A young couple I know have a organic smallholding, fruit and veg.and cut
flowers.They live in Gloucestershire very near the Vale of Evesham,
maybe that is not a good place to be for starters, anyway they are
really struggling to make ends meet, no time for trialing new products
etc.etc. Is this the same for most organic smallholders, are there no
grants to help young peeps trying to make a living, it does seem a shame
if they have to give up. They do do veg.and fruit boxes but there is not
much to be made in that.

kate

It was my fathers aim to earn a living off his smallholding (6 acres) 50
years ago. However, it soon became apparent that he needed to have paid
employment too. Market forces and government quangoes conspire against small
producers - mainly on grounds of price and burocracy. The problem is most
people want to pay as little as possible for their food and this typically
means the only successful producers are those that are large scale, heavily
mechanised and little in the way of quality.

An example of the above was egg production. My father kept hens in "deep
litter". Not quite the same a free range but a thousand times better than
battery - basically in a large room where they run around and forage in
woodshavings etc. He was making a modest return on the sale of eggs. Then
along came the "Egg Marketing Board" with legislation that required all eggs
to be sold through them. They also dictated the price that would be paid to
producers of those eggs. It soon became apparent that it was costing my
father more to produce the eggs than he was getting paid for them. So he had
no option but to stop production and sell the hens. The only producers that
made a return on egg production were those doing so intensively. Hence the
rise of battery farming and hens spending their entire lives in cages little
larger than they are.

--
Drakanthus.


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