Patrick Mayse

About

Interviewed by: Louise Rasmussen
Date: July 2015

Transcript

Louise: Could you just start by telling us a little bit about your farm; what you’re doing here, how old the farm is?

Patrick: Well, we’ve been here since about 1880 as a family. The farm is probably about more than twice the size it was then. It’s still only 400 acres, so it’s not that big. We’re on very good soil, so we grow intensive crops now, and always have done to a certain degree, basically you’re trying to do a comparison between 50 years ago and now, is that what you’re trying to…?

Louise: Yeah, yeah.

Patrick: I mean 50 years ago, I mean we would have been doing a lot of market garden produce, cabbages, brussel sprouts, suedes, all that kind of thing and a lot of it was delivered to the local shops, and a lot of potatoes, ‘lot of it was delivered to fish and chip shops around the coast, and all that sort of thing. When I was probably your age, I was running around in the holidays delivering down Margate back in the late 70s you know, fish and chips, those sort of places, but that’s died a bit of a death really. So now we sort of still grow arable, the usual arable crops such as cereals, peas, and that but more modernly now, we’ve got maize here now, which we’ve only grown for the last 2 years, that’s for the anaerobic digest down at Thanet for producing electricity, so that’s a modern thing that would never have existed 50 years ago. And we grow baby leaf salad, again that never existed 50 years ago, wild rocket, spinach, you know, you buy in the bags in supermarkets. And that, so they’re totally different things to what you would have had then. We’ve also got a livery yard with horses, whereas years ago we had cows. We still got a few sheep, only about 50, but that’s all obviously for leisure. People’s leisure. So that’s diversification into what the modern world wants really. All the (…) have changed. You know, and we don’t have any…we used to have a lot more staff then we do now, cause we got bigger machines, everything’s more mechanical, done on machines.

Louise: Why have you changed your crops over the years?

Patrick: Cause they weren’t worth growing when we…we have grown fruit in the past as well, top fruit; apples and pears down at a small farm in Wickhambreaux. But again, it’s all very labour intensive and back in the 90s everything sort of went down big time in farming; everything just hit the floor. So you just couldn’t run lots of different enterprises on a farm. You know, it used to work on the basis that one or two were up, one or two were down, when they all go down, you have to have rationalisation, so just doesn’t work.

Louise: You say it went down, a lot?

Patrick: All the prices went down very low, yeah.

Louise: Can you explain a bit about the situation back then at the time?

Patrick: Well, it was just, I mean, there was a grain mountain in the European Union for example so, grain prices went right down and we were stuck…grain prices were stuck for nearly 20 years or so at that level, which is very hard to sort of live with. And crops such as cabbages and cauliflower and that of course are getting less fashionable, less liked, so the requirement drops. Now potatoes, I haven’t grown potatoes for nearly 20 years. But potato is dropping dramatically cause people are eating rice and pasta more. The young people are not interested in eating potato whereas the old people were. You know, you gonna get a baked potato maybe you go to the pub or some have it as a jacket potato, but I … Do you eat potatoes at home? make chips?

Louise: Yeah.

Patrick: Oh you do? But a lot of people don’t you see. So a lot of people in potatoes are on the verge of getting out, James Holdstock would have said the same, I’m sure. He grows a lot of potatoes, but he’s getting pretty fed up, but he’s fed hundreds of tonnes to his cows this year, but there’s no money in that. Food’s just got too cheap basically. You know there was a percentage back in the 50s, people paying 30 per cent of their income on food, now it’s about 10 per cent. So the actual amount of money spent on food is not enough at the moment. That’s why the dairying is just going out of business. That’s not up to me, but…You know, a lot of farmers, 9 out of 10 farmers are packing up the dairy trade cause cheap import is coming in. So it’s quite difficult, the pound being strong as well doesn’t help. That makes a big difference, especially in the world of commodity prices, cause wheat, cereals, oil seed rape are all traded in the world on a commodity basis, so it’s world prices. And when the pound’s strong our prices go down. So a strong pound is not good for us.

Louise: You mentioned the EU briefly before, what sort of impact has that had on…

Patrick: The European Union?

