Heroes of Agriculture

My father was the butt of a rustic joke that involved his workmates sending sheaves of corn up the elevator onto the rick faster that he could cope with them. Building a rick of sheaves is something some of you may not have done, and you may not realise how hard it is. Walking round on the soft springy sheaves, using your pike to balance like a tightrope walker; every time a sheaf falls from the elevator you have to catch it on the tines of the pike and twist it around so that it falls into the right place among the other sheaves, where it will be a part of a delicate structure designed to lock together and slope gently outwards, to shed the rain and take a coat of thatch. It is exhausting work, a bit like working on a trampoline, or on the deck of a trawler rising and falling with the waves. My father was as much to blame as his jovial rustic colleagues, really, because he was damned if he would let them beat him, too proud to jump off the rick and get someone else to go up there. As a result he cricked his back and ended up in a plaster cast from his neck to his knee, and eventually went for a lighter job on a fruit farm run by a retired colonel and his wife. The colonel’s wife had been in the Women’s Royal Navy, the ‘Wrens’, and affected a way of standing with her one foot at right angles to the other to let you know she was used to bracing herself against any rough seas that might have hit the office block in Uxbridge or wherever the Wrens worked. (They weren’t allowed on warships until 1993). He, the colonel, was pretty much how you might imagine a retired colonel, only worse, with an aristocratic line in obsolete swearwords. I once saw him come out of the kitchen to hurl across the yard an egg that displeased him, shouting as he did so ‘A murrain on these fucking farmers!’ He was one of many local retired soldiers who came out of the war with enough money to set up fruit farms in the area.

Our move – from a hop farm to a fruit farm in the same county – was also into a new farming culture, the same farming culture that has dominated our countryside since the war, so maybe it is appropriate that the new farmer was a military man. On the hop farm not much had changed since the enclosures, but the defining event for the new farm was the war, and the way the government was taking an interest in the food security that would definitely be needed if the Second World War ever happened again.

To the north of us was a farm owned by a family of famous Hereford cattle breeders. They had been heroes of wartime agriculture. I have seen old films of their wondrous 80-acre field, cleared of all the hedges and habitats for wartime food production, being ploughed with a ‘prairie-buster’ plough behind a caterpillar tractor, with the young driver’s old dad following behind with a Shire horse tushing the horse-harrows. The same machine was also extolled for the efficiency with which it destroyed an area of marshland where the peewits used to breed. Even after the war the 80-acre field excited admiration, as did the articles in the paper about Argentine cattle ranchers coming to buy the farm’s famous Hereford bulls.

To the south was another prominent farmer, from a family still well known today, who made himself a name by using crop-spraying aeroplanes. These would swoop down somewhere near the field and pour out great mists of chemicals. To get spray onto a particular field you had to spray a fair chunk of the countryside round about. The idea was to gain a reputation of being a progressive powerful Yankee of a farmer. To apply the minimum amount of a poisonous chemical as safely and precisely as possible was not the aim.

At the end of the war factories equipped for making explosives and nerve agents were looking for new markets. In the UK, or Great Britain as we called it then – both titles looking pretty ragged just now - the advisory body called the WarAg continued into peacetime to advise farmers on how to drive their farms forward in case the war came back again. These advisors told farmers how to ‘improve’ complex wildflower-rich meadows, rich carbon stores full of insect life, by ploughing them up, adding chemicals, and reseeding them with very simple grass mixes. And they advised on how to improve crop yields by adding chemicals and using sprays, so that there was soon a thriving profitable market for the products of the wartime factories.  

As you may be aware, there are chemical similarities between some explosives and fertilisers; many IRA bombs used a mixture of fertiliser and sugar, and some weedkillers and insecticides derived from wartime work on nerve-agents. When these industries turned to agriculture no doubt they thought of it – or publicised it – as turning swords into ploughshares. I think it is more illuminating to think of it as turning the weapons of war onto the countryside.

As agriculture emerged from the war and civil servants returned to civilian concerns, those in the Department of Agriculture brought wartime attitudes to their work too, and easily accepted the idea of using the chemistry and the metaphors of wartime upon the countryside.  War – even that necessary war -had been a competition, and a very male way of conducting diplomacy. So to see farming as a battle between species, where the crop was to be defended against an army of enemies, came naturally. And the war was to be waged with no great subtlety, but rather armed with a few simple maxims, one of which was that crops needed Nitrogen, Phosphorous and Potassium, apparently, in a particular ratio, so you bought bags of NPK and spread it around.

Concepts such as ‘ecology’ or ‘the biosphere’ may have had their origins in the work of Charles Darwin and others, but in the 1950s they were only known to a few academics. Civil servants and farmers accepted the idea that farming could become almost hydroponics, where you added chemicals to a substrate to ‘fertilise’ crops and other chemicals to ‘protect’ them, and it may be harsh to accuse them of anything worse than ignorance of the extraordinarily valuable interactions between species that they so crudely tried to eliminate, though it is hard to forgive the insensitivity that saw no value in the natural world other than as a resource to exploit. Unfortunately once established this attitude to farming has dominated our countryside ever since, with serious consequences for soil fertility and wildlife as well as being one of our major causes of greenhouse gas emissions. The new methods became the accepted orthodoxy of the chemical-agriculture industry. They are now so embedded in the farming culture that they are difficult to challenge. Even serious opponents of these practices rarely dare to call for them to end, and merely suggest the reduction of chemical inputs, although we all know that organic farming is widespread and perfectly feasible.

