A long-serving farmer has blamed middlemen taking an outsized share of profits for a sharp gap between farmgate prices and retail costs, which pushes producers out of business, with some crops selling for nearly double by the time they reach consumers.

“Do something for the farmer at the bottom, the man with mud on his boots,” Armag Farms’ Richard Armstrong told the Ministry of Agriculture and Food and Nutritional Security’s Looking Forward: Agriculture 2030 colloquium on Monday,

The economics of farming had become increasingly unsustainable because too little of the final selling price reaches those who grow the food, he said.