Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello.
Welcome to the most prolonged start to series two known to man. Yeah, we're back. The three of us are here, just us three this evening. Today, we've become a lot more organized in what we're doing, so we're going to have a little run through about what we've been doing over the summer and why we haven't been doing stuff, and then we're going to have a little run through what we're going to do and have a little bit of chat about something that's quite relevant, that's going on all over social media right now. So, Chris, what's happened to you in the summer?
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Well, yeah, very busy summer for me.
Had got married and then, yeah, I've had. Seems to be probably a stage of life, but I think I've had about six or seven of the weddings.
Been flat out busy with my poultry stuff and on the farm and, yeah, and then just getting landscaping on my own house. So it's been absolutely flat out. But that's the way I like it and that's the way I choose to live my life, so I can't complain too much. But, yeah, it's been a busy summer, but, yeah, looking forward to getting back into this, especially now we've got our asses into gear and onto Apple. How many idiot farm lads does it take to get a podcast onto Apple?
[00:01:33] Speaker A: It took a massive idiot farmland, a lot of swearing at a computer to work out how to do it. And now I've worked it out. It's really easy, but I did it. So, flav, what you've been doing in.
[00:01:47] Speaker C: The summer, mate, don't even remind me about Apple, like, how they exist as a business, I don't know, but, yeah, there we are. Summer's been similar to Chris. Not. Probably not as hectic as Chris's, but, yeah, it's been up there, obviously, hog roasting, I think from end of June to beginning of August, I didn't have a weekend off. Some weekends was back to back and then also got married, like Chris. Not to each other, which wouldn't be a problem, but we got married to different people and what else?
Yeah, family life. Now I started nursery, so that's pretty cool. Nikki's gone back to work, so that also adds a bit of more workers. You probably know Chris already with your two little ones and Neil a few years back, you probably remember that, so. Yeah, and pigs have started getting out again, so. Fun, fun.
What's up?
[00:03:02] Speaker A: So Flav's got married.
Chris has got married. I didn't get married. I'm not doing that again. It's expensive. So, yeah, so that's what we've sort of all been doing this summer, I suppose. What have I been doing? I've been doing some various different things. I haven't got married, I haven't done any pig roast. I don't think I've been to a wedding this year. So, yeah, not as busy as you two guys.
So, on to more relevant stuff. So, as many people have seen, there's been a really good bad, I don't know how you want to describe it, campaign on social media, which has been sort of run by Riverford here, an organic sort of food delivery business. I don't know how the best way to describe them, basically, they're farmers and they deliver organic food across the country and it's called farm washing. And what they're trying to do is highlight what supermarkets are doing around basically using a pretend farm name and then selling the produce under that name, irrespective of where it comes from. So whether it's come from Kent or Poland, it's all come from Sunnyside Farms. And I think the three of us would all probably agree that that's not really very good.
[00:04:26] Speaker B: Yeah, I would.
[00:04:29] Speaker A: It's very misleading to the consumer.
[00:04:35] Speaker B: Yeah, it is.
[00:04:36] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:04:37] Speaker B: That part of is, yeah, is definitely an issue.
If we want to get the trust of consumers, both as farmers, processors, retailers, then we do have to be honest. And there is enough people out there that want to buy british and want to know where their food is coming from. So I think that part of the campaign is good to highlight.
I thought Chris and Zoe's video that they did in highlighting that was. Was strong and. Oh, yeah, and congratulations to them on their new arrival this week, as well as former guests.
But, yeah, I think we do also need to be conscious, though, with retailers that they're not all bad and they are our biggest customer.
And a lot of them do some very good work in promoting british and selling british. So I think we do have to acknowledge that as well as criticizing them when we think they could do things better.
[00:05:57] Speaker A: No, 100%. Because, I mean, end of the day, they just. We need them. Farmers agriculture need supermarkets, unfortunately. We have to have them. We have to work with them and, you know, we have to make sure they work for us as best as they can.
You know, that's. That's an absolute given. But I think what we're going to talk about briefly tonight was, I think you touched on what, you know, Chris and Zoe's video was absolutely brilliant. Ben Andrew's videos are. What he did was really good as well, I thought.
But the one that certainly got my emotions a little bit rattled was the one talking about megapharms and that featured Hannah Jackson. And I can't remember the guy's name, which is really bad.
