Peak Chicken
I know a farm up country from here pretty well. I won’t identify it, and you won’t be able to either. I have known the family for quite a few years, and enjoyed getting my knees under their table. Their farm is just like a hundred others in that area, but what is different is that I know them well, and like them, and have very good reasons to respect them. I found myself thinking about them after a conversation in another rural kitchen, where my hosts were trying to counter what I think they see as my prejudice against farmers by quoting various books much in circulation just now. The author of one of these books even spent some time travelling around in the smelly cab of a local knacker’s wagon, picking up ‘fallen stock’, and she produced an excellent work that you may find very helpful if you want to know what it is like to be a farmer, though if you feel tempted to empathise with any of their difficulties it would be well to remember that many of them are very rich indeed, in land, which always goes up in value, and very well supported by a subsidy system which guarantees them an income. There may be loneliness and depression in some far-flung farm houses, and sadness when they send their animals off to be sliced and ground up, but there is much money to be made, and you might find it utterly astonishing to look up on the internet the eye-watering subsidy payments that you and I have made to some of your very substantial farmer neighbours. In a country where most of us don’t own enough land to park a doormat, there has to be a limit to the possibility of empathising with subsidised landowners.
One of the big ‘us and them’ divides around here centres on farmers and farming, particularly because more and more country homes are owned by people who have moved out from towns, and there’s a fault line between ‘country people’ and ‘incomers’ or ‘townies’. We saw this crass simplification over fox hunting, and there is a very serious issue for country people priced out of being able to buy - or rent - houses in their native places. I often had to point out when the ‘country sports’ debate was at its worst that I had lived my entire childhood and much of my adult life in rural Herefordshire, much of the first 20 years either living or working on farms. I’ve been a cider maker and a charcoal burner too, and I used to work the Llangorse eel trap. My father was a farm worker and bee keeper for much of my childhood. My rural credentials are pretty good, but yet I’m no fan of foxhunts. And if I hate what farming is doing that does not mean I hate farmers. It doesn’t mean I can’t sympathise with them or count some of them as my friends. Which brings me right back to my friends up-country.
This piece isn’t about them, except that I know them well, well enough to imagine them meeting at some local dance, and falling in love. I can imagine them on horseback riding up onto the hill together to gather the sheep, until she was too pregnant or too busy with children to do it any more. I can relate to him finding himself full of the pride and energy of a young man with young children, building up the family farm. When farms all around him were getting into chickens, he would not have been slow to join in, because he is an energetic and enterprising man. I know them both as well respected members of a farming community whose tendrils, through the world of sheep and sheep shearing, stretch from Wales and the borders to Australia and New Zealand. Other farmers round there that I don’t know may well have similar stories, but what they definitely share is a farming style. If I describe a typical farm it is not theirs, but their farm is very like farms all around that huge tract of uplands. One of hundreds of farms that are very detrimental not only to the land that they use, to the local rivers, and ultimately to the whole catchment of the dying River Wye, but also to huge areas of tropical rainforest and to fish stocks and seabirds in our oceans. They also produce a lot of greenhouse gases both directly and indirectly – methane levels are seriously raised in a region where the air, you might think, should be noted for its freshness. How has this come about?
So a typical farm up there might have maybe 200 acres of land, permanent pasture in the valley bottom around the farm buildings, belonging to the family. Sheep farming has been the way of life here for years, and the sheep usually have access to common grazing on the hill, often several thousands of acres, where they have grazing rights along with the neighbouring farms and maybe cottagers too. Like all UK landowners, from the Grundys to the Duke of Buccleuch, these farmers are still being paid a subsidy for every hectare that they own. But farmers who also graze sheep on the common hill grazings get paid the subsidy for the hill grazings too, land that they do not own. So your typical farm might be getting the subsidy on their share of a 4000 acre common as well as on the 200 or so acres that they actually farm. They also get a fixed payment per sheep (£10, I was told) if they enter into the Glas Tir scheme, in order to reduce overgrazing. These farmers typically have more sheep on the hill in summer than their farms can support in the winter, and have developed a system of putting their sheep ‘at tack’ on farms in England where the grass still grows in winter. If they are in the Glas Tir scheme they get paid for every sheep put out ‘at tack’. It starts to look less like sheep farming, more like subsidy farming.
