Supremo still has to deliver bumper result

Or it could be sour grapes because I didn't get what I wanted.

Take Christine Tacon. She was head of the Co-op's farming business for many years, despite freely admitting she knew nothing about farming, but was a "good manager".

I first met her at a WiRe (Women in Rural Enterprise) conference at Harper Adams in 2002, when she was a "keynote speaker" on managing small businesses. I gave her information about our (small) business to read and hopefully take to her dairy managers.

I was optimistic then, because my husband Peter had already been on several of her dairy farms and the managers had seemed keen to try TDM, but they'd shrugged and said their boss wouldn't fund it, which is why I targeted her.

What I didn't know then was that the Co-op was going to sell their cows to focus solely on fruit and vegetables.

In 2013 she left the Co-op and became Supermarket Ombudsman with a remit to oversee the way supermarkets treat their producers and to negotiate better deals with regard to prices, contracts and bullying. So what has she achieved in her first year? Have "suppliers" benefited?

She's been meeting suppliers to gather evidence of how supermarkets have been manipulating them. She has funds for two investigations a year, which considering that the post is a three-year contract, is a maximum of six on her watch.

Maybe I misjudged her. But if there had been any successful outcomes, surely they would have been all over the farming press? The Farmers Weekly reported recently that she said progress is "not great". She says this is because suppliers are slow in coming to her with information, despite assurances of anonymity.

So it's the farmers' fault again.

It feels like another talking shop to me, which could end up where it started. Another expensive Government idea?

* Rosemary Allen is a retired livestock farmer now living near Ellesmere and with her husband Peter is part of CowCash-UK