Farming the future
(address to the South Bucks Agricultural Society 13/4/08)
If you look out on our magnificent countryside, that incomparable national treasure, you might be forgiven for thinking that nature put it there. It did not, neither does it preserve or maintain it. You do that. And you will know that the moment the countryside becomes a museum and ceases to be a working environment its glory will pass.
I said that it was an incomparable treasure, let us pause for a moment to consider why England was so different, -what made farming in England so different? Remember your school days: Edward I; Longshanks; “Hammer of the Scots”. That great Angevin and Plantagenet monarch who rescued England from chaos. In 1285 his second great statute of Westminster had fifty chapters, one of which was devoted to the reform of the law of entail and ensured the primogenetary principle for the inheritance of land for families of even relatively modest means. so that, instead of dividing the land between any number of younger sons as in other western kingdoms, it was to be transferred dynastically.
The significance of this for our history cannot be exaggerated. Heads of families in England looked after their land and improved it, making us the richest farming nation in the world, able to initiate an agricultural revolution which in turn sustained an industrial revolution. And all the time over countless generations relays of younger sons, educated to wealth but not endowed with it, left homes rich in transmitted standards of living and behaviour to seek their fortune and to serve the nation. It was undoubtedly the stewardship of our land that made our nation great.
We cannot however live in our history. We must endure the present. And the one thing that we thought was true about the present has proved absolutely false: we thought that it couldn’t get any worse, but it has. Who would have thought that after the disaster of BSE it would be in the next decade that we would have to endure two outbreaks of Foot and Mouth (one the result entirely of negligence by the Government itself), that we would be still dithering like a rabbit transfixed by the headlights and unable to take effective action over Bovine TB, or that we would have to be reconciling ourselves to the prospect of Blue Tongue becoming endemic. Who would have thought ten years ago after the disaster of BSE that it would be in the next decade that income to the agricultural sector would fall by a half from 28,000 per head to 14,000. Who would have thought 10 years ago, after BSE, that it be in the next decade that a further 80,000 people would leave farming and that our ability to feed ourselves from indigenous produce would fall by a full 10%.
Farmers feel marginalised, they have shrunk to the point where there are so few left they hardly count. One in ten children has never visited a farm. Apparently six in ten think potatoes grow on trees. I visited a cheese maker in Pembrokeshire, who also maintained his own small dairy herd and rather quaintly still gave each cow a name. He complained to me about a school party that visited and their politically correct teacher who condemned him for his sexism: demanding to know why the cows only had girls’ names!
As farming has shrunk Government bureaucracy has grown enormously. The inception and continued operation of the rural payments agency makes Heathrow Terminal 5 look like a model of efficiency. I spoke to a farmer in my constituency yesterday who had just received a cheque from the RPA for 2005. The Agency is absolved of all its incompetence but if a farmer makes any mistake the full force is brought to bear on him.
Government accounts for 40% of our economic activity: 40% of our consumption; 40% of our income; 40% of our output. As a classic liberal, I think that this is dreadful: Government’s do not do things well and therefore the less they do the better and the smaller they are the better. However as we have such a large Government we ought to make what virtue we can of it. It strikes me as scandalous that the Government has no idea of how much of the food that it purchases is British. The figures that we can get hold of are not encouraging: only 5% of the lamb consumed by our Armed Forces is British. Fully three quarters of the bacon served up in the DEFRA canteen is foreign. Now, if the Government were to institute a policy of buying British it would not rescue our farming industry but it could make a difference at the margin, and it is at the margin that so many farms are struggling to survive.
Equally, we have the highest standards of animal welfare in the world which increases our costs significantly. Why is there no marketing campaign to capitalise on this virtue? Why is there no labelling regime that would allow us to use it as a marketing tool? Again, this will not solve all of our problems but it will make a significant difference at the margin and help us get through the present difficulties.
For the future, if we can only survive the present, I believe that the prospects are very good indeed. World food prices are already rising significantly in response to increased population, and increasingly prosperous populations such as in China, and as a result of Climate Change and the consequent switch to ethanol production by North American grain producers. I believe that these are long term trends to which British farming will respond and rise to the challenge. I would speculate about another development as well. I rather doubt that Governments will have the will to take unpopular measures to deal with growing carbon emissions and I think that subtly the focus will change from the issue of emissions, how much carbon we put into the atmosphere, to sinks, how much we can take out. The whole technology of carbon sinks is very likely to be an agricultural technology: it will be about the crops that you grow and the way that you manage your land.
I have every confidence that British agriculture will respond to these challenges and that the forces of conservation, of initiative, of enterprise, that were unleashed by Edward I have many more generation to run.
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