Louise: Yeah.

Patrick: Massive. Cause we’re the only industry that’s been in existence since we joined. We joined the CAP in 1973, I think. So we’ve been in it, the whole industry has been in it from the word go. And of course you get all the directions and regulations that come from the European Union. Which gives a lot of bookkeeping and record keeping. They pay you a subsidy but that’s got less. But then without that I think a lot of farms would go to the wall, you know. Because the price of food is low, so that’s the basic, that’s why we go into high value crops such as salads and leisure, such as horses. We need to get away from the mainstream farming because there’s not much…The last 4 or 5 years cereals have been pretty good for the first time in a long time, but they’ve tailed off a lot now, the prices dropped a lot this last year, 18 months. So you’re coming back to where you were 5 or 6 years ago, you earn a higher price but production costs are higher, but relatively speaking you’re about where you were before you it all got better. So a lot of this money in the initial moments are spent on things like equipment and so forth. Of course it has a knock-on effect on the supply chain.

Louise: Now you said you’re going further away from mainstream farming…

Patrick: We moved to a certain degree away from regular arable farming, yeah. We weren’t, you have to have a rotation so you can’t go right away from it, but yeah, that’s us. We do salads, that’s our main, that’s much more intensive.

Louise: And the horses, what do you use the horses for?

Patrick: It’s a livery stable; people keep their horses here and pay us to keep them.

Louise: When did that start, or when did you start…?

Patrick: That’s 15 years ago. Maybe a bit more now, 15, 16 years ago. Just that my wife turned hobby into an enterprise and then built it up. It’s about got to where it’s gonna be now so, I’ll show you when we go around, she’s mainly used the old buildings down there and improved them, and it’s not dependent on subsidies or anything else, it’s just, people pay in, like a normal business every month.

Louise: Where, the salad for example, or your produce in general, where does it go to nowadays?

Patrick: The cereals get sold to grain merchants that go… and we generally grow bread making wheat so it goes off for that. Peas are on contract to make mushy peas up north. We’re growing maize on contract that goes to the anaerobic digestion down at Thanet. And the salads are on contract to a company, we sell to a company who then sells to supermarkets. They process it and sell to supermarkets. So everything we got is on contract, except wheat. At least, you know where you are there, we got contract prices, you’re not worried about the potato market, you’re worried all the time that the potato trade changes… you never know where you’re gonna be with the prices and so for example. So with the contract price you know more or less where you are, so you can then work back on that and your costings.

Joe: By contract price is that the same thing as a futures?

Patrick: No, Contract is you got a contract for that crop, you get paid so much a ton or a kilo for it, for the coming year. A futures is, when you sell on the futures, you look at the future price, and think, if I buy or sell then, that’s a good price, I’ll get in November or maybe next year. You sell ahead on futures with cereals usually, if you think the price is peaked up for some reason and it’s going to be acceptable.

Louise: How do you think it’s changed over the years where you sell your produce to? How has that changed?

Patrick: Well, there’s a lot fewer customers cause all the smaller shops are gone. So and the small bakeries are gone, so it all goes through bigger merchants and bigger companies and there’s a lot fewer staff. You know, farmers nowadays don’t employ anymore because they just can’t afford it. They buy more machinery instead of men basically. Big machines, yeah.

Louise: Can you feel that the consumer demand has changed as well over the years in parallel to that?

Patrick: Hmm. Hmm. Well, people are eating less stodgy food these days. They eat less potatoes, more salady stuff and pasta and rice, that kind of thing. Cause peoples’ whole diet’s changed. They’re aware of food around the world really. So that just changes how people eat. Whereas if we go back 50 years, a lot more heavy industry on, a lot more people eating, you know, potatoes, Yorkshire puddings and all that, you know, pies and all that sort of thing, bread. These days it’s not the same cause they don’t need it to work. But now people increasingly, you know, in office situations or service industries, they don’t eat so much. So, it’s changing everything, we’re gradually moving forward I suppose, or backwards if you look at it that way…

Louise: Now your typical working days on the farm with all these changes, has a typical working day changed as well in itself?

