Small farms and farmers are disappearing at an alarming rate – and yet they are vital. A prime task for humanity is to re-establish agriculture as the focus of all our endeavours and to raise the status of farmers.
The only people who are truly treasured and rewarded in modern progressive Britain are those who deal in money. Or as the late academic and Labour MP David Marquand described them in Britain Since 1918 (2009):
“… the ‘electronic herd’ of rootless and effectively stateless bankers, hedge-fund owners, pension-fund managers, insurance company bosses and private equity partners who came to believe that the alchemy of finance would, for ever, succeed in turning dross into gold”.
Britain now has 165 billionaires and there are more than 3,000 in the world as a whole and sure as eggs is eggs, no one ever got to be a billionaire just by working.
In absolute contrast, the people who actually do things that contribute directly to the wellbeing of humanity and our fellow creatures, including teachers and healthcare professionals, are seriously under-valued, and paid as little as the government of the day thinks it can get away with. But none is more under-valued than the farmers – unless of course the farmers are also significant landowners, or farmers-qua-business people, who see agriculture simply as “a business like any other”, a way of maximising and accumulating material wealth.
Agriculture matters more than anything else
Yet of all human endeavours agriculture is by far the most important, for all kinds of obvious reasons. It’s our main source of food by far; it’s the world’s biggest employer; and of all human activities, it’s the one that engages most directly, and on by far the largest scale, with the natural world. So it is that if we get agriculture right, then even at this latest hour, with the clock ticking in Faustian fashion towards midnight, everything else we might aspire to do becomes possible.
If we get agriculture wrong – and right now we’re getting it horribly wrong – then we will be lucky to survive in a tolerable state for more than a few more decades, and most of our fellow creatures haven’t a prayer. The WWF now tells us that wildlife populations have dwindled by an average of around 75 per cent over the past 50 years. This doesn’t mean that we have lost 75 per cent of all species – but, clearly, as populations fall, so the threat of extinction increases. The spread and spread of inappropriate agriculture is a prime cause.
All of us, clearly, and particularly the people to whom we have entrusted our lives and the lives of all other creatures, must take agriculture very seriously. Indeed, farming should be the main focus of all human activity. We should build our policies, the economy, and ways of life around it. Absolutely not, as now, should we seek to gear our lives and the lives of our fellow creatures to the political ideologies and whims of the day, or to some economic algorithm, whether ‘neoliberal’ – which is the kind that now prevails the world over – or ‘Marxist’; or something in between.
Agriculture cannot be reduced to a function of GDP
But the powers-that-be, for the most part, don’t take agriculture seriously. They spend a huge amount of time on it, and our (taxpayers’) cash, and hold portentous conferences in prestigious places, with flags and banquets and sometimes with post-horns, but the people with the most power don’t truly engage with it. They don’t feel what agriculture is really about.
To most of the most influential it’s just another exercise in power and money, and the natural world is simply a ‘resource‘ to be taken seriously if it can be shown to contribute to GDP, or to the wealth of some powerful company, but otherwise not. The modern high-fallutin’ concern for ‘the environment’, global warming and mass extinction and all the rest, is alien to these people – it is beyond their cultural compass. Degrees in business studies from Harvard or PPE from Oxford, or indeed in chemistry or history, as history is conventionally taught, don’t foster the appropriate mindset.
… but try telling the powers that be
For governments like ours, agriculture is an also-ran, a bore. In Britain agriculture is now subsumed within the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. The appointed ministers for the most part are hopefuls on the way up or old lags on the way out. Thus in 2012 at the Jockey Club in Hong Kong the old and later to be disgraced Owen Paterson urged British farmers to raise more beef — to sell to the Hong Kongers; and at the Tory Party Conference in 2024 the young hopeful Liz Truss (Oxford PPE) famously or infamously urged cheesemakers to make more cheese and farmers to raise more pork. That’s as far as their understanding went.
Worse: as former smallholder and academic Chris Smaje argues in Small Farm Future (2020), and as the agricultural cognoscenti widely agree, the world above all needs small-to-medium-sized farms, as diverse as possible and as organic (low-input) as possible. Diversity of crops and animals – including genetic diversity within each class of crop and livestock – is nature’s best protection against parasites. With a variety of small farms too it’s easer for farming as a whole to change course and adjust to changing conditions – more important than ever as global warming bites.