I spent some time the other evening with another farmer who farms in what was once Breconshire. He has no hill grazing rights and no chicken sheds, and farms maybe 300 acres pretty much single handed. He cannot claim subsidy on hill land he does not own, or graze it rent free. I started asking him about the hill farming situation and he nearly choked on his beef burger. His version of events is that the hill farmers in Wales are unfairly privileged by the current system. He talks of some graziers on the Brecon Beacons getting the maximum allowable subsidy of something around £350,000 per year because they are grazing huge areas of the Beacons. He talks of being able to claim the subsidy if you have grazing rights even if you don’t actually graze any sheep there, and of claiming the subsidy on reclaimed slag heaps. He says the hill graziers now get the same subsidy rate per acre as everyone else, in spite of the protests of the lowland farmers, who threatened to take the issue to court and were counter-threatened by the suggestion that this might hold up their subsidy payments for several years while the case was going on. He knows what he is talking about and his wife has relatives who have hill grazing rights, so she was looking a bit sheepish as he railed against the hill farmers. ‘Don’t take it on trust from me’, he says. ‘Look it up. Look up the Glas Tir scheme’.
I took him at his word and went on the internet. The subsidy system is fairly Byzantine, and I was often baffled, but much of what I found seems to confirm that the hill graziers are over privileged in spite of, or perhaps because of, hill grazing being utterly uneconomic by any measure, as well as being environmentally damaging. When I could detect any rationale for this in the documents I rounded up, it seemed that the Welsh government believes that hill farmers are an important part of Welsh culture and heritage, including the Welsh language, and that it supports the idea that the upland grazings are an important habitat that needs to be maintained by an appropriate level of sheep. This is a classic case of “shifting baseline syndrome” as identified by Daniel Pauly (1995), whereby the health or other attributes of an ecosystem are measured against an already depleted state. It is very likely that when the new regime for Welsh farming emerges it will continue to treat that depleted state as the baseline.
https://www.cambrianwildwood.org/forestry-in-wales/
The common land in Powys generally has a mixture of grasses and heather on poor quality acid soils leached by rain following the loss of forest cover. It is only classed as farmland because almost all rural land in the UK is classed as farmland. If historically the commons were grazed by people farming at a subsistence level, they have continued to be classed as farmland into the present day, which has become a boon for graziers who can claim the subsidy. This is paid to owners of grouse moors and deer forests as well as to farmers with grazing rights, and has supported the ‘traditional practices’ of grazing, heather burning and so on. (It also seems to be paid to some Boy Scout troops, which is among the side issues I turned up while investigating subsidies).The trouble is that this land use pattern is very environmentally destructive, and maintains the hill and mountain landscapes in a denuded state supporting a very limited range and number of species, especially if the keepers continue killing birds of prey. We may have become accustomed to seeing great sweeps of thin grasslands with virtually no trees; Wales might once have been proud to call a huge area of mid-Wales ‘the Green Desert of Wales’, and the devastation of the original forest landscapes may have happened a long time ago, but it remains so meagre an ecosystem that it scarcely deserves the name. Ecosystems need richness and diversity, not sheep like maggots gnawing the mountains to the bone. Any rational discussion of the best land use for such areas would, I think – and I’m not pretending to be humble in expressing this opinion - conclude that the best land-use was a return to native semi-natural woodland, which would protect the soil from erosion, sequester carbon, support the maximum biodiversity, hold rainwater and reduce downstream flooding, and create a range of recreational opportunities and jobs in ecotourism, forestry and so on. Hell, you could even have beavers… Elsewhere in Europe land at these kinds of altitudes tends to be forest, and there is an urgent need to raise levels of forest cover in the UK, currently the lowest in Europe, and levels of biodiversity, crash diving in the UK. On the other side of the balance sheet is the cash paid by the taxpayer to support a few farming families to produce lamb and wool at a loss – at a loss even before you start to account for the value of lost peat, lost carbon, and the loss of all the other opportunities listed above. A new revitalised hill and mountain ecosystem could be powered by the same farmers, who are widely believed to be very happy to change their practices if they are paid to do so.