Patrick: Hmm. Yeah, yeah, very much so.

Louise: In what way?

Patrick: Well, if we’re harvesting salads we start at 6 in the morning, 6.30 and then we have to cool it down and send it off on lorries later in the day. And that’s only 6 months of the year, so it’s very much a summer thing, a sort of, well, not summer but, sort of March to October period.

(Mr. Mayse’s wife comes in)

…

Patrick: So yeah, also we don’t have the animals that we used to have, so that’s different. We don’t have to worry about feeding animals so much.

(talking to his wife…)

Patrick: (continues) Yeah obviously in the summer we have harvest with, we tend to use contractors for harvesting. David Birt does it for us. Because he’s got a huge combine so there’s no point both having one, so they harvest it and put it in the barn and we just shovel up so it means we don’t, and then in the autumn when he’s digging potatoes, we finish the salads and we go and farm wheat for him in autumn. We all now each other fairly well, so…

Joe: Favours…?

Patrick: Well no, we pay each other. but it means we haven’t got to worry about a combine and he’s doesn’t have tp worry about a big seed roller you see. Cause big machinery is very expensive. So you limit what you need and make more use of what you got. Its spreads the costs about.

Joe: It’s that sort of cooperative way of working is that quite unusual?

Patrick: No, a lot of people cooperate now. Sometimes people cooperate together and buy one big combine between three or four farmers, for example. That’s one way of doing it.

…

Louise: Now you still have a very good relationship then, and you can help each other with the farmers here, but do you think that the community has changed over the past 50 years?

Patrick: Well, the local community? Or the farming one?

Louise: Yeah the local community.

Patrick: The local community is completely different, yeah. Yeah because it’s full of people who are coming from away and maybe there are new people living…houses are very expensive. So Ickham is a very expensive village to live in and most of the people moving in there now have nothing to do with the local families that were there; virtually no farmers are left, they’re all gone. The cottages have all been bought up and done up for people to move into. Of course the children of the farmworker types can’t afford to live in the village so they’ve all gone. So you’ve got all sorts of people living there now, from people running big businesses or retired people, and actually the income of the people in the village is much higher than it used to be. Cause people that have started moving in there are attracted to it, they got a lot more money. And it’s also not the local business, most of the little shops are closed that used to be there. You got no little shops around, but of course people are buying in supermarkets now.

Louise: And how about the farming community then?

Patrick: The farming community, I mean most of the farming families, I mean farms have got bigger so there are fewer farmers but the ones that are here have been here a long time. Twymans have been here a long time, we’ve been here a long time, Holdstocks, Birts, they’ve all been here a long time. But small farms have been absorbed by bigger farms, that’s what tends to happen. You’ve gotta keep getting bigger. Size makes it, you know, costable…people would look into buy more land, buying or renting together.

Louise: Can you explain a bit about – because you said your family has been here now since 1880 – how has the farm been passed on since then?

Patrick: We’re church tenants, so we have a succession tenancy so we can pass it on one generation to the next, so my son’s with me now, he’s gonna take it on from me. He’s the last one that’s guaranteed like that, what will happen in the future I don’t know, but it won’t be my problem.

Louise: What do you think about the changes that have happened over the years?

Patrick: What? Do I like them or not?

Louise: Yeah, or in any way, what do you think about them?

Patrick: Well, they’re inevitable, cause there’s always, trying to push down the cost of food. (dogs barking) It’s just the pressure like every industry really to reduce the costs, reduce the price on things. So it’s just competition. Which is just one of those things…It’s a shame there aren’t a lot of people involved in farming anymore. We don’t have a staff anymore, but you can’t afford them so…there’s only three of us here now, whereas 50 years ago there would probably have been 9 or 10 people at a farm that’s only half the size. But then they had little tractors and knives to cut things in the fields and packed more by hand.

Louise: Do you need seasonal labour from time to time or is it always just 3 people?

Patrick: It’s always just us, yeah. The harvesting is done by the company we sell to, so they provide a gang of Poles and a harvester. But increasingly, I mean, seasonal labour is mostly Eastern European now.

Louise: Why do you think that is?

