her, even before the floods. “I was that desperate, I rung up a helpline for farmers. They answered, but I put the phone down. I was too ashamed to say I needed help.” 

Many farmers are, which is why the volunteer from the helpline rang him back and persuaded this reclusive, grief-stricken man to accept a home visit. “I was going to tell her nothing, it was all so raw, but she was a right down-to-earth countrywoman. She opened me up like a can of beans. Saved my life.” 

Farmers do not often talk like this, and his story offers a rare glimpse into the human cost of the crisis, which began in earnest when the floods swept across the country last year, destroying crops worth £600 million. Farmers had to spend another £700million on extra costs just to keep going, for example by drying grain. 

Animals had to be moved or kept inside, and the price of feeding them soared. Liver fluke flourished in the wet weather, devastating sheep farms. Meanwhile, Schmallenberg disease had come from the continent to cause death and deformity in calves and lambs. It has now been found on more than 1,200 farms, in every county of England and Wales. Some report losing 60 per cent of their early lambs this year. 

Bovine tuberculosis took the lives of tens of thousands of animals in 2012. Fuel bills rose and the economic crisis hit farmers as much as the rest of us. Any of these things would have been a challenge, but in combination with the floods they were overwhelming. The full effects have yet to be calculated, but experts believe hundreds of farmers have quit the industry, and suicide rates have increased. 

“This crisis is unique because it is so broad,” says Victoria Elms of the Prince’s Countryside Fund, which was set up by the Prince of Wales. “There have been others in the past but they have affected particular groups, such as livestock farmers. This affects upland and lowland farmers and even arable farmers as well, which is something we haven’t seen in a very long time. Nearly every farmer is going to be touched by this over the next year or 18 months. It is wider than foot-and-mouth disease.” 

That is why the Prince, through the PCF, put £150,000 into a new emergency fund just before Christmas. The amount was matched by the Duke of Westminster, and others such as NFU Mutual took the pot to just over half a million. The money is being shared over the course of the next year between four rural charities, including Farm Crisis Network, which runs the helpline that Peter Slater called. 

“We are very much busier than we were before,” says Charles Smith, the charity’s chief executive. 

Money worries are likely to increase. The average income of a dairy farmer is expected to fall by 42 per cent this year, according to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. 

Those raising beef and sheep in lowland areas can expect to earn 44 per cent less; in upland areas it will be 52 per cent. Pig farmers will see their incomes halved. Those predictions were made before the horse meat crisis, the effect of which remains to be seen. 

As for the crop farmers, some have been unable to prepare their lands for planting, because of the flooding, so the coming harvest is expected to be poorer than usual. Meanwhile, people are suffering now. 

“There is this perception that you never see a poor farmer, but that is just not the truth,” says Paul Burrows, chief executive of the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institution, which runs another helpline offering financial help to those in distress. It received twice as many calls in January as in the same month last year, and gave away more than twice as much money, namely £100,000. 

The list of things it helped farmers to pay for is so mundane, it’s moving: a school uniform, an MOT, a fee for bankruptcy, an unpaid funeral bill… and food. Some British farmers are making huge profits. Others are so desperate that they are willing to accept food vouchers. 

“Some farmers have only the farm account,” says Mr Burrows. “If things go wrong and a stop is put on it or cheques are bouncing, then you’re not going to be able to go and buy food. Children might not get fed. Money would get wiped out by going straight into the account, so we give them food vouchers instead.” 

Many farmers do not claim the state benefits they are entitled to, but last year the RABI helped obtain £361,000 that had previously been untouched. Peter Slater was one of the beneficiaries. At his feet is a clear plastic bag, containing about 20 boxes of pills. “This is what I have to take every day.” 

The heart attacks were caused by stress, he says, not unreasonably. Born just three miles away towards the Witherslack Mosses, he became the tenant of Bellart How Farm in 1988, soon after marrying Gwen. They farmed together, surviving foot-and-mouth disease, and raised Craig and his sister Lynsey in the hope of being able to share the work one day. 

“We were hoping that we would be able to have some time off together, eventually, to go on holiday and the like,” he says quietly. “It didn’t work out like that.” 

Gwen was diagnosed with cancer, which became terminal after seven years. Peter worked all hours to keep the farm and nurse her at home, until the last week of her life, when she went into a hospice. She died in February 2007, having slipped into a coma. 

“I sat and held her hand and talked to her while she was unconscious, like the nurses said,” he says. A single tear glistens on the face of this big, bluff man, who puffs his cheeks out like a lost boy. “The kids were quite tired, so my mum and dad took them into another room. She just relaxed then, and that was the end of it.” 

He believes that Gwen was relieved that her children were being looked after, and would not see her die. “That’s how she was. She was a remarkable lass.” 

Listening to him talk so tenderly about her, and knowing what her death did to him, brings a tear to my own eye. Peter threw himself into work after she was gone. 

“I did anything I could to stay out of this house. I never grieved. That was my downfall. I was on a spiral, going down and down. I know it sounds morbid, but I wanted to die.” 

The woman from the Farm Crisis Network helped him find the strength to go on, but his body “blew a gasket”. Pneumonia was followed by three heart attacks in April and another in November. 

Craig, 22, has a two-month-old daughter and a job on a dairy farm elsewhere, but still comes over to Bellart How every day to help his father. When he pops in, I tell him he sounds like a hero. “Can be,” he says, smiling, before heading for the cows. 

If young people like Craig and Lynsey, 25, are going to stay in farming, they will need help. One source of that is the Prince’s Countryside Fund. Besides contributing to the emergency pot, it releases grants of its own to charities working to relieve rural isolation, train young farmers, boost incomes, provide new services and tackle the disconnection that many people feel from the countryside. 

Victoria Elms of the PCF says applications have doubled since last year. “These are small steps to try and make things better, looking towards the future,” she says. 

The money is released twice a year, and The Sunday Telegraph has been shown the latest grants. The Herefordshire Federation of Young Farmers has been given £39,000 to pay for members to train in new skills such as tractor driving or cash-flow planning. The farming and countryside education charity FACE has received £50,000 to help encourage school children from disadvantaged areas to discover more about food and the countryside. 

The Worcestershire Rural Hub will use its £49,000 on helping farmers set up new projects such as farm shops, to earn extra cash. Up in the Hebrides, the Rassay Community Association has been given £28,250 with which to buy the island’s only shop. The nearest alternative is 90 minutes away, by land and sea. 

There are 11 grants in all, totalling just over £400,000, to projects that also include an apprentice scheme for livestock vets and support for farmers in managing woodland. 

As for Peter Slater, he is unsure of the future. “I want to carry on farming, because it is what has kept me going through everything,” he says, but he knows of 16 local farms that have stopped milking or gone out of business lately, and believes more will follow as the horse-meat scandal hits home. 

“We have done nothing wrong as British farmers, but the meat price will still fall. We won’t be able to stand that. It must be the hardest thing for a farmer to do, to give up what he has worked for all his life, but some won’t have the choice.” 

In the meantime, this tough but thoughtful man hopes other farmers will read his story and realise that talking to someone, and admitting they need a hand, might just save their lives, too. 

“There’s no shame in saying you can’t cope. There are more of us like that than ever before, because of what has happened to farming in the last year. Things are s--- just now, that’s no lie, and I can’t see it getting any better soon. But farmers need to know there are people out there who can help.” Telegraph