feast news

The days of cheap food are over and we need to highlight what is going on with food production at the moment,” he said.

It is likely that if a strike was to take place farmers would be asked to withhold produce for a 24 hour period.

Mr Handley admitted that some organisations and a number of farmers felt such a move would be a bad idea, but said the industry needed to be talking about the issue of escalating costs now, rather than in six months’ time when things reached crisis point.

“If it isn’t the right idea, then people, won’t take part,” he said. “You could argue that there are other ways of doing it – but we’ve found that the only way is to make people realise how serious things are.”

Mr Handley said price rises had brought a feel-good factor to farming but that now seemed to be diminishing. Fertiliser, fuel and feed prices had all rocketed in recent months.

“A lot of people who bought inputs last year and are yet to but this next year’s haven’t realised what is around the corner. We need to be talking about this now.”