Farming Futures
If farms have been part of your life in even a minor way you will instantly connect with a description of a lobby where you kick off your wellies next to a washing machine milling away constantly, a farm kitchen where the dogs and the bits of straw creep in to create that farmy Rayburn fug, with cups of tea maybe and worn but comfy chairs and green boiler suits giving off a strangely reassuring smell of animal manure. Pictures maybe of Captain and Bess hauling in the last horse-drawn wagon-load of sheaves the year before grandad bought the Fordson tractor. You know the sort of thing? I spent a lot of time in a new farmhouse in Sweden once where the bidet that the farmer’s wife had thought was such a good idea was always full of smelly wellington socks. I’ve come in from tending the eel-trap in the pouring rain of Wales for a last cup of tea and a Welshcake before the family went to bed and l was back off out in the rain for the rest of the night. I’ve put the world to rights and played a tune or two in farmhouse kitchens in County Clare. I think of the Irish fiddle player Paddy Fahey, whose tunes were linked in his mind with places on his farm in East Galway. He would remember each of his own tunes by thinking of where he had been on the farm when the tune started to form in his musical mind. And I would venture that all these people felt a visceral connection and a love for the land they farmed, where they grew up, even as they were also doing what they were being told or paid to do by successive governments, paid to grub hedges out, encouraged to spray chemicals and fertilisers around, then suddenly being paid to put the hedges back again, or planting herbal leys where the old flower meadows had once been before ‘improvement’ had destroyed them. Good people mostly, but not entirely in control.
Sometimes I stumble across a radically different kind of farm, a more calculating kind, that lacks the warm connection with the land of a good family farm. I first came across one of these years ago when I was working on the census, trying to give a census form to a farmer who never seemed to be at home. Turned out that that was because his home was in Australia. The farm was entirely given over to ‘combinable crops’ – crops that you harvest with a combine harvester – cereals, oilseed rape and field beans. The farmer ran the farm by phoning the agronomists and the agricultural contractors. They organised the chemical fertilisers, the spraying, the cultivating, the spraying, the planting, then more spraying, of course, and then brought out the combine, put the crops in storage and watched the futures markets. I don’t know if this farmer was unique, or successful, or if he now uses a drone to check if the contractor is doing the farming. You wouldn’t get a cup of tea and a Welshcake in his kitchen, that’s for sure.
Another time when I was trying to find a large landowner (who owned at least a thousand acres of land too) I walked through his clean concrete yard full of Rangerovers and suchlike to his nice tidy office buildings to talk with the farm secretary. Turned out the landowner was in a room next door I had never seen before where all the Rangerover owners were at work in their suits at their computers. These were agronomists and accountants, planning spraying regimes, balancing inputs and outputs, talking of adjuvants and crop protection and crop nutrition, speculating in wheat, bean and oilseed rape futures.
The clash of cultures this illustrates has been a concern to the National Trust for some time, because they wish to combine care for the countryside with ‘modern’ farming. Their way of convincing themselves and us that they are doing their best is often to insist that their tenants farm with conservation in mind on the more ‘marginal’ ground in return for allowing them to rip into the land with the chemicals and sprays on the more ‘productive’ areas. This works, to the limited extent that maybe choughs survive on the cliff tops while the farmer gets on with treating potatoes to the very latest in crop protection and nutrition, a bit inland of said cliffs.
This National Trust approach is based on an assumption that proper, serious food production needs inputs of sprays and chemicals. In spite of all the pressure from the agricultural chemicals brigade to make this an article of faith, we all actually know that this is not true. I’m sure we can all find a nearby organic farm where the farmer is as prosperous as anyone else and probably says going organic was the best thing he’s ever done. There’s one such only a mile down the road from me. I came across another one the other day, on a farming forum, who had not bothered to go for organic certification but was farming organically perfectly successfully without getting any organic premium prices but saving a fortune on chemicals. (And it is also important to point out that even if the chemical farmers produced more food temporarily, using poisonous chemicals to do so, this is clearly not sustainable and it’s high time we came up with something cleverer.) The ‘either conservational or profitable’ notion underlying the National Trust approach is, I suggest, a very misleading idea which if it spreads will put much of lowland Britain in the hands of those same soulless agronomists I met in the estate office. One can predict a kind of a compromise emerging – give the sterile uplands and the marginal land to the conservationists and the big lowland arable farms to the agronomists and the chemical boys.
I fear that these huge arable farms, with all the chemical inputs, and with a profit and loss calculation with no column putting a value on the loss of all our wildlife, will end up farming in a way that is even more hydroponic than the way they farm now. The land, the soil, will just be a growing medium; the administration of ‘nutrients’ and ‘crop protection’ will be directed from space via drones and robots. The countryside will simply be a production site run by people who think shooting pheasants keeps them in touch with the natural world, and we will be sold this deal with the devil because conservationists will get the bits industrial farming doesn’t want anyway. The same uplands that the enclosers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries didn’t want to steal either.
It is very easy to fall for the either-or arguments. We humans seem prone to think in terms of opposites, and if farming is classified either as conservational or progressive, or conventional versus organic, we can have that kind of spurious oppositional discussion with each other. I believe that things are very much simpler than that. We have foolishly entrusted the future of the planet to capitalist agrochemical enterprises that by definition don’t care about anything except providing the ‘shareholder value’ that releases the big bonuses for the directors, and who have been shown to lie and manipulate and lobby to achieve their ends. This week marked the end of the Bayer company’s attempt to make the European Court lift the European Union’s ban on neonicotinoid pesticides. They failed, but as long as chemical companies aim to dominate the discussions of entire continents with lobbying and misinformation, lawyers and propaganda and corruption, we will be less motivated to develop clever ways of combining conservation with food production, based on understanding and working with the subtle and complex interactions in ecosystems we still do not fully understand, instead of hitting them with indiscriminate chemical blunt instruments. I believe that it is time to take back control of our countryside from the chemical farmers - the whole countryside, not .just the bits that aren’t profitable.