[00:06:47] Speaker B: Oh, Jamie Oliver's mate.
[00:06:49] Speaker A: Yes, I was going to say Jamie Oliver's mate.
Can't remember his name. Let's just call him Jamie Oliver's mate.
[00:06:55] Speaker B: Jamie Oliver's mate.
[00:06:56] Speaker A: Yeah, Jamie's foul. I don't know. Anyway, so him, that fellow. We all know who you mean. We mean, and talking about mega Farms and what is, you know, what is a mega farm?
And I hate that word. I absolutely hate the word megafarm because I think from a poultry side that we're right in saying, chris, that if you've got more than 4000 hens, you're a megaphone.
[00:07:23] Speaker B: 4000 birds and 2000 pigs was the, in the social media comments, was what Riverford explained. I think they made. They made that up. They've made that up. That was just there, what they conceived to be a mega farm.
And yeah, if you, if you compare that to pretty much every country in the world, that is not a mega farm.
And, yeah, I just, I don't, I don't like the narrative at all that some of these companies say to promote their own stuff by making out that because a farm is larger, it has lower welfare.
That narrative really, really frustrates me because, yeah, there might be some larger farms that may not be particularly good, but often a lot of these farms, which are family farms, have invested heavily in their businesses.
And the only way to support that business, it could be a high rent or a big mortgage or a second family, a son or daughter entering the business is to add a larger enterprise and grow that business. And surely one key point of a business is being able to grow.
Yes. Keeping up the standards and the welfare, which, which many of these are, but I just don't like that term because it.
Yeah, I completely agree.
[00:09:20] Speaker A: I mean, we were talking before we started recording and, you know, I'm on a farm next Friday, one of my customers, beef farm, family farm, and they've got a poultry house, layers 32,000, I thinks, in that shed. And that's a sort of quite a standard size. In fact, that's quite a small size. But that farm, they're free range, they're supplying Clarence court. So they're premium end, you know, welfare. And like any business, once you get to that sort of scale, animal welfare is absolutely key, because you, for a livestock business, any livestock business, animal welfare has to be high, because if you've got stuff dying, sick, not performing, then you're not making any money, you're not making a profit, you're losing money. Never mind anything else. I just find it incredibly frustrating.
I'm coming from a dairy sector point of view, and my largest dairy farm I look after, they're milking well over 1000 cows, like 13, 1400 cows. The animal welfare is fantastic. They're a big local employer. They're ticking all the boxes. They're supplying a really good product that, again, we have to feed people. We've got a growing population, massively growing population. We've got to feed them. And unfortunately, having four chickens running around free range ain't going to feed a load of people.
That's the difference. I'm talking about feeding flav, how are you getting on.
[00:10:49] Speaker C: Feeling? Um, yeah, I'm getting on well. The fish and chips is going down very well. Not, not fish and chips, chicken, butters, sausage and chips. Um, this, yeah, this topic for me is also, is also quite triggering in parts, in a sense that, like you said, I agree with most of what you said so far already. Like Christensen's, O's video, Ben's video. I've not seen the guy that you're referring to, Jamie's mate. I've not seen that, but I have seen the campaign and I think it's like everything these days. It's almost like some things, the way they're portrayed or the way they are reported, it's to catch the attention. And then when you get into between the lines, you can actually see what he's talking about. So I think with this one, the way supermarkets use those names, that pisses me off, because, like I say, you can't have Sunnyside Farm, that's in, in Benin, as well as Kent, like that. That doesn't work. It's either Sunnyside in Kent or Sunny side in, in Denmark or wherever. And also it can be under red tractor if it's not in this country, which we've seen already.
So that's one thing.
And then they side about supermarkets. I agree with definite supermarkets because not all of us, not all farmers can sell direct like I do, or like Chris does as well with the goat meat. So we definitely need supermarkets there. But that doesn't mean that, because we definitely need supermarkets, it doesn't mean that farmers are at the supermarkets mercy.
The two should definitely work together better. And like Chris says, not all supermarkets are guilty of not working well with their suppliers in terms of payment amount they're paying or all those contracts and things like that. But I think it could definitely be better having things like not selling products below cost of production, etcetera, etcetera.
