Country Matters

Quality Assurance –

is it all a FABBL, or just a Glowing Report?

Over the past ten to fifteen years, more and more quality assurance schemes have been introduced into agriculture to ensure that the quality of the food produced is at as high a standard as possible. Thinking of some of the events of the recent past helps explain why these standards have been needed. Most of you will be aware that the Chernobyl disaster was twenty years ago this year. However, how many of you know that there are still 375 British farmers in North Wales, Cumbria and Scotland, with over 200,000 sheep, whose land is still considered "dirty" and subject to restrictions brought in after radioactive rains brought contamination to Britain in 1986. Originally, farmers were told they would apply for only a few weeks, months at most. Twenty years later, many farmers have had to accept that their land could be affected for years to come. This land is monitored by the food standards agency (FSA) to ensure that no radioactive food enters the food chain. The farmers need to obtain a licence every time they want to move their sheep and call in Government inspectors to scan each animal before it can be sold. They are only paid £1.30 compensation for each sheep scanned, the same as in 1986. Just for interest, Country Bumpkin was recently in northern Germany and was told by locals that a wild boar had been shot in local woods. Apparently this boar glowed in the dark it was so radioactive and had to be disposed of rather then become a pig roast!!

In the beginning was the word, so DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) introduced an overarching assurance scheme, appropriately called GENESIS. Genesis QA is a new type of farm assurance to help with the profitable management of farm business. DEFRA believes effective farm assurance is crucial to the sustainable development of UK agriculture and to securing markets for the high quality produce grown and reared in the UK. Genesis QA also states that to be effective, assurance has to be based on an annual assessment. So it uses existing records and practical commonsense developing the first modular assurance scheme, meaning that all enterprises could be covered by one assurance business, ie GENESIS.

The FABBL (Farm Assured British Beef & Lamb) Farm Assurance Scheme was set up in 1992 to provide a farm assurance scheme that would give retailers and consumers confidence in British livestock production standards. This scheme covers a range of self explanatory areas that farmers need to comply with:

How many of you know what the British Farm Standard little red tractor logo means? It means those products have come from farms assessed to British standards concerned with food safety, animal welfare and environmental regulations. Eleven farm assurance schemes originally set up independently to assure beef and lamb, pork, poultry, dairy, vegetables, cereals and oilseeds, were brought together under the single little red tractor logo in 2000. Contrary to popular misconception, it does not guarantee the produce is British, it just conforms to British assurance standards. It can hail from anywhere in the world, so please look on the label to establish the origin of the food.

All of these measures have been put in place to give confidence to consumers that British products really are the best and amongst the safest products they can eat. So the next time you are in the supermarket, actually look at the labels and support British farmers who are constantly striving to achieve high standards of food production.

Country Bumpkin