Little Malvern Priory has supported the Worcestershire Chaplaincy for Agriculture and Rural Life (CARL) for many years, primarily through annual donations of £1,500. Whilst financial support for CARL has now moved to a case by case basis, our involvement with agricultural life has been strengthened by Canon Eric’s association with CARL and by Wendy and I becoming members of the Worcestershire Group of Farm Crisis Network (FCN), which is an adjunct of CARL. This short article highlights the current activities of the FCN Group with the aim of maintaining LMP’s interest in and support for agricultural life.

FCN is a UK network of groups of volunteers from the farming community and rural churches, providing a national helpline and visiting service to farming people and families facing difficulty. They provide pastoral and practical support for as long as it is needed, helping people to find a positive way forward through their problems.

I am a member of the Helpline Group, which operates a national helpline 7 am – 11 pm every day of the year. Currently the number of calls averages over 50 per month, of which around 40 are stress related. The majority of these concern problems with the bureaucracy surrounding Single Farm Payments and more general financial difficulties, but the impacts of disease and flooding also feature regularly. For example, I took a call from a very distressed lady farmer in Cumbria who had just lost her milk outlet through the collapse of the cooperative Dairy Farmers of Britain. She was the fourth generation of her family running a small dairy herd and, ironically having come through the BSE and Foot & Mouth crises unscathed, was now having to face up to the painful prospect of closing down her beloved herd. She knew that, with the size of her herd, this was the only sensible option, but the sense of guilt and shame over her perceived failure was palpable. She wouldn’t give me her name and refused the offer of a visit by a local volunteer, but after 45 minutes of mainly me listening to her, she did express her gratitude for having been able to talk through her predicament with someone other than her family, who were all emotionally involved in the situation. I felt powerless to help and I don’t know whether I offered her any real comfort, but I just hope that the old cliché ‘a problem shared is a problem halved’ did apply, at least a little.

Helpline calls are generally referred to local county group coordinators, who arrange for a local volunteer to contact the individual in difficulty with the aim of ‘walking with them’ until the situation is relieved. The coordinators also have a hotline to the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) to help resolve difficulties and expedite payments. Currently the Worcestershire Group has about 3 or 4 cases running at any time and most of these concern RPA payment issues (all farms have been subject to re-mapping this year and this has raised numerous boundary and entitlement disputes!). The Group has around half a dozen caseworkers, including farmers, members of the clergy and an accountant, available to visit clients. Other volunteers, including Wendy and I, assist with publicity and fundraising and manning of the national Helpline.

I have been heavily involved in a recent initiative by the Worcestershire Group in specifying and purchasing an FCN exhibition trailer. We first deployed it at the 3 Counties Show in June where it was dedicated by the Bishop of Worcester. Wendy and I have also helped to man the trailer at the Tenbury Show, which sadly was an awfully wet day, and at the Moreton-in-Marsh Show, where we were joined by colleagues from FCN Warwickshire and Oxfordshire and from Gloucestershire Farming Friends. The aim of is to publicize FCN and our associated charities, the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Fund and the Arthur Rank Centre Addington Fund, to both potential clients and the general public. The trailer will next appear at Worcester Cathedral for Harvest Festival services in early October.

I have also been directly involved in the research for the recently published FCN report ‘Stress and Loss’, which highlights the impact of bovine tuberculosis (TB) on farming families. Worcestershire was one of 3 areas surveyed and I conducted interviews with 20 farmers in the county who had suffered from a TB breakdown in their cattle during the past 2 years. The findings clearly demonstrate that farmers and their families are experiencing considerable stress; that the costs, in terms of both time and money, of testing and culling of cattle are huge and growing (now an estimated £100M per year); and that the current policy in England is failing to control the spread of bovine TB, let alone eradicate it. For example:

‘Financially it is very stressful. Cash flow is a huge problem. Having to keep animals when I would normally sell them puts more pressure on me, on my family, animal accommodation and feed costs. I don’t know how long we can keep going.’

However, the decision of the Welsh Government to introduce a trial cull of badgers in affected areas in Pembrokeshire was shown to have lifted the morale of farmers there by at last acknowledging that wild life plays a significant role in spreading the disease. It is hoped that the report will help to influence Government actions to seriously tackle the control and eradication of bovine TB.