Patrick: Well partly cause the English people don’t wanna work so hard…I don’t know. Where are you from?

…

Patrick: The trouble is young people have got too big expectations now, they think they’re gonna have a nice little job and like to go out and use their hands to work and it’s not like that. I think things will change because all the welfare state is gonna be, gradually evolve back again and people are gonna have to go back to basics and get on. These Poles come over and they work harder; half past 5, 5 in the morning and they go and get on with it, quite happy, get stuck in. And they work, which is what, you know, some English youngsters do, but not that many. They see it on the television, ‘oh no, that’s for foreigners!’ they got this idea that welfare is too easy. But it’s unaffordable. So I think it’s all gonna change now.

Louise: We know that Britain is less self-sufficient today what do you think about that?

Patrick: Well it’s very bad. Because the government has not given support to the farming industry. If you get some sort of crisis, which is looking more likely now the way the Russians are behaving, all of a sudden the clock’s been turned back almost. I mean you can’t remember it, but you know, when I was your age we used to see films at school about 4 minute warning and what you should do if a nuclear attack was coming, that sort of thing and right through the late 80s. It was quite a worry and but of course that’s all gone away now. All of sudden you got this idiot, Mr. Putin behaving like something from the past, and everyone’s got a bit worried. People have got to start sharpening up and standing up to ‘em, really. Cause it’s always the old way, if you don’t stand up to them they keep going, don’t they? History tells us that. But yeah, so that’s a problem. Of course, if you’ve got disruption with food supplies it should be quite easy. People have got so used now to having everything on the shelves in the supermarkets and from all over the world. If you’ve got some sort of blockade or some problem coming in, which is not beyond the realms of possibility, everyone will be pretty down in the mouth, and it’s a much bigger population now as well.

Joe: So has the Russian – Ukraine thing brought about a massive volatility in wheat prices…

Patrick: Oh yeah yeah. A lot of wheat grown there, you see. You can’t really grow much wheat in a war zone and of course if the economy then goes down you can’t afford the fertilizer and the inputs to go with it, so your production goes down so it’s a bit of a vicious circle, goes on and on. But you know, it may not be my problem, might be yours but it could happen in the future. But if you start, you know people think – there’s this feeling in Western Europe particularly – that days of war are behind us. But I don’t believe that at all. Europe’s always been a most horrendous place in the world for wars. Look back in History; it’s been the most war-mongering continent in the world. We’ve always been fighting each other. And it’s been, the European Union since WWII has brought about a nice long period of peace, but now it’s all starting to fall apart round the edges. That’s the trouble. And you get people like Mr. Putin wanting to rebuild the Russian Empire you see, he got a problem, he’s living in the past I suppose. But there you go. And then you got other things happening around the edges in Africa and Middle East, which is all looking rather worrying. So who knows? So, food security – No, we haven’t got enough food. Europe hasn’t got enough food, has it really? We do need more. But unfortunately it’s hard to produce food because of regulations banning more pesticides for various reasons; everything’s about greening and leaving bits aside for nature, I suppose you gotta make a choice at some stage to support the human population or you’re gonna go down the nature’s way, and if you go down the nature’s way you gonna get less food produced so you import more and it gets more expensive. Cause expensive food is not good for votes, so governments don’t like that, and there’s no votes in food going through the roof, is there? Price wise…there’s a problem.

Louise: Has this ‘going down the environment route’ and ‘and nature route’ and all this about organic farming and so on, has that…

Patrick: organic farming is nonsense anyway, complete nonsense.

Louise: In what way?

Patrick: Well, the production drops by 40% straight away, so the price goes through the roof. There’s no evidence that it’s any different. I mean, we’re all living longer on conventionally produced food, so there’s no issues there as far as I can see. It’s always, it’s the sort of liberal classes sort of chattering away saying how wonderful organic food is. But when you see the properly conducted testings and tastings, no one tells a difference, I mean it’s all, it’s a bit of a fag. I mean the number of organic farms in England is dropping quite quickly now I think I’ve been reading in the press cause it’s just not worth doing. We’re not gonna go into organic conversion so, you can’t feed the world on organic food I’m afraid. Doesn’t work, there’s just too many people. What’s it, 65 million people here now and it’s gonna be 80 million people by the end of this century.

