-Caveat Lector-
Hang up the pitchfork and sell up
This farming crisis is for real, argues Leanda de Lisle. The countryside
of the future will be managed by big business and inhabited by rich
urbanites http://www.newstatesman.co.uk/199909060014.htm
Hang up the pitchfork and sell up
This farming crisis is for real, argues Leanda de Lisle. The countryside of the
future will be managed by big business and inhabited by rich urbanites
PictureNewspapers report that British agriculture is suffering its worst
crisis since the 1930s, but is that really so? Despite the BSE crises and their
annual complaints about the strong pound, farmers are still out there farming,
after all. Isn't it just a case of their crying wolf once more? No.
Rationalisation has arrived in the countryside and will change its face for
ever.
The family farm is disappearing, and the agriculture minister Nick Brown's
promise of cash for farmers who retire is designed to hasten the process. Farms
in Britain are instead becoming rich men's toys or the kind of right-sized,
downsized, large-sized businesses favoured by management consultants. Given how
industrial-scale agriculture has been slated in recent years, this seems ironic.
But to the government it is simply inevitable, in a way the triumph of the
proletariat is not.
The current problems began under the Conservatives with the BSE crises and the
strengthening of the pound. Jonathan Pugh, whose family currently manage a
2,000-acre hill farm in Wales, found they were unable to sell their lambs to the
Spanish market that once took them with such enthusiasm. They hoped that things
could only get better, but under Labour the crises have got worse. With the
economic problems in Russia and the continuing strength of the pound, the export
market disappeared.
At home, new government regulations have made slaughtering costs prohibitive,
and, uniquely within the EU, the farmer alone is expected to bear those costs.
The result is that lambs that once made Pugh £36 each now make him £18. Worse,
his ewes, which had lost 50 per cent of their value over the previous three
years, are now almost worthless. The wool market has collapsed, and Pugh's fuel
costs have risen twice in the past six months. What should he now do?
The Pughs have already tried to spread their costs. In 1989 they bought a small
farm after the 96-year-old man who farmed it died. The house was sold to a
detective constable, and the land remains worked by them without any extra
labour. The local council has been keen for them to graze their sheep on the
750-acre park it owns, and the Pughs have obliged, although for what reward it
is difficult to say. They looked hard at the organic option, but, Pugh tells me,
it made no sense to him. "They wanted us to dip our sheep in Bayticol, which is
so toxic you have to burn it."
Another avenue the family explored was diversification. They planted trees but
it hasn't helped their financial situation. What, then, would? Money? "The
politicians are very clever," Pugh says bitterly. "They always say, 'There's no
more money', so people think we want money out of them. But we don't want money.
We want our markets back and we want to be dealt with fairly."
That means allowing farmers to compete on equal terms with their EU neighbours
and challenging the supermarkets and the middlemen who have been allowed to grow
so fat at the expense of both farmer and consumer.
Pugh believes that, while the government proclaims that it can't help, the truth
is that it doesn't want to. "I sometimes think it's part of some master plan,"
he told me. "Perhaps it's something to do with the right to roam and giving
people the countryside."
I can understand why he thinks as he does. After all, those in government seem
merely embarrassed by the farmers' shouts of despair. It is as if they can't
wait for the family farm finally to die. "Why," they appear to wonder, "is it
taking so long?"
The average net farm income in England for 1998-99 was £8,000 and falling. But,
as the American writer Fawn Brodie once wrote, "there is a gold mine or buried
treasure on every mortgaged homestead. Whether the farmer digs for it or not, it
is there, haunting his daydreams when the burden of debt is most unbearable."
Many have hung on; some despair. In Wales farmers are now killing themselves at
a rate of one every ten to 11 days. Others are trying to sell and finding they
cannot.
As the estate agent SPD Savills told me, there isn't a market for remote farms
with poor land in the hills or the fens. It is impossible to know what will
become of such farms and the land they work. The older farmers will doubtless
die in harness, but who will take over from them? Their sons and daughters are
leaving to find work in the cities. In other areas of the country, those with an
attractive house near a city have found a buyer for their home among the urban
rich. SPD Savills
