WHAT fantastic weather we have had this year in our part of the country, with the best spring for many years followed closely by the best summer since records began and then the kind of backend which we all were sure could never happen.

As a born-again farmer, I could not have wished for better weather for my first season back in charge at Lodge Farm. With the exception of the wet week in May when we were making our first-cut silage, almost every operation on the farm went according to plan. I made a few mistakes along the way, but eight months on and things on the farm are slowly falling into place and we are on target with just one major problem to overcome. We need to run our farm at a profit.

This is the problem which today affects every business allied to farming and the countryside industries which depend on us. The supermarkets have used home-produced food as a loss leader and systematically reduced prices of home-produced products which are subjected to strictly-enforced rules and regulations, and have also, in many cases, passed off imported food stuffs which have just been processed in the UK as British. This is dishonest and in many cases the housewife is being seduced into buying cheaply-imported food produced to minimal standards in the belief that it is grown in Britain.

The result for the UK farmer is prices for our produce which are lower than they were 15 years ago, but prices in the shops, which bear no relation to those which were being charged in 1998. Bread and milk are two classic examples. Today my milk has left the farm at 18.953 pence per litre and wheat is being sold at £100 per ton. These are the same prices which applied in 1990, but since that time the price of milk and bread in the shops has doubled. I think the housewives are being ripped off, but then I am just a simple farmer and can never understand why we have allowed it to happen. Perhaps I joined the wrong union. Today I seem to be required to farm for a hobby, and most certainly not for profit, whilst my union leaders wax fat on my subscriptions. This is the reality facing almost every farmer in the country.

CWS has just announced that it is selling its remaining dairy herds and will stop producing milk this year. The Co-op farms were always the biggest, and supposedly the best, in the country.

Tourism is regarded as the new way forward and the saviour of farming, but tourists need looking after and this means working people to provide the services they demand during their leisure times in the country. They are certainly not available on the farms. Almost every farmer's wife I know, either young or old, has a job. Nearly all the younger ones have full-time jobs, and are often totally dependent on grannies to look after the younger children to allow them to work. Nurseries for the pre-school children are expensive both in terms of care and the cost of transport because of the distances involved in country areas. As a result, the net amount of cash which is left for the working mother is often quite small. The grants to help in these circumstances look very promising on paper but are nearly always impossible to get. This is the reality of life for the young people in the countryside today.

Housing is perhaps the next most critical factor affecting country life, with house prices way out of the reach of the majority of first-time country-based buyers and rents are set at similar levels. All these factors are conspiring to drive our young people out of the countryside and are leaving us with an aging population. This, of course, is being exaggerated by the increasing number of retired people who are moving into the villages looking for rural peace and tranquillity but at the same time demanding the level of service which was available in their previous life in the city. This, in turn, causes its own problems, as cottages, which formerly were starter homes for young country folk, are altered and expanded to fit the lifestyle of their new owners, thus making certain that yet another country cottage becomes much too expensive for the younger generation.

The next thing to be affected is often the village shop which, because of its size, is unable to stock the range of goods regarded as essential to maintain the required lifestyle of the modern-day country dwellers. And village shops are yet another victim of our changing world as our new country-dwellers, whilst expecting to share the benefits of country life, demand the services they enjoyed in the city and are prepared to travel to shop at city supermarkets. The village shopkeeper is becoming just as much a victim of the new order in the countryside as the farmer and farm worker who used to be the backbone of his trade. With the shops go the post offices and they are disappearing too.

Village schools are another victim, as the number of young married couples reduces, so does the number of children. Falling numbers and pressure on shire county budgets are both conspiring to kill off village schools, with busing of pupils to larger schools the present order of the day.

The combination of these and the many other negative factors are all affecting farming and rural life, but the worst and most demeaning factor which affects the farming community is the constant barrage of criticism and vilification hurled at farmers almost every day.

BSE was one example where blame was deliberately placed on the farmer when bad science and Government mismanagement was the cause. Foot and mouth, too, came from imported food and yet again Government mismanagement caused what should have been a minor problem to turn into a national crisis. What worries farmers about this is the fact that foot and mouth can strike again tomorrow because of the complete lack of controls on imported foodstuffs. Another outbreak on the scale of the last one will destroy UK livestock farming forever.

I, like many more farmers of my generation, am very concerned about the current trends in British agriculture. In spite of all the progress in the past century, Great Britain is still an island, and our population needs food. Today, because of drought and disease causing crop failures in places as far away as Australia and America, wheat prices have risen dramatically, and no doubt bread will also become much more expensive. At the same time, British farmers are being told to concentrate on tourism and to take land out of production and, in many cases, are being told to plant trees on good farm land rather than plant crops. The long-term effect will be a leaner but no doubt fitter population.

I can remember the hungry days of the 1930s, and it was not a very nice time to grow up. But in spite of politicians' false words, most housewives know that "if you use rubbish ingredients, you will bake a rubbish cake" and women vote at elections too. Say 'non!' to imported food and support British farmers.

Updated: 11:39 Wednesday, November 26, 2003