Howden farmer's hopes of financial boost as Great Yorkshire Show returns

  • Video report by Katie Oscroft

A pig farmer from Howden has been looking forward to the return of the Great Yorkshire show after what has been a tough year for farming.

Around 1000 free range pigs live outside at Anna Longthorp's farm but Brexit and Covid has heavily impacted on her business seeing production and feed costs soar.

Anna who runs Happy Trotters said: "The pigs that we were sending to the bigger processors that kind of fell away because they weren't able to get the through put in the factories because of covid. It was like the perfect storm with Brexit at the same time there were hold ups on the borders. Our biggest challenge at the moment is the cost of production our feed costs have gone through the roof."

Respected voices in the industry say pig farmers have had it harder than most.  Alistair  Driver Editor of Pig World magazine said they had been operating at a loss of around £25 per pig which equates to thousands of pounds per week.

The industry has also been hit by a shortage of labour.

The food industry has also suffered. In Sowerby Bridge in West Yorkshire one cheese making business has had to scale down its plans.

Razan Alsous from Yorkshire Dama Cheese said:"We stopped thinking of growing more because Business is usually based on anticipation because of Brexit we didn't know what the rules would be which way the rules were going to go, how much the demand was going to go."

Razan is trying not to pass price rises on to her customers.

She added: "All our expenses have been increased but is it the right time to increase the price, we are in a critical situation. We will absorb some of it and this will affect our profit and our growth . But at the end of the day you have to think about the customers."

Brexit and the pandemic have imposed challenges in every sector in the food industry. Today at least one of its biggest shop windows is underway.

The Great Yorkshire Show is a boost to morale as well as sales for businesses which have never been through anything like the past year.

Anna Longthorp added: "It's something that we all look forward to I think every year, it's great that it's able to go ahead, obviously it's not going full pelt like it does in normal times but it's just nice that it can go ahead."