And then when you move on to the mega farm thing, I just looked up the 2000 pigs thing you mentioned. I think that figure could be from, I just looked at on AHDB, it says if you've got more than 2000 finishing pig places indoors or finishing pig places above 30 kilos, or more than 750 south places, you need an EA permit, like an environment agency permit. So whether that's where they got this bigger from.
Yeah, yeah. So whether that's where they got their figure from, not sure.
I've not been in touch with the commercial pig side for a while, but I'd say, like you say, the term mega firm isn't a good term, but I think that's the reason for it. It's not meant to be a nice term. Like on pig side. Have you seen that?
Have you seen that big building in China? They're going to build like a few stories that's gonna have, I think, 80,000 pigs for me. I think that's nuts, man. Like, yes, we need to feed people, but having animals that can be outside in a country that has access to outdoors, it's not like us, we're an island. China's massive and they're building like essentially a pig hotel. Pigs are gonna be getting moved around in lifts or whatever. I know the cleanliness of that place would be amazing. The pigs won't be walling around in mud like I hours will be this winter the way the rain's coming. So there's pros and cons for indoor and outdoor, and I'm not going to be the person to say get rid of indoor farming, whether it's chickens or cows order because I know that it has, it has a place, but I think the intensity of, the intensity of animal farming can go a bit overboard sometimes. And I wouldn't blame the farmer really, because the farmer's not doing it for his own family, essentially because they're selling it. If there wasn't customers, farmer wouldn't have 30,000 chickens. But because people are eating eggs, what do you do? You produce eggs for them to eat. Because people are eating over 100,000 worth of pigs to be slaughtered a week in the UK, pig farmers are going to produce pigs. So I think it's a bit harsh to just point the finger at the fat mega farms in quotation marks to point the finger at them when you're not pointing the finger at the consumers that are buying the product the mega farms are producing, you know?
[00:15:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:15:30] Speaker B: Because ironically as well, if we were to stop larger farms here, like sometimes what we forget in farmers is we need to produce something that our consumers are able to buy.
They're able to afford a.
So we'd end up bringing in food for consumers to be able to afford from lower welfare and much bigger farms. I know from my own poultry side, our standards, we've got a lot more goalposts to get through than, than other countries.
And, and this video did, did really focus on UK mega farms, which there are very, what I would say is a mega farm. There are very, very few. For example, they pulled out the, the poultry industry and Jamie's mate and said that it's run by sort of three huge. What sort of demonize these processes and their profit levels. But actually, yeah, they're high turnover businesses, but poultry is a very low margin return.
One of the processes is as much of a family business as you could possibly get.
British family succession, huge employer. And actually what they didn't mention is there is hundreds and hundreds of family farms producing for these businesses. There's a demand for it.
Chicken is seen as an affordable source of protein.
People want it and we couldn't produce that amount without larger farms.
And also these guys have invested, these guys that putting up larger sheds to support their families and provide a product that is wanted.
They are putting their necks on the line, they're borrowing lots of money, they're taking on bigger mortgages, they're investing in loads of different things. Like Flav said with the permit that you need over 40,000 birds again, the amount of gate posts and stuff you have to look at, ammonia and efficiency are huge. And that sort of stuff shouldn't be overlooked.
[00:18:12] Speaker A: No, no, I agree. I just like it. Jimmy Doherty just googled it. That's what Jamie Oliver's mate's called.
But you're absolutely, you're absolutely right in everything you're saying. Like, I just touched on what you said, flavor, but going back to us about China now, China's just a complete anonymity. That's just a bonkers country that will just do what the fuck it likes to do to feed its people without really caring about what it does. I mean, overnight China went from being like the 10th biggest dairy producer in the world to the third, literally. So it's like we're going to milk cows now rather than buy it from New Zealand, we're going to milk our own cows. And they just literally went out and built massive, massive dairy farms just because to feed that market. And it's just what they're going to do. And I think we can't. We're not, we're not China, we're never going to build these massive, massive, massive units, but equally, we have people to feed. And I think, like, what you saying about Chris, I don't eat, you know, chicken is a really good source of protein that doesn't cost the earth and people are going to eat it. People are going to eat eggs. There's nothing better than eggs. And there's a massive demand there. People are going to drink milk and people are going to eat, obviously, hopefully continue to eat meat. And the business that I was doing a little bit of research earlier, delving into the Internet around cost and looking at stuff, you know, to buy a box off Riverford with some sort of vegetables in and whatever, organic, I think it's about 18 pounds. And you're still going to pay for it to be delivered. I went to Sainsbury's online and I sort of priced up the same products and it was a tenor that's like, that's a huge difference. And their chickens are sort of twice the price for a free range chicken. The only difference of being organic was, was double the money. And you think, hold on a minute, there's a lot of people out there struggling.