In short, an agriculture based on small, diverse farms is far more resilient than one based on vast, high-tech, high-input monocultures – and resilience in this uncertain world is at a premium. Such farms perforce are highly complex and so they need endless tender loving care which means they also need to be skills-intensive – meaning plenty of skilled farmers and growers, as opposed to slaves doing the job of robots and tractors.
We need small farms more than ever, but we’re losing them
Yet in Britain and the world over small farms are disappearing hand over fist. When I listened to the first-ever Archers in the early 1950s, the patriarch Dan had 100 acres, which in those days was big, while his son Philip dreamed of establishing a herd of a few score pedigree Large Whites. But as Lizzie Rivera reported in Riverford’s excellent Wicked Leeks on September 26, since 2005 England has lost one in four farms that are smaller than 100 acres. According to Compassion in World Farming (CIWF), 85% of all farmed animals in the UK are now factory farmed. And as shown by a recent survey conducted by Riverford, “64 per cent of British fruit and vegetable farmers now report that their farm is at financial risk”.
As the small farms disappear, so too do the farmers, with all their expertise and hands-on experience. Theoretical knowledge is recoverable. Personal experience is irreplaceable. Lawyers and doctors recognise this. Thus, though jurors and moral philosophers of boundless scholarship and dazzling intelligence may frame our laws as thoroughly and unambiguously as they can, 90% or more of legal literature is case law – records of attempts to apply the moral and legal principles to real life.
It’s the same with medicine. The science of medicine is truly wondrous (although within 100 years or less our present knowledge will doubtless seem primitive, assuming it is still possible to do research at all). But again, the medical literature in the end is rooted in case histories. In practice, most small farms just disappear without a ripple (beyond their own neighbours) but among the more high-profile victims in recent months are Simon Fairley and Gill Barron, who established a unique and rather marvellous teaching centre and highly productive unit at Monkton Wyld in Somerset, including a pioneering micro-dairy (and a penchant for scythes). They also established The Land, which is essential reading for all who seek to engage seriously with farming.
To anyone who looks closely, who takes care to engage with life’s realities – ecological, social, spiritual, as well as merely financial – and who thinks beyond the life of parliament and their own pension, the worldwide loss of small farms is a catastrophe. Indeed, as I have said elsewhere, the task for humanity now is not to prevent catastrophe, for it is already upon us, in many different forms and contexts. The task before us now is to prevent the final descent from catastrophe on to meltdown.
Reshaping the zeitgeist
We have yet to see what kind of job the new Labour government makes of agriculture, and the new secretary of state, Steve Reed, MP for Streatham and Croydon North, will make of Defra. I beg leave to doubt, however, whether the new government or any conventional government that we can envisage will truly get to grips with the world’s ills, and in particular the key issues of food and farming. For to put the world to rights or indeed to rescue us all from meltdown we need to dig very deep indeed, right down to the ideas and presuppositions and attitudes that we take for granted, and for the most part leave unexamined – ideas which shape the Zeitgeist and seem to justify the policies and the economy and the over-hyped technologies that have led us to where we are. It’s this that I want this article and others to attempt.
An absolute priority for the whole world and particularly in urbanised, neoliberal Britain, is to raise the status of agriculture and of farmers so that people at large and the powers-that-be in particular begin properly to acknowledge that it really does matter; that it cannot simply be left in the hands of corporates or, more generally, left to the mercies of political ideologies.
In-depth analysis is needed to ask why it is that governments persist with strategies that are so obviously destructive, why the rest of us allow them to get away with it, and what should be done instead. How do we get from where we are to where we need to be? With the help (I hope) of many others, I will be returning to this general theme in the months to come.
Editor’s note: This article is reproduced by kind permission from Colin Tudge’s website https://www.colintudge.com/a-matter-of-mindset/ . Colin Tudge discusses these ideas and much more in his latest book, The Great Re-Think (Pari Publishing 2021).
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