In 1996, Oasis were at the peak of their powers. When they announced two concerts for Knebworth that August, 2.5m people tried to buy tickets, 10 times the 250,000 capacity. That’s a similar demand-supply ratio to what we witnessed last weekend for the band’s 2025 reunion. The big difference is that ticket prices were a flat £22.50 back then.

What has any of that got to do with farming?

Well, let’s take a little look at farm prices back then. The cattle price that summer, according to the CSO, was €1.89/kg liveweight. It rose to the dizzy heights of €2.20/kg by June 2024. How can the beef farmer survive?

Well, it isn’t the price of grain for feed that is breaking him or her. Feed barley was costing about €110/t in 1996; it’s currently trending at €180/t.

It’s the same across all farm commodities. They have barely moved in price since the 1990s and quite a bit of that movement was over the last couple of years as input costs rocketed.

Meanwhile, Oasis can charge €176 as a starting price for Croke Park standing pitch tickets, and then raise them to €400 each through “dynamic pricing” as remaining ticket supplies dwindled. This is the system Ryanair uses to sell airplane seats, but they start at a fiver, not at €176.

It would be wrong to conclude that people can pay more for food because some people (a lot of people) were willing to pay exorbitant prices for concert tickets. But it is correct to conclude that people have decided that cheap food is their right, despite demanding ever higher production standards, and an ever-lower carbon footprint.

Market requirements

Those combined market requirements make food more costly to produce, but farmers have to accept world prices due to globalised markets. This ignores the fact that we are competing with producers unfettered by the same environmental restrictions, and aided by genetically modified technologies. EU farmers are swimming in the open seas with their hands tied.

But what about the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), I hear you say? Is it not the contract between the European consumer/taxpayer and farmers?

The CAP is not able to bridge the gap any more. In fact, it’s overwhelmed. That’s not surprising. The CAP annual budget of€50bn has barely changed since Ray MacSharry was European Commissioner for Agriculture back in 1992, when there were only 12 member states in the EU, not 27.

Whatever the Commission is announcing as its CAP priority, without a massive budget boost, farmers will continue to go slowly broke.

Where’s The Masterplan? Little by Little, farmers will just say Whatever, and Slide Away. D’You Know what I Mean?