I was in a farm shop I used to visit, partly because they sold my honey. They were an attractive couple, I don’t mind saying. I’m old enough for none of that to be misinterpreted. So on this particular day I felt like paying them a compliment. I told him that I liked the way they sold authentic local produce in an unpretentious way, or words to that effect. ‘Some of these farm shops’, I said, ‘start to diversify. First of all they start selling potpourri in little baskets of wood shavings, and they go on to selling gnomes, and before you know it…’ I was just getting going when I saw he was shifting from one leg to another, and when I paused – I’m sensitive like that – he said ‘Well, she’s just started a bit of a potpourri display as a matter of fact…’ nodding in the direction of said display.
‘You want to watch that’, I said. ‘Before you know it you’ll be selling gilets and cute chicken-themed kitchen gadgets and placemats of dogs and running a café. Instead of being a farm shop selling authentic local produce, you’ll find yourselves turning into a kind of day centre for pensioners’. I was getting going now. ‘You’ll be booking Rolling Stones tribute bands to entertain them before you know it’, I said, knowing that my generation of pensioners have moved on from Vera Lynn.
‘Well, sir,’ he said, ‘If ever that happens you will be most welcome to join us. We’ll keep an armchair for you – one of those with a spring-loaded seat and an ejector lever to make it easier to get back up’.
I mention this because the owner of my nearest farm shop has just died. He was as old as the queen, and he died on the same day, and we have all been talking reverentially about him for the last ten days. His passing has been overshadowed, of course, but we can all just remember the day when his dad died and he took over the farm, promising to devote his life to owning the farm and to selling potatoes to his loyal customers. His farm shop was about as authentic as it was possible to be. A concrete yard, a big barn with the special blended aroma of dust, soil, rotten potatoes and axle grease. He owned several hundred acres of land in the Wye valley, but far from wandering his lovely acres admiring the works of nature, he spent most of his life in the big dusty shed, grading and sorting potatoes and putting them in paper sacks. If you bought a sack he would take your tenner and go inside to find some change from the stack of cash that was reputed to hold his bed a good two feet off the floor. He produced wonderful potatoes and sold them very locally, and if anyone dares to say he did this because he didn’t have to pay tax on cash sales, he’ll have me to answer to. Especially now he’s dead and lying in state in his big potato shed and we haven’t even had his memorial service yet.
I’ve been thinking a lot about potatoes lately in the context of the various debates about regenerative agriculture, and of the notions that we might take pressure off the planet if we ate plant-based foods more and meat less. Spuds, and frozen peas, are the two vegetables we, as a nation, really like.
When I was young spuds were just another farm crop, but now everything has changed and we have Potato Barons. (Potatoes are now only grown by Potato Barons, with the tenacious exception of my farm-shop neighbour who grew them himself). A Potato Baron approaches you and offers you a very tempting sum to rent your field to grow potatoes for a season. When it is time he arrives with several huge red machines worth at least £350,000 each and starts driving them up and down your field until it is more or less the texture of the icing sugar you sift on your cakes. The same machines then fill up with seed potatoes and sow them in ridges before moving on to pulverise the next potato field. I have no idea why it is necessary to pulverise the soil so severely. It isn’t necessary in my garden, and it wasn’t necessary on the farm when I was a kid and the bailiff planted rows of potatoes for the farm workers.
In the autumn the red machines return and repulverise everything as they harvest the spuds, unless it is wet in which case they churn the whole field so badly that it is sometimes necessary for the farmer to straighten it out with a JCB before he can cultivate it again. The consensus is that this process wrecks the soil structure and that the field takes years to recover, but many farmers are happy to rent to the Potato Barons because the money is so good. No doubt these farmers use the money looking after the countryside for us. The same spuds, unlike my neighbour’s, are then often trucked off to Scotland to be made into a well-known brand of oven-chips, before being trucked back down to your local supermarket deep frozen in plastic bags. You know it makes sense.
We are now getting another kind of Baron. These also offer money you can’t refuse – unless you really do want to look after the countryside – to grow maize to feed a local anaerobic digester. These produce biogas. Originally the idea was to produce gas from farm waste, which might have been a sensible plan, but the tariffs paid for the gas under the renewable energy schemes were so good that people started to build digesters to be fed with crops specially grown for the purpose. So to make a supposedly renewable type of fuel you used all the fertilisers made with huge amounts of the same fossil fuels that power agriculture these days, to grow a crop that could be passed off as a source of renewable energy. It would probably be better, in terms of carbon footprint, not to do this at all and to leave the field empty for the season, but if you are a Maize Baron you can make a lot of money. The crop is said to be damaging to the soil and to leave it very vulnerable to soil erosion, but hey, it makes a lot of money, for the Baron and the farmer. You know it makes sense.
Add to this mix the move to regenerative agriculture, and the growing view that eating more vegetables would free land for nature and reduce methane missions and cut wasteful use of land for livestock farming, and you have an interesting conundrum. A tricky pancake, as Flann O’Brien might have said. Regenerative agriculture holds that you should cultivate the soil as little as possible. in order to preserve the soil structure, the soil organisms and the sequestered carbon. The view that we should eat less meat has to take into account that many of us are not so keen on vegetables, but we do love our spuds. How can we eat our spuds without ruining the soil with the huge machines used by the potato barons? I don’t know the answer, but luckily my neighbour’s son has inherited the farm and the farm shop. He has had to wait many years for the old boy to die, and he’s no spring chicken himself, but he has had plenty of time to prepare himself for the role and I believe he will continue in the family tradition of selflessly spending his life in the big potato shed so that his loyal customers can continue to enjoy their bags of locally-grown spuds.
And if anyone knows why or how it became necessary to pulverise the soil so comprehensively in order to grow spuds, I’d love to hear from them. I presume someone is benefiting from it but I’m not sure it is you or me.
Sorry he's gone [it can only be one place] but do hope his son keeps the tradition alive. I grow my own spuds.