Three acres and a cow is still a recipe for poverty not 'radical agrarian populism'

 

Each generation rediscovers agrarian revolution as “…a genuine revolutionary moment in British politics.” This rejection of urban life, an attachment to a sort of bucolic, rose-spectacled agrarian ideal is captured in the latest, post-Brexit version by Aris Roussinos - “…a radical agrarian populism is developing among a network of thoughtful smallholder-writers which seeks to utterly transform Britain’s relationship with the land, and with the food we eat.”

This idolising of an agrarian, peasant society – three acres and a cow as Eli Hamshire wrote to 19^th century land reformer and MP (and urban industrialist), Jesse Collings – traces its roots back into ancient times where the nobility of the smallholding subsistence farmer is held up as a social ideal.

“Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds. As long, therefore, as they can find employment in this line, I would not convert them into mariners, artisans, or anything else.”

Thomas Jefferson there presenting his idealistic views on the (presumably slave-owning) agrarian world he wanted to see in the new America. This didn’t come to pass because subsistence agriculture, even in a slave-owning society, is a dead end. People walked away from the land because the reality, that thing Jesse Collings brought down the government over in 1886, was that working on the land, peasant farming, is the meanest and poorest livelihood. We’ve forgotten that poverty is often far worse, and still is today, in places dominated by bare subsistence and marginal agriculture.

This doesn’t stop a new set of reactionary intellectuals embracing ‘back to the land’, that ‘radical agrarian populism’ as a desirable political end rather than a repeated romantic delusion.

“…as a result of the collapse of the neoliberal economic model and a growing awareness of the looming threat of environmental disaster “a contemporary agrarian movement has arisen which has a lot in common with the agrarian populist and neo-populist movements of a century ago, emphasising self-reliant, low impact, low energy, land-based lifestyles, a fair distribution of resources, greater political autonomy and so on.”

Leaving aside that the collapsing neoliberal model is another one of those romantic delusions, it’s hard to see how promoting a low technology, peasant farming future is either sensible or remotely populist. What these new back to the land campaigners want is to recruit a million new farmers from people “…who are currently driving taxis or checking income tax or working in call centres, if they have a job at all.” Presumably, each to be given threeacres and a cow with which they will create “…widely-dispersed networks of small producers.”

What the proponents of this new peasantry (many of them, while claiming to be some sort of farmer, are more sustained by writing or academia than agriculture) seem to believe is that we can replace a mostly efficient, if over-protected, agriculture with what amounts to little more than a million people running allotments. Worse still our agrarian radicals step back into the single most discredited idea in economics and social science – protectionism and autarky:

“…all nations should strive for self-reliance in food — at least producing enough of the basics to get by on — and exporting food only when the home population is well fed, and importing only what is truly desirable and cannot reasonably be grown at home.”

Two hundred years of enlightenment snuffed out by a deluded and romantic idea of self-sufficiency. Everywhere else in the world, and through history, “…producing enough of the basics to get by on…” is known as bare subsistence. It’s just about tolerable until the harvest fails. Saying peasant farming is, in any way, a sustainable response to (another romantic and oft-repeated myth) “…capitalism in its final crisis…” strikes me as an argument more worthy of the Khmer Rouge than any sort of conservative. And it doesn’t matter how many folk festivals you organise to celebrate this agrarian populism, it remains merely trying to move poor people from one form of precarious existence to another – turning an Uber-driver into a smallholder doesn’t represent a response to neoliberalism's (fictional) collapse but is just a return to the mythic romanticism of Jefferson, Cobbett, Borsodi and Snyder.

Through most of history subsistence agriculture has been incredibly hard, back-breaking work done by people with little choice and characterised more by poverty, famine, disease, and death than by sturdy, noble, horny-handed sons of toil. It isn’t a failure of British agriculture that it employs less than 2% of the workforce, this is a success because it means the way we do what agriculture does – feed the population – is more efficient and effective than in the times when most of the population slaved away in mostly subsistence poverty.

This supposed agrarian populism is nothing of the sort, there is no demand for, no need for and no economic justification for making millions of workers return to the land. This isn’t the recipe for some sort of post-capitalist Elysium but simply a return to the pain, suffering and exploitation from which we were released by free markets and free trade. Giving every man three acres and a cow may sound revolutionary and make for good songs but, in truth, it’s either trying to turn allotment gardening into farming or else the sort of year zero that leads to the dead end of food shortages, poverty and economic suffering.

