Death to Farming

This is a version of my article that appears in the February edition of Perspective Magazine

Looking at YouTube the other day, I was bombarded by ads. One promised me a perfect body in two months. Apparently, all I have to do is seven minutes of easy exercise every morning. No pain, loads of gain!?

Then, up came an ad for a course that’s guaranteed to take you from beginner to master of blues guitar in a few short weeks, Nevermind the Bollocks.

Finally, a video which, we are told, can make anyone an expert on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus in just one hour …I’ll pass over that one in silence.

It’s a simple strategy…just tell people they can achieve the results they dream of with little or no cost. Or, in the language of economics, that trade-offs are unnecessary.?

We don’t like tradeoffs; we don’t like to acknowledge every benefit comes with a cost. So deep-seated is our resistance to the idea that whenever a trade-off is discussed...regardless of the issue... the standard reaction is to deny its existence…or to mindlessly fling abuse.?

We prefer to imagine every issue in terms of an unambiguous good versus an unambiguous bad; that the things we like to have nothing but positive results, and the things we don’t like to have exclusively negative results.?

If only.

Advertisers know this as do politicians.

However, there’s a world of difference between the self-aware cynical manipulation used to sell or to win votes, and the deluded mania that leads people genuinely to believe that trade-offs are unnecessary, or even some kind of conspiracy theory.?

Trade-offs are inescapable.?

Now, all across Europe, farmers have been protesting.?

Why? Is it just the prospect of reduced diesel subsidies??

No, that was just the final straw.?

So, what’s been going on?

First a little background. This article emerged out of a chance conversation with a dairy farmer in Derbyshire.?

He wishes to remain anonymous, so I’ll call him Ed Fairfax.?

In discussing various things, Fairfax said: “One of the problems we have is that people don’t think about where food comes from, people seem to think food magically materialises on supermarket shelves.”?

So, people don’t connect the food they buy in supermarkets to the work of farmers? Is that, I wondered,? an accurate characterisation, or is it just a farmer’s prejudice??

I put the claim to someone about as far removed from farming as it’s possible to get, my friend Ashleigh, a theatre producer in Hackney. Anecdotal of course,? but she corroborated Fairfax’s claim: “I think that’s probably right. Obviously, if you stop to think about it, of course food comes from farms but I certainly didn’t really make the connection until I started getting those muddy veg sent from in boxes from Kent.”

In reality, of course, food gets onto the shelves only after long, arduous, and risky work; work that requires huge investments of time, money, and emotion from farmers.?

Ok, but when the time comes to sell the produce, there’s another problem. Ed Fairfax again: “No matter what they might tell you, the supermarkets act as a cartel, they bully us ruthlessly. I’m already working way below minimum wage, I can’t keep it up much longer.”?

In other words, there’s absolutely no possibility of farmers passing on cost increases.?

Sadly, there’s more.?

Farmers aren’t just squeezed by the supermarkets. According to environmentalist and arable farmer Nick Rowsell, they’re also getting it from governments.?

“Look, food production has to be regulated, it’s simply too important to do otherwise. But the quality of regulation… the way it relates to actual farming practices is clueless. They give us grants to do things we would have done anyway, and they don’t seem to understand that if they make it more expensive for us to produce food, we have no choice but to close down or produce less. DEFRA [The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs] doesn’t seem to trust us to get on with what we do best… farm.”?

According to Nick, agricultural policy is, and has always been, myopic. There’s a lack of joined-up thinking which means the effects of policies are swamped by unintended consequences. “After the war, the sole focus of policy was maximising crop yield. That worked brilliantly well, but there was little, if any, consideration of environmental impacts.”?

And there’s the rub, farming produces 11% of Europe's greenhouse gases and with climate considerations being front and centre, attention has inevitably focussed on farming. Indeed, farmers have found themselves accidental frontline soldiers, in the battle for net zero.?

Nick Rowsell again: “It is essential that we tackle climate change, but the authorities, both here and in the EU, seem to have lost sight of the fact that our job as farmers is to produce food.”?

Nick has a point. I put myself through the purgatory of reading a 150-page DEFRA policy document. Food production isn’t mentioned at all, it seems to be assumed that it will just carry on as normal regardless of regulatory changes…a glaring omission.

I mention this to Ed Fairfax: “You know what DEFRA really stands for?” Ed asks me: “Death to the English Farmer and Rural Areas. The problem is the people at DEFRA don’t know anything about farming.”

At the heart of the matter sits an important trade-off, a trade-off that farmers see all too clearly, but which the rest of us either miss or try to ignore.?

What is it??

It’s the trade-off between policies intended to mitigate climate change and the expectation that there will continue to be an abundance of cheap food.

Returning to environmental policies, Nick Rowsell is clear: “Net zero is a great aspiration and it has my full support but there are some major issues.”

Such as?

“Take the banning of Nitrates in fertilisers. That’s a good idea, but the speed of implementation is key. Do you have any idea of the hit food production would take if nitrates were phased out overnight?”

I confess I do not.

“Food output would fall by at least 50%.”

50%!

As I said, the real world is a series of tradeoffs, but we like to pretend trade-offs don’t exist, and politicians find it pays to indulge us in this pretence.

Ashleigh again: “I think a lot of people think we can stop producing food here and just import it from places with less strict climate policies, but what about things like air miles?”?

Nick concurs: “If we import our food from unregulated countries, all we’re doing is exporting our conscience. The net global effect of net zero would be zero if not actually negative.”?

Legislation is increasing farmers’ costs of production, and this in the context of the Ukraine war and governmental pressure on supermarkets to cut prices. Something has to give.

You can’t have strong climate policies coexisting with cheap food…not with the current state of technology. The farmers know this; they know that unrealistic policies are doomed to fail. I suspect the rest of us are about to find out.?

#PerspectiveMagazine #ClimateChange #Farming #FoodProduction