If you eat beef, and ever stop to wonder where and how it’s produced, Jonathan Chapman’s farm in the Chiltern Hills west of London is what you might imagine.
A small native herd, eating only the pasture beneath their hooves in a meadow fringed by beech trees, their leaves turning to match the copper coats of the Ruby Red Devons, selected for slaughter only after fattening naturally during a contented if short existence.
But this bucolic scene belies the turmoil in the beef market, where herds are shrinking, costs are rising, and even the promise of the highest prices in years, driven by the steepest price increase of any foodstuff, is not enough to tempt many farmers to invest.
For centuries, a symbolic staple of the British lunch table, beef now tells us a story about spiralling inflation and structural decline in agriculture.
Mr Chapman has been raising beef for just over a decade. A former champion eventing rider with a livery yard near Chalfont St Giles, the main challenge when he shifted his attention from horses to cows was that prices were too low.
“Ten years ago, the deadweight carcass price for beef was £3.60 a kilo. We might clear £60 a head of cattle,” he says. “The only way we could make the sums add up was to process and sell the meat ourselves.”
Processing a carcass doubles the revenue, from around £2,000 at today’s prices to £4,000. That insight saw his farm sprout a butchery and farm shop under the Native Beef brand. Today, they process two animals a week and sell or store every cut on site, from fillet to dripping.
Today, farmgate prices are nearly double what they were in 2015 at £6.50 a kilo, down slightly from the April peak of almost £7, but still up around 25% in a year.
For consumers that has made paying more than £5 for a pack of mince the norm. For farmers, rising prices reflect rising costs, long-term trends, and structural changes to the subsidy regime…