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"There is little money, and they are desperate" - much of British farming isn't viable, you don't change this with regulation or protectionism

And yes, I have a beef with the intensive end of my industry, with its beak-clipping, tail-docking, permanent ‘in-housing’, zero-grazing, nitrogen-spewing, Frankenstein cattle-making, prophylactic antibiotic-dosing ways. Raising of livestock in this fashion is not farming, because it abjures any sense of husbandry. It is senseless, inhumane Fordian food-production of ‘units’. Also, the produce from such factory systems, be it milk, meat or eggs, is tasteless, in every sense. I do, however, have sympathy for the managers — not farmers — of these agri-factories. There is little money, and they are desperate.

Reading John Lewis-Stempel's moving piece about farming, I was struck by the last sentence of this little tirade. Lewis-Stempel started his article with a description of shooting a dying sheep and how this started him thinking that we need to change how we farm if livestock farming is to survive. I don't have to share Lewis-Stempel's view of intensive farming to get that, for a lot of UK farmers, it's not a business in any meaningful sense of that word - especially sheep farming.

I remember on a walk near Dent in what is now Cumbria us following the path through a small farmyard where we met a man shearing sheep. Like you do we stopped for a chat and discovered he was doing his own shearing because the cost of employing a professional shearing team meant he'd lose money on every fleece. Even doing the job himself wasn't a guarantee of a return.

This was a man who probably works harder than near everyone you know, hard physical labour in an unforgiving environment to get us products - wool, lamb chops - that we all take for granted (and probably when we look at the cost of that Pure English Wool jumper, is a cause for a little whistle at the price). The average sheep farmer earns about £6,000 a year - way below the minimum wage - from the actual business of rearing, shearing and slaughtering sheep. The whole industry in the UK is only sustained because of working tax credits and government farm support. And since the last round of CAP reforms most of that farm support goes to the landowner - most sheep farmers are tenants.

I wrote a little piece called 'Life on the Farm' inspired by seeing the hill farmers I used to represent as a councillor, mostly old men, none of them rich and all into their seventies working the sorts of hours most of us would consider exploitation - all for a pittance:

The farmer is old. Too old you might say. Having got down from the tractor he stands for a few seconds seemingly oblivious to his similarly old border collie and catches his breath. The next task is to close the field gate - the man is tired and he makes his hand into a fist so as to still the shakes that get worse with each passing day. With the gate closed, the days work is done or will be so long as nothing dies, breaks or falls. Last autumn the fox got into the chicken run and killed all but a handful.

The farmer shuffles slowly to his house. A house with no central heating, a leaky roof and single glazing but where the tenant farmer can't afford to run more than one fire - so he'll stay in his coat to keep warm and anyway he's tough and can cope with a little cold. His wife died a couple of years ago, his daughter's alright as she's a nurse in Sheffield and his son's driving tipper trucks for the big quarry company. The farmer knows nobody will succeed him - as he did to his father - in the tenancy and he frets about the animals.

We like to blame a bunch of faceless things for this problem - the government, the supermarkets, international trade, the EU, banks - but the painful truth is that the real problem is us whistling as we see the price. As with so much else we look at the ticket on the shelf or the tag on the hanger and make no connection to the costs involved in getting that product into our hands. So the result - mostly beneficial but sometimes problematic - is intensification, industrialisation and a farming industry that bears no resemblance to the ruddy-faced, bucolic image presented by Countryfile or the collection of celebrity farmers sustained well enough by their media income that the loss making hill farm doesn't matter.

The question of farming and farm standards has, as these things do, arisen in the context of us leaving the EU (with its preference for subsidising landowners over supporting farmers) and entering into a new world of international trade agreements with strange places like the USA. And the chosen battleground of those who didn't want to leave the EU is factory farming - an interesting choice of battle given how much of that industrial livestock production goes on in the EU:

Denmark is a mere 16.5 thousand square miles and produces between 25 to 28 million pigs each year from about 5000 pig farms. For the most part they are kept in what the EU euphemistically calls ‘zero hectare’ farms. Denmark is not alone in this; in France, despite having the largest landmass in the EU, the proportion of pig meat produced by zero hectare farms increased from 31% in 2004 to 64% in 2016, while the proportion of chicken meat rose from 11% to 28% between 2004 and 2016.