The other feature of almost every farm in the region is a huge shed with maybe 100,000 chickens, generally under the auspices of a factory in Hereford owned by Cargill, an American company heavily involved in the destruction of the rainforests of Brazil in order to grow soya. One of the problems with farming chickens in general, let alone for Cargill, is that it is hard to do so sustainably. Currently they are fed on things like soya and fish meal. Their only connection with the farms is that they are looked after by the farmers. A sustainable chicken farming system would source their food on the farm as far as possible and create a circulation by which the nutrients of the farm would recirculate via manure that supported the growth of chicken feed. Such a farm would have the number of chickens that it could support with locally grown grain. There is a problem with sourcing the protein component of the chicken (and pig) feed, especially in industrial units, which is why soya from rainforests and fishmeal from our oceans have become essential to this industry. If we were serious about sustainability we would have to develop an alternative, maybe insect, source of protein. (Clearly there is development work to be done here, but it is acknowledged that the future of insect farming for food looks brighter for animal feed than for human food. Chickens love insects and don’t need to have them attractively and expensively packaged and disguised with Periperi sauce; and we already feed mealworms to our garden birds).
Chicken farming has got to such a level in Powys that the council has declared they have reached ‘peak chicken’ and they have put a moratorium on planning permissions for new chicken sheds. Chicken farming around here is an accident originally caused by the success of the local chicken factory. There has been no strategic plan to fit this trend into the local environment, and when they say they have reached ‘peak chicken’ I suggest they really mean that the number of chicken sheds has become intolerable, because there was no limit on how many were allowed, and the planning system could not restrain the rush to chickens because it only makes case-by-case decisions. Because these decisions are based on planning criteria alone, I think Powys council went out on a limb when they decided to embargo further planning applications on chicken sheds. In a recent George Monbiot film on the state of our rivers, the Welsh Minister for Rural Affairs, Lesley Griffiths, appeared to commit to shutting down industrial chicken and pig units in the catchment if necessary, a step I doubt the English government would take, and a measure of how serious the situation has become. Maybe a national government has the power to take on Cargill; I hope so.
So these farms in relatively remote areas generate greenhouse gases from the chicken waste, from the fossils fuels burnt during the long supply chain from distant oceans and rainforests where they source the fishmeal and soya for the chicken feed, from the environmental devastation of rainforests destroyed to grow the soya, and the lorries driving round the farms collecting the chickens and the eggs and bringing in the feed. Mid Wales has very high levels of greenhouse gases such as methane emitted by chicken farming, which damages the local environment as well as the planet, and there is not space here to list the environmental repercussions of industrial fishing or rain-forest destruction, though as I mentioned earlier the American company Cargill that owns the central chicken factory and supplies the feed has been very heavily criticised for its role in the destruction of rainforests in Brazil in particular.
https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2020/11/25/cargill-deforestation-agriculture-history-pollution.
The farms also draw in so many nutrients via this supply chain that manure, for example, which in sustainable farming would circulate beneficially as part of a crop rotation, has become a pollutant. One result is that large quantities of phosphates and nitrates and so on find their way into the water system and eventually into the River Wye and thus affect the entire Wye catchment.
“On the border between Wales and England, we found a great river dying before our eyes. The Wye is covered by every possible conservation law, but in just a few years it has spiralled towards complete ecological collapse. The vast beds of water crowfoot, the long fluttering weed whose white and yellow flowers once bedecked the surface of the river, and which – like mangroves around tropical seas – provide the nurseries in which young fish and other animals grow and adults hide and breed, have almost vanished in recent years. Our own mapping suggests a loss of between 90% and 97%.” (George Monbiot, see link above).
I look on your works, ye mighty, and despair. I cannot think of an appropriate conclusion. But however you interpret this mess, to paraphrase Karl Marx, the point is to change it.