Louise: Do you feel that the talk, the political talk around the nature and the environment has affected your work in any way?

Patrick: Yeah, we have to leave all sorts of strips and pieces here and there for nature. I don’t mind to a certain degree, I mean cause I like seeing wildlife about.

… (telling a story about a cheeky fox and his dog) …

Patrick: I mean you got a keep it in a sort of balance, really. It’s like, I mean the badger population has gone through the roof cause they’ve been protected. No more hedgehogs anymore. I mean the hedgehogs, no one dare say this but when you talk to people they say, yeah. Badgers are not very pleasant things; they eat everything, they eat meat, plants and everything, and now of course if you got a big increase the population that’s gotta mean something. And they pick on smaller animals, which are easy, the hedgehog population has fallen thru the floor for example. And these birds of prey they’ve been reintroducing, they’ve gotta eat something. So if you’re not careful these people come in and say oh you must do this, you must do that, it’s just reversing, changes the balance again, and now the things suffer.

Joe: Coming back to the EU, we’ve got a referendum in this next Parliament term, what can you see this bring in for yourself or for the farming…

Patrick: Well, we won’t vote to leave, we won’t leave, I’m sure of that, be quite nice to get some of the bureaucracy out the way. But I mean, no, our industry is better of in the European Union because the European countries like France, Italy, Spain all support agriculture, there’s more votes in agriculture. Here there’s no votes in agriculture, so most parties here wouldn’t give a damn about us. We’d be left high and dry. So we’re actually protected by the farming industries in Europe, so we’re better off in.

Joe: Do you think that would be the consensus throughout the farming industry?

Patrick: Most people tend to say that, yeah. Because we’re better off in in the CAP because if we came out, we wouldn’t have the same support and protection. On the other hand, we’re loaded with so much red tape and bureaucracy. It’s just not good really. The record keeping forms are just complete madness!

Louise: How has that increased over the years?

Patrick: Oh, colossally, yeah. It’s like everything, you need a certain amount but…they get to a certain point where you got a sensible amount, but of course all the people who create regulations have gotta do something to justify their existence, so they just create more regulations otherwise they’d be out of a job. That’s the problem, always happens. You know when you get a cost cutting going on, its never the management that get cut, its always the workers, cause the management are constructing the cost cutting, the whole thing gets all top heavy. That what happens. The turkeys vote for Christmas, as the old saying goes.

Joe: So what sort of bureaucratic things do you have to go through?

Patrick: Oh, everything we do, we have keep records of all the applications of any chemicals, fertilizer, that sort of thing, which is fine. But then it’s all the business of you can’t cut a hedge until this date, you can’t do this and all that, and it’s just like never ending really. Then there’s all the health and safety stuff as well you gotta go along with. Which you need to a certain degree, but a lot of it gets a bit silly. I don’t know, do you have that in Denmark? Health and Safety? See the French don’t have it…But it all gets a bit top heavy you see. But all industries are the same, I mean the CBI it’s just overregulation and the bureaucracy, everything. It puts a lot of costs on them, that’s the trouble. Especially when you’re competing with countries that have it. And then you got a strong currency that makes the import cheap.

Louise: What you are saying now must apply to the CAP as well and all the regulations that the EU has introduced now when they are trying to apply something to 28 different countries?