According to Eurostat, the number of zero hectare farms in the EU grew by 31%, from 164 000 to 214 000 between 2013 and 2016. At a zero hectare farm, animals are kept indoors and are fed with harvested fodder, or a concentrated diet of grain, soy, and other supplements because according to the EU; ‘farms raising granivores (pigs and poultry) do not necessarily need agricultural land’

Yet we are told by trendy London restaurant PRs, by those media-friendly hobby farmers, and of course by the protectionist National Farmers Union, that free trade with the USA in agriculture would mean indulging a host of really bad practices that undermine the standards of UK production. Forgive me if I call bullshit on this one (unless that is the hobby farmers and restaurant PRs want to abolish UK factory farming). Britain produces about 70% of the chicken it eats (nearly 900 million birds since you ask) - I watch the wagons roll into my village every day, their plastic crates rammed with those birds, ready for slaughtering in our little factory:

UK Chicken farms still abide by EU farming regulations. 90% of UK chickens will be raised at the UK’s minimum standard of 19 birds per square meter, the UK Red Tractor Standard. However ‘extensive indoor (barn-reared)’, the lower of the three higher welfare production standards, is only slightly better at 15 birds per square metre. That is three rows of five birds in every square metre. This maybe fine when they are chicks but when fully grown they would be still be unable to turn around. There is no maximum number of birds in a ‘barn raised’ shed and there is no requirement for the birds to spend any time outside the shed. But as they can be slaughtered after eight weeks, this overcrowding may not be for very long.

So when people decry US standards on the back of a single documentary and a petition, they ignore the reality of the 'high' UK standards since that would mean confronting those painful truths about our farming set out by Lewis-Stempel in his article. And we aren't going to do this, however much folk like Lewis-Stempel wax lyrical about "Medievalist ethical carnivorism". Partly such views represent the growing conservative bucolia, a postmodernist rejection of city life - more for its whizziness than from disposing of its economic power, but mostly it's a convenient tool for the protectionist to secure support for limits, bans, tariffs and restrictions.

As Lewis-Stempel concluded, "(t)here is little money, and they are desperate." But is this a justification for imposing an idealist and elitist view of farming ("Medievalist ethical carnivorism") on consumers? An approach that, while making little difference to those of us with the means to afford expensive meat, condemns many to a largely meat-free life - not from choice but by the economic cost of protectionism. So far the government has resisted the imposition of essentially arbitrary limitations to choice but the widespread support for protectionism ("we care for animals", "the climate", "environmental protection", "British farmers") still threatens to impose less choice and more cost on the majority of consumers.

If Lewis-Stempel wants to produce wool and lamb in accordance with a somewhat rose-tinted view of how medieval peasants produced these things then that's fine (is that the sound of ironic peasant laughter I hear echoing down the years at the idea that they ate less meat from choice rather than poverty). Make the case, create a market - if you find enough people who'll pay for your myth-made lamb steaks then great. But don't seek to impose these changes on the rest of us, don't seek to regulate cheap food out of existences and stop indulging the NFU and its protectionist mission to enrich its members at the cost of British consumers.

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Environmental campaigners, more than any other group, are the ones living off fake news.

 There's nothing new with what's now called fake news - in WW1 rumours of a Russian army spread:

"There is being circulated everywhere a story that an immense force of Russian soldiers – a little short of a million, it is said – have passed, or are still passing, through England on their way to France."

The news was given credibility by this being reported in The Times - even though that newspaper merely reported the rumours, it failed to explain they were false (which a quick call to the Foreign Office would have confirmed). So it is with fake news:

Singers and actors including Madonna and Jaden Smith shared photos on social media that were seen by tens of millions of people. “The lungs of the Earth are in flames,” said actor Leonardo DiCaprio. “The Amazon Rainforest produces more than 20% of the world’s oxygen,” tweeted soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo. “The Amazon rain forest — the lungs which produce 20% of our planet’s oxygen — is on fire,” tweeted French President Emanuel Macron.

Last week you couldn't move for media reports describing a catastrophe in the Amazon as the entire cast of great and good the world over piled into the story so as to demonstrate that, above all, they cared! Thing is, though, that a lot of what the great and good were sharing was every bit as fake as Russians with snow on their boots marching though England in 1914.

And yet the photos weren’t actually of the fires and many weren’t even of the Amazon. The photo Ronaldo shared was taken in southern Brazil, far from the Amazon, in 2013. The photo that DiCaprio and Macron shared is over 20 years old. The photo Madonna and Smith shared is over 30. Some celebrities shared photos from Montana, India, and Sweden.

