Chairman of the Essex Farmers' Union John Jolly somehow juggles the role with farming 400 acres and owning Mangapps Railway Museum, finds JILL MARINER

The new chairman of Essex National Farmers' Union is a very well-known face in the mid Essex farming community.

John Jolly, 56, is well-known, too, in the world of steam trains and historic railways as the owner of Mangapps Farm Railway Museum at Burnham.

It can't be easy wearing these two hats simultaneously but John manages both with apparent ease - farming 400 acres in Burnham and welcoming 20,000 visitors a year to the museum, not to mention all the committee and paper work attached to both pursuits.

However, he insists the railway is just a hobby, albeit a lucrative one. Farming is his main career and his first love.

John Jolly's family originally came from Scotland. They were farming near Rochford in Essex 150 years ago. John joined the family dairy farm at South Fambridge in the late Fifties.

In 1973 he bought a 300-acre arable and pig farm at Halesworth, Suffolk where he farmed for 13 years before coming home to Essex. He still holds 70 acres of set-aside land in Halesworth.

John has been a member of the National Farmers Union for 40 years, joining the Essex County Executive in 1967.

In Halesworth he joined the Suffolk branch and the county executive in the mid 1970s.

On his return to Essex, John joined the old Southminster branch - serving variously as vice chairman and chairman of the original branch and the newly-merged Maldon and Southminster branch of which he is currently chairman - and on the Essex County Executive.

He also serves as a member of the East Anglian Region Parliamentary Land Use and Environment Committee which meets at Newmarket to discuss Parliamentary measures.

He describes this grand-sounding body as "a main interface for East Anglian farmers with the Government."

He is also a member of the eastern region administrative board for the NFU.

John describes his election to the top county NFU post as a formality: "I have been vice chairman for two years and I will be chairman for two years.

"Farming is in its biggest crisis since the 1920s and Thirties - since the great depression of the 1880s - and it is right across the board.

"There is no type of farming that hasn't been affected. In the old days you could convert from arable to dairy. Now there's nowhere to go."

John blames this crisis on the reduction in subsidies through pressure from bodies such as the World Trade Organisation, and on a slump in world commodity prices.

Profits become marginal and it only needs the wrong sort of weather for all to be lost. Mercifully these three evils haven't combined yet.

The way out, he believes, will not be popular. Farms will become much larger, more specialised, corporate-owned empires with fewer concerns for the environment: "You will lose the structure of British farming."

When he started farming 400 acres was a medium-to-large concern. Now it is small potatoes compared to the many East Anglian farms of thousands and thousands of acres.

Farming subsidies are not intended to keep the farmer and his wife in champagne and fast cars.

"They are to level out the ups and downs of agricultural economics. They benefit the consumer as well.

"History has proved that agriculture can't survive without some level of Government aid," John said.

Pigs, poultry and horticulture are suffering more than most types of farming as they receive no support. "They are staring bankruptcy in the face," says John.

An endless torrent of environment and safety legislation and general red tape threatens to strangle the farmer.

On the thorny question of GM foods John chooses his words carefully.

"From my own knowledge I don't think there is any danger from eating them. But if the consumer is unhappy, I am quite happy not to grow them."

Identifying GM produce can be a problem. It is impossible to separate American GM soya oil from the ordinary variety.

John was one of the original big growers of oil seed rape - a good healthy crop made unprofitable by its alternative, American soya. And, thanks to American pressure, no longer subsidised by the EU.

"We are in thrall to American economic and diplomatic power. Economic wars are the wars of the future," he says with just a shade of bitterness.

Man of earth and steel - John Jolly is both farmer and railway enthusiast at his farm in Burnham

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