You've got to be realistic. And I think, don't say mega farms are a bad thing, because mega farms are not a bad thing. They're actually got really high end welfare. They're producing a fantastic product that is feeding the country. We can't feed the country on four chickens running around a paddock and some organic vegetables. It just ain't going to happen. And people can't afford it. Yeah, that's the difference.
[00:20:41] Speaker C: So this thing about affordability, and it's something I thought about when, when I worked for the farm I worked on before, they had a farm shop, fairly high end farm shop, and looking at the stuff in there and a clientele coming in, like, like we.
We live in a country that you got people that probably go to bed hungry sometimes, or people that, let's say, even homeless or don't know what they're gonna have in the morning, and you have people that would have sort of King Henry VIII type banquets.
That's. That disparity and it's life. That's the way it is. So I think when we talk about affordability of food like that as a farmer, and especially now, we sell online and we sell our own product. We've always said with Nikki that if we produce food that our parents can't afford. Nikki's dad's retired. Nikki's mom works part time, so not full time. She retired and went back to work. My mom works full time, still, dad works full time. They're not on mega money. I've never slept hungry, so they've afforded to feed me and my sister and bring us out. If we're producing food that they cannot afford, then what the hell am I doing?
That does not mean that I'm producing food cheaply to match some of the stuff that's sold in supermarkets. And also, that also doesn't mean that I'm going to produce stuff that's too expensive compared to supermarket that the normal family can afford. And when you look at how people buy stuff, so the other day we were in Costco and they do rotisserie chicken, cooked, ready to eat, $3.99. There were cakes in there, more than 399. There were bags of cookies in there, more than 399. So are you telling me that a chicken that's been looked after, even if it's like four weeks or six weeks, that's been looked after, however intensive you look at it, a chicken has been looked after for that long, got killed, plucked or whatever, put in a bag, cooked or shipped to this place, cooked, and it's ready to eat, it's cheaper than a bag of.
Bag of cookies or a cake. That's madness. And I think that's the issue that I have with it, is that not so much about how many animals on a farm? Because if you can afford to look after that many animals, like in America, I remember meeting a feed nutritionist that said their sheds, a chicken shed has quarter of a million chickens, which that, to me, that's a mega farm, or you talk about mega farms there, quarter million chickens and a share does not anyway. So for me, it's more about why has food been allowed to be so cheap? Because, like you say there, the cost of Riverford stuff.
Yes, it might be expensive in comparison to supermarket, but is that what should cost? Food should cost anyway, because if we're spending less than 10% of our income on food, where the hell's the rest of that going? And if it's going on, like transport, like trains are always late or for rent, sort of filling up people's pockets that have ten or 20 houses, that they're fleecing people like in London and other cities, then why should it? Why shouldn't it be flipped back again? That people can spend 20, 30% of their income on food, eat healthily, you're not straining the NHS, you got better mental health, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then we'll pour in a better place. But I think with supermarkets, I've done a hell of a job marketing and making people believe that you can spend less on a whole chicken than a pint.
Like $3.99 for cooked chicken, man, a pint. You struggle to get a pint for a fiverr or six quid. A decent pint anyway. So for me, it's just all. It's all a bit upside down.
[00:24:36] Speaker A: What do you think, Chris, because you're in the poultry industry? I mean, what's your take on that?
[00:24:40] Speaker B: I think the argue can be made, well, definitely that food is too cheap, especially when you look at the price of a chicken to a pint or the cookies that you mentioned.
[00:24:56] Speaker A: But.
[00:24:58] Speaker B: That'S because they're such popular products and it isn't just here. Things like eggs and milk and chicken are used to get people into a store. And now if you were to say overnight that the price has gone up so much, it would stop people eating them.
If the Daily Mail or whoever got hold of that and said, your chicken is going up by 40%, then people would stop buying it. That's because it would be a big story and. And it would happen that way.
So that's happened in the past. Like, for example, Edwina Curry said in the eighties, late eighties, early nineties that british eggs all had salmonella. Egg consumption just dropped. If stories like that come across, then they do huge damage to consumption figures. And I just.