Arguments about the use of chemicals thus tend to get bogged down in arguments about whether they increase yields and whether their use can be reduced. These arguments seem to me to be entirely sterile. We know – if we take the trouble to inform ourselves – that the chemical companies promote their products with bogus science and rigged safety tests; we know that fertilisers and farm chemicals damage soil structure and soil microbiology on which fertility depends; we know that chemical agriculture has devastated the wildlife of the UK particularly; and we know that intensive chemical agriculture is killing  rivers such as the River Wye, creates dead-zones in our seas and is responsible for huge outputs of greenhouse gasses, particularly from nitrogenous fertilisers. This cannot be dismissed as acceptable damage in return for food; it is damage to the ecosystems, the biosphere, on which our food production depends, and if concepts like ecosystem or biosphere had been known and valued by the post-war civil servants and politicians in charge of agriculture, these methods should not have been promoted. Ways of improving food production (through plant breeding, cultural techniques and the encouragement of natural predators) without damaging the planet could have been researched and explored, but as long as we thought chemicals were the answer there was no incentive for exploring more benign methods and techniques. Most farmers use no other techniques, and many treat crops and animals with chemicals as routine, without bothering to find out if there is a problem.

You might think that forests might have been exempt from the ‘war on nature’ approach, and thought of them as refuges for wildlife, but in many countries this way of thinking affected forestry too. In Canada trees seen as the most commercial were planted and the other less profitable trees were classed as weeds. Glyphosate – the carcinogenic weedkiller our farmers love so much – was sprayed on forests in an attempt to turn them, like our wheat fields, into monocultures. One particular scientist* working as a forest researcher spent her career challenging this, through her work on the relationships between fungi and trees. She was able to demonstrate that trees could be linked up by the underground mycorrhizal threads of fungi, and through this network moisture and nutrients could be passed between trees and fungi in a way that could prioritise the needs of particular trees in particular situations. She was able to prove that the trees seen as weeds could be crucial in keeping alive the trees the foresters wished to encourage. This is the crudest of summaries of her work, because I’m just using it as an example of how we are coming to understand that what happens in nature is extraordinarily complex, whereas our interventions are clumsy, brutal and often counter-productive.  Her ideas have not entirely succeeded in changing the way foresters work in Canada, maybe because the chemical companies who want forestry to be chemical-dependant have too much influence over governments and have been able to pay academics to manufacture competing ‘science’. But the emerging view of nature as being a co-operation between species rather than a competition must eventually change the way we treat the land, ideally before wilderness forests are converted into glyphosate monocultures like much of the farmland near where you live..

We have been treating the land, the soil, as if it was nothing more than a hydroponic substrate. You plant crops and add the NPK and the water, and then you spray with biocides from time to time, as recommended by the agronomists who are often on commission from the chemical companies. If you take the nitrogen as an example, these fertilisers are made from the nitrogen in the air by chemical processes, often in Russia or Ukraine, that require large quantities of fossil fuel and thus emit large quantities of carbon dioxide. They are then trucked over here, using fossil fuels again, and spread on the land where only 17% is utilised by crops and the rest pollutes rivers, lakes and the sea and also gives off another even more powerful greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide. Nitrogen is already here in the air, of course, at 75% the main gas in the atmosphere and it can be made available in the soil by making changes to farming, changes that recognise that farming might benefit from seeing natural processes as co-operative rather than competitive. Spreading nitrate fertilisers damages the soil, in particular the soil structure and the microbes that co-operate with plants to fix atmospheric nitrogen and make it available to the plants. And there are many other soil organisms that also co-operate in ways that could be beneficial to farmers, and which are damaged by contact with these chemicals. The most obvious of these even to the farmer who knows nothing of ecology are earthworms, which are in very serious decline under industrial farming.

For this destructive orthodoxy to change, other changes in our attitudes might be necessary or helpful. These might include some criticism of the idea that the surface of this country, for example, is mainly a source of income to be exploited by a very small number of people** for their personal profit. There should be ways that the land of my community, for example, might make a direct contribution to the food supply of the people who live here, rather than supporting three farmers. There should be ways that those in this community could have some veto on the destruction of the environment for the benefit of those three farmers. The community should have more access to the countryside than a few hundred yards of footpaths provides. The view promoted by the farming industry that the surface of the planet round here is merely their workplace should be challenged.

The other day in the pub I got into discussion with one of my neighbours about trespassing. He has a bit of land – not much more than a garden really, but he is very proud to own it. He soon started to tell me that no bugger was coming trespassing on it and if they did he would get the shotgun to ’em. I went on for a bit about how great it was that you could walk in Scandinavia or Scotland pretty much where you wanted, but he said he didn’t want to go there anyway. I pointed out that if we had the right to roam he could walk in huge areas of our landscape now called private, but it suited his argument to say he didn’t want to go there either and was quite happy on his own bit of land and wasn’t keen on walking further than his nightly stroll down to the pub, and back in time for his supper, to which he was looking forward.

I asked him how he would feel if, hungry as he was, I ordered a big basket of juicy hand-cut chips. We could either go for the law of trespass, and I would slap his hand if he reached for my chips, or we could go for the right to roam and I would share the basket with him. Which sort of world, I asked him, would he prefer? He didn’t have a ready answer, so I rested my case and bought him a pint.

It may take a while for people to realise that the system that we run, with its poverty, exploitation, environmental destruction and regular economic crises, is not the only possibility, and that visions of a more cooperative, less exploitative world are realistic and offer more hope for the future. In the meantime “Have some of my chips! There’s a bowl of ketchup too, and these couple of fish might be enough to feed everyone in the pub”. One day maybe the meek will inherit the earth.

*Suanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree, Knopf Doubleday 2021.

**25,000 people – less than 1% of the population - control half the land in England.