I wouldn’t feel comfortable telling you, whoever you are and wherever you are, about the women I have known and liked and loved, nor about whatever formative experiences might have resulted in my being attracted to particular women. So if that’s what you want you can whistle. But I am, I have eventually come to realise, a little easier about talking about men, even as I admit now that my feelings for some of them might have been some kind of love.
When I was five and started remembering things we were living on a traditional Herefordshire farm that grew hops and raised cattle, and grew cereals that were stored in round thatched ricks in a traditional rick yard until the threshing machine came around. My father was a gentle warm strong sunburnt man with big hands I loved to hold, and the farm bailiff too seemed to me to be a kind warm man with a soft Gloucestershire burr in his voice. Maybe I believed that he was as good a dad to his son, my first friend, as mine was to me. Somehow since then the men I have liked the best have been countrymen more often than not, big shambling men maybe, men with big hands and warm burry voices.
When I was a teenager our family lived next door to a family of farmers who had been evicted from the Eppynt ranges, one of 54 farming families displaced by the government in 1940 to create a military firing range and training area, which destroyed the easternmost outpost of the Welsh language. This family brought their wild Radnor sheep with them, said to be able to leap a six-bar gate, which people just said in order to exaggerate their exotic Welsh agility, as there wasn’t a six-bar gate in the parish. They continued a simple and straightforward a way of farming as if they were still on the Eppynt, though I never actually heard them speaking Welsh. The man of the house died when his only son was about sixteen, and young Eddie and his mother took over. We couldn’t keep away from the farm, playing in the barns and strawstacks, and in the evenings Eddie would sometimes take us for drives in his pickup, touring round with our elbows out the windows looking to see what the other farmers were doing. I ended up working the harvest there for several summers. Eddie, of course was another big warm kind sunburnt man. I remember him crying quietly when the last of his father’s cows dislocated a hip and had to go off in the knacker wagon, wiping a tear from his stubbly face with a big mucky paw.
Some while ago I found myself spending a lot of time very close to another farmer. A notorious farmer with a bad reputation for gradually degrading the farm, leaving sheep carcases lying around, not maintaining hedges and letting his cattle poach all his pastures. And yet I liked him. He had a kind face, he looked as if he liked and understood people and empathised with them, and he was, of course, the same big shambling kind of man that I find it maybe too easy to like. But these days it’s less easy. I have struggled with my regard for another family of farmers, people I know so much about that my liking and respect for them is founded not on any predilections but on a sound knowledge of who they are and how they live their lives and how kind they have been to a lot of young people who really needed their warmth and support. And yet their farm is an environmental disaster area, like many a farm in Mid Wales.
They keep sheep on the hills, as their families have done for years. This is the chronic environmental disaster, allowing the sheep to perpetuate the desolation of moorland grazings with the minimum of biodiversity, suppressing the wish of their hill grazing to return to its destiny as Atlantic rainforest. Years of nutrient stripping and overgrazing has resulted in areas like the Cambrian Mountains becoming astonishingly unproductive, with so little fertility that quite small numbers of subsidised sheep can keep them gnawed to the bone. Rewilding would allow this part of our exhausted biosphere to recover its productivity.
The acute environmental disaster is the big chicken shed, a business built up by their energy, drive and enthusiasm, and now giving them an income envied by many farmers with more and better land. For their farming is now not tied to their land. It’s a factory farm. It uses feedstuffs brought half around the world, from places such as the Amazon basin, to feed an extraordinary 96,000 chickens. It does not use and recycle nutrients within the farm in a sustainable way; the imported feed passes through the chickens and becomes a devastating pollutant, bringing in to the farm huge quantities of nutrients the farm, and the whole Wye valley, cannot deal with. They are one of the farms responsible for the destruction of the ecology of the River Wye. They have the technology of a factory farm, but no technology to deal with the industrial waste, and so have been spreading it around the countryside in the old fashioned way, where it pollutes the land, the atmosphere and the waterways.
They are of course part of an agricultural community that is very content with itself and is reluctant to change, and is supported by a Welsh government that sees such communities as the bedrock of Welsh culture. But if the precious ecosystem of the Wye Valley is to be saved, industrial chicken farmers have to stop doing what they are doing. We tend to think with some reason that farmers do what we pay them to do. If we hadn’t paid the subsidies they would of course have stopped farming sheep on those hills long ago, because these areas are so marginal that much of the land is not by any stretch farmland. I spoke to my neighbour farmer the other day about planting some trees to gap up a degraded hedge and he – a millionaire for sure – said he would only do it if he got a grant. We, their neighbours, tend to suspect they will do anything we pay them to do, and nothing if we don’t.
In the Netherlands industrial farming is now doing so much damage to the environment that the government is contemplating closing farms down. Dutch pig farms and the resulting pig manure have been an issue for years, and now cows are producing so much pollution that they are threatening the entire ecosystem of the Netherlands, degrading nature reserves and of course hastening global warming too. The Dutch solution is to suggest paying farmers to stop farming, which is causing a massive reaction among Dutch farmers who don’t want to admit the harm they are doing and don’t want to change their lifestyle. They are constantly evolving fancy new milk products to make use of milk from more cows than the country could possibly need. They are too sold on the images of pretty Dutch milkmaids in flappy hats and cheese boats and black and white cattle on their green polders to be able to admit that they are poisoning it all.
It seems to me that we might have to follow this story with some interest, as it is likely that chicken farmers will not be persuaded to stop destroying the River Wye unless we too pay them to stop. Meanwhile the Welsh government would do well to think of an alternative dream of Welshness that does not foul its own nest with billions of tons of bird droppings, and gnaws the mountains to the bone. Rewilding might give the farmer something else to do, and money to do it too. Why not? We’ve been paying them to trash the place for years, so what do we have to lose? Maybe we could pay the farmers to rewild the hills and recreate the rainforest, instead of feeding their chickens on soya grown where the rainforests of the Amazon used to be? Farmers might make a living from a vibrant reviving biosphere instead of smelly old sheep. And if you think I’m going too far here, please cast your mind back to the Thatcher years when the government – run by the party farmers mostly vote for – destroyed an entire industry and undermined all its associated communities, social clubs, brass bands and male voice choirs. There was a strong green case for closing coal mining down, but that was absolutely not why Thatcher did it. There is a very strong green case for closing down the industrial chicken units, and clearing the sheep off the mountains. How else do we meet the target of setting aside 30% of the country for nature recovery?
Meanwhile, how do I look my chicken farming friends in the eye? Do I hope they read this, or hope they don’t? Do I point out to them that they didn’t mind when a government they voted for destroyed the coal industry and the communities that went with it? Do I point out that that was done in order to destroy trade unions and not for environmental reasons, whereas I am arguing for something of benefit to the entire planet? It would be so much easier if farmers were a sort of people I did not instinctively like and understand. Whether they like and understand me is of course quite another matter.
I enjoyed this post very much and have been following the Dutch farming story with great interest. In your next post on this subject please can you tell us what is to be done with all that animal manure produced by the factory farming sector. Can it be used for green energy perhaps? I feel if farmers were given a positive way forward many of them would be happy to change their ways. Most of the farmers I know are, as you say, kind hearted and community spirited and we couldn't manage without their can-do and will-do attitude.