Patrick: Yes, that’s right. But that’s one area that caused, is pan-European of the whole thing, that’s the CAP. The CAP was a cornerstone of the European vision, EEC, European Economic Community was formed after the war, because obviously after the war there was a lot of starvation in Europe. We didn’t have it here, but there was a lot of starvation in mainland Europe in the aftermath of the war, so the CAP was seen as a way of making sure that there was never starvation in Europe again, which is why it’s always far more important to countries in Europe than here because we didn’t have starvation, but in Europe they had it and they remembered it. And so it was there to guarantee food supplies. And then of course you end up with butter mountains and grain mountains and everything else, back in the 80s and 90s, which of course they didn’t realise there was too much production of some things going on, being encouraged and that sort of thing. But even, that why even the continental countries still have much stronger positive feeling about the CAP than we do over here, because we had our own agriculture before then, but we also had all the food from the Empire coming in in those days. That’s a big difference, we had this huge empire that went through, it ran out in the 50s eventually, but a lot of stuff was coming in from the Empire and manufactured goods going out, food was coming in. That’s why we’ve always had a very different attitude to Europe, cause we had the biggest Empire in the world, and we still have the strong associations with places like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, all English speaking, the Queen is the Queen of all those countries, and they all play cricket. The old saying is if you get an Englishman, an Australian and a Frenchman sitting down, as far as the Englishman is concerned, the Australian is a cousin, even though he lives 12,000 miles away, and the Frenchmen who lives 25 miles away, he is a foreigner! He doesn’t play cricket and he doesn’t have a queen.

…

Louise: Now we’ve talked about loads of different changes, would you generally say or think that they have been for the better or?

Patrick: Many have and many haven’t I think. I mean one of the main problems is that the reduction of the people in the industry. That’s a shame, because not so many people work in agriculture and therefore that means an increasingly smaller population’s involved, so the rest of the population doesn’t understand agriculture very well. You get a lot of misconceptions, especially in animal production. So, people just don’t understand where things come from. Whereas if you go to the continent, they still have a lot more, with the French for example, still only 1 or 2 generations away from the land but of course with us, we had the Industrial Revolution before everybody else did. People moved in from the countryside so we lost that connection, which is why you get a lot of people in the towns that got no idea where our food is produced. So I think more education should be provided there. So that’s a shame I think. And that’s just got worse as time’s gone on. But on the positive side I think there’s probably more money in the countryside, certainly good community locally and we’ve got good friends, and nice people have moved in.

…

Louise: Has your work become…I hear some farmers have this romantic memory of what farming used to be like in the olden days

Patrick: It was much harder work

Louise: But I have the impression that some of them dream back to that past even though it was harder work, I don’t know whether that’s because of the bureaucracy or ?

Patrick: Well there is part of it. I mean I’m 60, so I mean David’s about 70 for example, he’s older than me, so is Martin, he’s in his 70s. So I just think, I mean it depends, I think the younger farmers, my son is much more on top of the bureaucracy. I’m on top of it to a certain extent, but the older farmers are not on top of it, so it’s a thing that, it’s an age thing really as well. But yes, I mean there was the old…we used to have lots of people just wandering around with lots of people around doing things, with small machines and by hand it was hard work. I mean farm workers or farmers were sort of generally pretty badly crippled up with arthritis at an early age I shall imagine. I’ve got it, I can’t straighten out, I’ve been stacking potato bags. But then hoping my son won’t have that, cause we’re using handlers and things now, more machines. So it’s actually less physical, which is good in that respect. Yeah, so its like everything, modernizing changes. It’s still quite dangerous, I mean you still get people killed every year in farming. That’s partly because people work by themselves you know, cause there’s not the staff that were. You get people especially on maybe the livestock farms up the hills, people running now loads of sheep or cattle compared with what they used to cause the economics of the job. And of course then they do long hours, they make mistakes, they get tired. It’s easily done. So that’s the sort of downside to it.

Louise: well, thank you very much!

Extra Notes from interview with Patrick Mayse, Britton Farm (things that were mentioned when we were walking around the farm afterwards)

Original farmhouse where father was born and lives built around 1900. That part was the original part of the farm, whereas the never part where we sat was only built around the 60s and 70s.

Only ‘original’ building left from 1900 is the old barn (wooden building, black), which has not been altered since it was originally built.

The little stone wall between the farmhouse and the staples was built by German ex-soldiers, who lived in the farmhouse after the war in the 1950s.

The stables and barns used to have livestock in them; they are now used for the horses.

The maize is used for energy (as Mr. Mayse explained in the interview). The people buying the maize from Britton Farm are subsidised. Mr. Mayse mentioned how it was worrying that we were now growing crops not for food, but for energy. What might this lead to in the future?

Audio

Photos and Documents

Patrick Mayse Interview Archive – Download .pdf version