Yeah, I just think that there's a lot of people out there that are on a big budget and maybe a lot of these people are buying a pint or cookies especially. People are really hard up, probably aren't spending that money on pubs and extras, because they can't. But something like a chicken and eggs and milk as a vital part of your diet.
As supermarkets, they need to offer staple products at an affordable rate for consumers to live off. You get lots of people on the sort of retail insights that will say, oh, yeah, I want to buy free range, I want to buy this. And then they'll do something completely different in the store.
[00:26:56] Speaker A: No, you know what? I think it's the supermarkets.
We started off talking about this, this evening about the supermarkets and how they brand stuff and they put stuff under Sunnyside farm. Whether it's come from Poland or Kent or Cumbria and all this sort of b's that goes around it. But like, they are using things like milk, bread, chicken to get people into the shops, you know, to go in and then buy something where there's a higher profit margin. That's what they do. That's what they've always done. That's clearly, clearly what, you know, what they do.
Again, I mean, it comes back to this reoccurring theme about educating people, actually, where their food comes from because, yeah, a chicken for four quid or three quid or whatever it is is ridiculous. That's just too cheap. That's bonkers.
How can that even be produced for that is just crazy. I suspect it's probably not produced for that. I don't know enough about it.
I don't know.
[00:28:01] Speaker B: I'm taking, for example, the retailers have done a really good job with some of the processes on managed margins where farmers have been able to grow their businesses on the back of retail line contracts with farmers processes and retailers where they share any sort of profit in the job. So actually.
[00:28:27] Speaker A: So is it like, is there like a cost of production going on? A lot of this sort of stuff? So, like a lot of.
[00:28:33] Speaker C: Little of.
[00:28:35] Speaker B: Little have just announced a great incentive on, on eggs.
And so where they're investing in the supply chain because they realize that they need to meet their demand and supply issues. They need farmers to invest considerable amounts of money to be able to feed their consumers.
I just keep going back to the fact that though, like, if everyone had these tiny farms, we would just, we'd just have way more imports.
And I've seen people on social media and stuff say back to sort of my, sort of my criticisms, some of the regen guys that, oh, yeah, I've got a, I built a hut for 300 chickens and I'm selling, I'm selling them on. Okay, what salmonella tested are you doing? What's the air? What is, what's the ventilation like for the birds inside? Like even, even we talk about some of these farms in China or whatnot, I can tell you firsthand that an incredible amount of work goes into animal behavior.
The right ventilation, the right temperatures, making sure that they have water that is of the best quality feed of the best quality.
And we just, we need to point out that, yeah, not everything that is big is bad.
[00:30:13] Speaker A: No, no, 100%. Like, you know, one of my, you know, a farm, one of my customers the other day, and they're a robotic milking farm and they've invested massively heavily in technology. And they've just put a new car shed up and they've got a big curtain down the back of the shed. If the temperature in the shed goes above eleven degrees, this curtain just automatically opens to increase the airflow. How brilliant is that? So the calves in an open side shed drops below eleven or starts raining, stuff like the curtain then automatically closes and the calves are back comfortable again. And you think stuff like that. But the only way that those sort of businesses can they afford to invest in that sort of animal welfare technology is by pushing output.
And that's what people have to realize. These higher output farms generally are investing massively in animal welfare. Because if the animal isn't output, if the output isn't there, whether it's eggs, milk, whatever it might be, then the profit margin isn't there and they haven't got the money to invest and, you know, to keep growing that business or, you know, put food on that farmers plate, that's the end of day. These people are running businesses and they're trying to make a living and that's all they're trying to do effectively.
