Caretaker role for British farmers

Press, 5 February 1987, Page 17

Caretaker role for British farmers

By

NEAL ASCHERSON,

the London

“Observer” columnist.

Grow less food! A gramophone record -which has -been playing the same old tune in the background of my entire conscious life has suddenly been taken off. It was Dig for Victory and All Power to the War Ag. It was Step Up Milk Production, it was Clear Bracken for more cattle to graze. It was We Have the Most Efficient Farmers in the World, and eventually it was Build the Grain Mountain — and grow filthy rich. In the uncanny silence which has fallen, distant sounds and voices echo more clearly. The sounds are the slamming of doors, as bank managers refuse loans to ten thousand small farmers going bankrupt and as city fund managers climb into their Porsches to drive away from their agribusiness grain prairies for ever. The voices preach new gospels. Farmers must become countryside wardens. Their job is not to grow food, but to keep the land looking pretty. Fields are not for crops, but for golf courses, riding schools, “broadleaf coppices,” or even Barratt villages. -

The great farming crash is upon us, and the word “fallow” is no longer pejorative. D. H. Law-

rence once imagined a fresh planet without people, just “grass, with a hare sitting up.” But this is not what fallow Britain will look like.

Left to themselves, the fields would fur over with weeds, waist-high and then head-high. Bushes would be followed by small trees, and eventually — in most of lowland Britain — by dense and scrubby secondary forest. Much of this land would revert to waterlogged swamp, as field drainage broke down. It would be good for birds, but also good for rats, mosquitoes, and accumulations of weed pollen to make the nation sneeze and to smother its gardens. In the dimness of the tangled underbrush there would lurk, like the debris of a forgotten battle, millions of abandoned cars, refrigerators and — especially — agricultural machines.

This prospect terrifies the Government, the planners, and the environmentalists. This is why, as the subsidies wind down at

last, they have invented this new idea of the farmer as museum custodian, whose duty is to preserve the look of the rural “heritage.” The ancient motto of the polish peasantry, using their scythes sometimes on the wheat, sometimes (attached to a pike) on Imperial Russian soldiery, was “Nourish and Defend!” The motto of British farmers will from now on be “Prune and Pretend!”

Writing in the “Independent,” Richard North points out what nonsense it is, anyway, to treat this countryside as visually unchanging. “It is in fact both manmade and a relatively recent invention.” The. hedge-pattern is not older — usually — than the Enclosures: the bare uplands were bared by a combination of ruthless forest-felling, the eviction of human beings and the ecological murder inflicted by sheep.

And, incidentally, this new turn in farming offers sheep more damage to do. In John

McGrath’s new show, “There is a Happy Land,” a Gaelic song proclaims, “My curse upon the Great Sheep: where are the children of kindly folk who left me in my youth, before the country of Mackay became a desert?” This refers to the Highland Clearances, families driven out to make way for sheep. But the surviving crofters are now dependent on income from sheep themselves. As sheepmeat is about the only E.E.C. rural product not in surplus, its support will for the moment remain. But that — for sure — means that British farmers will now bolt into sheep-raising as a last resort. The result is all to predictable. In a few years there will be a mutton mountain. Then sheep subsidies will be slashed in turn,

and the crofters, in company with most small upland farmers in Britain, will face catastrophe.

This is not what either the Government or the environmentalists want to happen. Their hope, in this entirely new period, is that smallholdings would increase and prosper as the big farms ceased to be “viable.” To keep the countryside fit for townees to enjoy, the land would have to retain its population. A vision begins to take shape of happy cottage families, tending a few acres of organically-grown buckwheat or rye, serving cream teas to spectators as they milk goats in a demonstration byre, supplementing their income by letting the grown children commute to the nearest Japanese car plant. I don’t want only to jeer at this

change of heart. A break with the traditional belief that agricultural progress means letting big farms grow bigger by driving the small farmers off the land is very welcome. But such a new policy would need a complete change in British attitudes towards the rural economy. In this country, with the exception of the Scottish counties subject to the Crofting Acts, the small farmer is unprotected. He faces the full blast of competition for land from big landowners, from incomers backed by city fortunes, from multinational agribusiness concerns, from State corporations like the Foresty Commission. Even if the price of land goes on falling, the strong will continue — a little more slowly — to consume the weak. A century ago, when the first Crofting Act was passed, Aberdeenshire had more crofters — tenant smallholders — than any of the Highland counties which came under the act’s protection. Now there are almost none. The

slaughter of the Great War, the agonising rural slump which followed, and then the growth of uncontrolled capitalist farming in the past 30 years did for them. How may this process be halted?

It requires a completely new deal, a decision that the small farmer must be assisted to stay on the land — as he is in so many European countries — by legislation. The tax system must be revised to encourage the transmission of smaller farms to the heir. The sale of such farms must be controlled, giving first option to other farmers in the same category and only exceptionally allowing large landowners or rich incomers to acquire it. A special land bank should be founded, offering cheap loans. Central heavy-equipmerit parks should be established, capable of carrying out the essential jobs like drain-digging and track repair which the small farmer can ill afford for himself (this was done during the last war). Above

all, large farms and estates which do not meet stiff criteria of good land use should .be ■ purchased and broken up for resale. .j' Some years ago, the banker, lain Noble, was driving through the Highlands and picked up ah Israeli hitch-hiker. He pointed our various landmarks, observing that this belonged to Lord X and that was the property of Sir James Y. Finally the hitch-hiker turned to him in bewilderment What did he mean? How could a loch or a mountain “belong” to anyone? » This question, strange and theft all at once not strange at all, worked its way into Noble's mind. Not much later, he left banking to become the founder of a college of Gaelic culture arid language in Skye. But if Britain is to be “fallowed,” then we |si have to understand that story. To halt agricultural growth Is to call into question the sacredness of private property in land. Even when we now say that, suddenly, we seem to have a glut of land instead of too little, it’s the “we” that matters. This is a rare chance to recognise that, in the end, the use of the land is a decision for the community.