[00:31:31] Speaker C: Yeah, and I agree with this. These points just made actually, because also I find when, when we got the tenancy to have sort of pig that's outside all the time, which in the last few days, I could jack it in because it's just so annoying. It's wet, it's muddy, it's shit like. But I just have to look for ways to mitigate it and learn to adapt and work in this environment. But one thing I've always said to small scale pig farmers is do not keep pointing the finger at the commercial side or the bigger side. Because a lot of the things that have been done by the commercial people, the bigger companies, these are sometimes demonized because of, let's say, XYZ or whatever. Which one? One bad farmer doesn't mean every farmers like that. They've, they've done a lot in terms of research, because if you look at small scale people and large scale, the amount of money that goes into R and D, there's not much money that the safe R and D for, for small scale people as big companies, they've got the money. So all the research are doing, whether it's genetics, whether it's feed or whatever, small people can benefit. So that gap there is that it's like if you're small scale region or whatever, you almost look down on someone that's got a bigger farm, whatever. I think that that probably needs to stop and then another point I was going to make is, is when we talk about these issues about food costs and how food is, how animals are raised and how veg is growing organic or whatever, you can't avoid the. The social dynamic in this country. So obviously, growing up in Kenya, I never used to understand or see the whole thing of, for you to afford good food, you have to be rich. Like in Kenya, if people joke and say, if you sleep hungry, it's a choice because there's so many things you can do to make. To earn money or even go to a hotel and ask for leftovers and eat. Like if you sleep hungry back home, it's a choice. Whereas I find here in this country, you've got people that have money, can afford to go to a farm shop, can afford to, let's say, order food from Riverford or, or your able and coles or all those other places. Whereas if you can afford it used to be seen as if you can't afford these things, you go to your supermarkets that sell stuff cheap. Now there's supermarkets that sell stuff cheap. Everyone's chasing them because things are getting tight. And it's like you've got a little small middle of the high end supermarkets. The bottom line, or some of the high end. I've got low, low end lines to compete with it, with the lower ones who are making stupid money. And then you've got a small few at the top that would go probably to your. What's the JCB zone? Is it dales for the adults for farm shop and stuff like that? So I think, yeah, it is, it is. It is a weird one for me. It's just someone that's not from a rich family, working class to. To sort of see that side of. If you're gonna. To advocate for food that's going to be expensive, that's gonna push people to one side that can afford it. I'm not a fan of that.
[00:35:02] Speaker A: You ever been to Daylesford?
No, not yet, no.
[00:35:07] Speaker C: Hardest quite dear, though.
[00:35:08] Speaker B: No.
[00:35:10] Speaker A: Jesus Christ. It's. It's on another level that is.
[00:35:15] Speaker C: It's.
[00:35:17] Speaker B: Like, yeah, cumbrian business. Brilliant. Jesus Christ. The cost is just by me as well.
[00:35:25] Speaker A: Yeah, same thing.
[00:35:27] Speaker B: It's. It's crazy cost. And you do think, how. How are people affording this?
[00:35:33] Speaker A: Yeah, like I remember going down a couple of years ago, just have a look around and you're looking around looking at something. Jesus. And then somebody walks in with their shopping list like they got dips into Liddell and they're like chucking stuff in the basket, like, you know, anybody going to label co op? And I was like, wow, yeah, there's bonkers.
[00:35:53] Speaker C: So I think you mentioned it, Neil, about education. I was at you, Chris, and I think when you come, when, when we talk about the education side and even I remember when I was at boarding school and came to secondary before moving here, there was a subject called home science and we used to learn about sort of cooking, even things like stitching or doing crochet or whatever, just simple things that you do in the house. And I think when you look at things like cost of stuff, like where I work as a butcher at the farm shop, stuff is probably similar to a high end supermarket or just a little bit more, but someone will come in and say, oh, that's a bit expensive. And I'm like, oh, okay. Could you imagine going for a meal? How much would you pay for a meal these a decent meal these days? Average, you're not going to pay much less than 20 quid. It's around there just under or just over for a decent meal. So if you're going to come in and buy, I don't know, a free range chicken for 15 quid, 16 quid and it's a family of three or four, that chicken can do two meals, can it? So if you divide that between you, suddenly it makes sense. But I don't know, clearly somewhere in the education system in this country that bits missing, whether it's maths, whether it's just general knowledge that bits missing that people don't think like that. Because you think 15 pounds for chicken that you can cook and have two or three meals out of it or 15 pounds for three pints or maybe two and a half. If you're in London you go for three pieces and that's like gone. Maybe have a hangover if you're lightweight. And when you, when you add those things up you just think it sounds simple. But a lot of people don't think like that.
[00:37:44] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no, no. Like definitely educate. I think it's something we'd all agree on is definitely in school curriculums.
We need to learn more about food and how things cost and where your food comes from and all that stuff. I know Fred just did a video for his, he just started reception and he sure tell was he did a video that was that I'll put onto the, I put onto the Instagram but just all like just where everything comes from and this is what they eat and this is what they do and yeah, I think things like that would kids would really, really benefit from. I remember when I went to university in Newcastle, I couldn't believe some of the people I met, really clever people, had no idea what lamb, Washington, where it came from, like milk. And they would just be flabbergasted when I would sort of explain it to them because they just never. These are clever people, have just never been taught about food and nutrition and stuff like that.
[00:38:59] Speaker A: It's. Yeah, we're very detached in the UK of where our food comes from. That's like a real problem we've spoken about a lot before, but then. But I think we've sort of covered that pretty well. We can keep going round and round in circles and I think from our point of view, we've got. Chris is involved with, obviously, the poultry sector and he's dealing with these supposed mega farms that are not actually mega farms, they're just businesses and families that are just trying to improve what they do really, and grow their businesses in a sort of sustainable way.
And like Chris said, you know, the, you know, back on the video from Riverford talking about, you know, these massive companies and like, the company that Chris is talking about, the family owned business, you can't get anything more family. It is a proper family run business with sort of family values. It's just the fact that that family has done particularly well at poultry farming, you know, that's it. So don't knock them for doing that. And, you know, they're a massive employer and they're providing a good product.
I'm coming out from a dairy point of view that, you know, just because a guy's milking several hundred or 1000 cows, the chances are they're doing that, they're actually doing a really good job and animal welfare and what they've invested in cow comfort to enable those cows to give the milk yield to get back in calf and is phenomenal. And those cows will be really well looked after. I think you've made some good points, flav, as well, because you're sort of looking at it from the side of, you know, you are a smaller scale farmer, but you have a really good understanding of what the bigger farmers are trying to do.
Yeah, maybe right in saying that.
[00:40:56] Speaker C: Yeah. And I'd also say, I think Chris touched on it earlier, that I think it's such a cliche thing people say is that not all big farms have bad welfare and not all small farms have good welfare. Like welfare of an animal is down to the farmer. So you talked about robotics, Neil. I remember going to see the previous place used to work at. We were looking at different robots to put in the dairy. And I remember seeing, what's the company dollar veil? It's the first time I've seen a robot before. And you ask this farmer, like, so what was this robot brought to your farm? And it's like this thing can tell cell count if it, if it goes high, it senses it, it can detect the change in.
They can use it to detect the change in kind of what it was to see if an animal's on heat or not. All these things that if you're expecting a human. We talk about mental health in farming, you're expecting a human to remember all those things. Do long hours milking. Like, I don't envy anyone that works in a dairy and I think I'd only do dairy if there was a robot there.
He said, they get so much more done because accounts are milk three, some of them milk three times instead of two. So they come in on their own, blah, blah, blah. And I just think things like that just show how much we can use technology in this day and age to improve animals lives. I'd say pigs, you've got research people, like, with tail biting, you've got lighting that's different in the shed to make the pigs calmer. Or I think similar things been done with chickens togethe. So, yeah, I think having a big farm that's indoors doesn't always necessarily mean bad welfare and vice versa. Like I said, just because I'm small doesn't mean the animals are always going to be good. Because some people, you're small, you can't afford to buy things, blah, blah, blah. And one thing leads to the other and you can end up with bad welfare. So I think both have a place, definitely, especially in the UK.
[00:43:19] Speaker B: I think my final point on the whole thing will be, I think we all need each other, especially beef and sheep farmers.
If you look at that, the bigger farmers need the smaller guys to be able to produce for them and the bigger guys need, and the smaller guys need some of the bigger guys to buy off them. And I think we discussed this on an earlier episode, but I just. I think we'd be in a better place in agriculture if instead of criticizing other farms and other farmers, we talked about the. We sold our own products on our own merits and how we produce it and why we feel passionate about that. I don't get sometimes why we have to be so critical of each other.
[00:44:06] Speaker A: No, 100%. We just got to all get on producers quality product and we actually should be incredibly proud of the animal welfare that we've got in this country and not try and give it a kick in, because actually, we have got the best animal welfare anywhere, as far as I'm concerned. So we're not good. Well, thank you very much. Thank you, ladsen. And we'll see you next week. And don't forget, because now we're on apple and all of that. To subscribe to Apple, follow it like it, do all of that. Because the more of that then, the better this becomes. All right. Cheers, folks.
See you.