Even if this is down to an excess of enthusiasm over fact-checking, the fakeness of the story is at an even bigger magnitude than just celebs splashing pictures of random fires across social media while shouting "climate change" or "far right Brazilian government". It seems - at least according to one of the authors for the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that not only are the photographs fake but:

The Amazon rainforest is not the "lungs" of the planet - “There’s no science behind that. The Amazon produces a lot of oxygen but it uses the same amount of oxygen through respiration so it’s a wash.”

Nor are the fires burning at a record rate - "it’s just 7% higher than the average over the last 10 years ago, Nepstad said."

And anyhow those fires aren't actual rainforest - "(w)hat increased by 7% in 2019 are the fires of dry scrub and trees cut down for cattle ranching as a strategy to gain ownership of land."

It seems - as always that, if you poke a little into any scare story you quickly find it's full of holes, based on dubious information and doubtful science. The reports are filled with frightening words "agribusiness", "right wing", "multinationals" and assorted dots are joined to show how, even if it's not quite a world-wide conspiracy, there's a lot of 'links' between all the nasty people we're told not to like by the great and good.

The same - and this is linked to those fires - goes for cows. To listen to so-called experts, you'd surmise that, to save the planet, all we have to do is stop eating meat and drinking milk. If we do this, hey presto, climate change is fixed. But again the claims look dodgy (and they come from a report that "claimed livestock are responsible for 18% of GHG emissions, but the figure calculated emissions along the entire supply chain, from land use to processing and refrigeration in supermarkets").

So given that every sort of food get transported from farm to processing plant to supermarket, we're left mostly with the methane that cows burp (methane we're told being a much worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide). Here's what happens to that methane in the actual real world:

While methane is 28-times more heat-trapping than carbon dioxide, methane’s lifespan is just a decade, while CO2 — known as a long-life pollutant — remains in the atmosphere for 1000 years.

After ten years, methane is broken down in a process called hydroxyl oxidation into CO2, entering a carbon cycle which sees the gas absorbed by plants, converted into cellulose, and eaten by livestock.

To put that into context, each year 558m tons of methane is produced globally, with 188m tons coming from agriculture. Almost that entire quantity — 548m tons — is broken down through oxidation and absorbed by plants and soils as part of the sink effect.

And then (who knew?) the number of cows we farm has reduced - America's beef herd is a third smaller than in 1975 and dairy cattle numbers have dropped by even more. Those cows are bigger and produce more milk or more beef per cow - better livestock management, improved feed and genetic science is doing more to save the planet from cow farts than all the shouty vegans telling us to be 'plant-based', and all without us losing the joy of a t-bone steak to go with that great bottle of red.

These are just two examples of how the environmentalist movement, now locked in step with anti-capitalist thugs and animal rights fanatics, uses fake news to propagate its ideology. We could do the same with fracking, nuclear energy, the number and impact of extreme weather events, declining glaciers and dying polar bears. There really is a case for responding to climate change but almost none of the arguments dominating social media and the press stand up to close examination. All these arguments have done it create a ridiculous sense of panic and emergency among the credulous - and we're all credulous at times regardless of how wise we think ourselves.

What's missing in all this is journalism - from big broadcasters and agenda-setting broadsheet newspapers - that asks sceptical questions about the things that environmental campaigners tell them. It seems that, in accepting climate change (or even Climate Emergency or Climate Crisis) as an act of faith, too many journalists simply don't bother to question the latest scare and plonk it straight in front of the viewer, listener or reader. As a result anyone questioning of these stories - even those like me who accept much of the science around global warming - is badged a denier, someone who doesn't recognise that there's a climate emergency dontcha know, and we must act now. More than Trump, Brexit or those nasty right-wingers, environmental campaigners are the ones living off fake news.

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Friday Fungus: Coffee and climate change

This isn't a 'have a go a climate change' post - that the climate changes is a matter of fact, it's the causes of those changes and their impact on us humans that's the subject of debate (and so it should be). Rather it's about being just a little cynical at the tendency to see negative affects on crop production as consequential on climate change - the example being coffee leaf rust:

Science is in no doubt that the changing climate is behind the rust and other problems affecting coffee production worldwide – and that things are likely to deteriorate.

"In many cases, the area suitable for [coffee] production would decrease considerably with increases of temperature of only 2-2.5C," said a leaked draft of a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,

The problem is that the pesky science really isn't quite so certain about the reasons for the spread of the nasty little fungus that causes coffee leaf rust:

“While CLR infection risk was elevated in 2008–2011 in coffee-growing regions of Colombia, we found no compelling evidence for a large increase in predicted infection risk over the period in which the CLR outbreak is reported to have been most severe, and no long-term trend in risk from 1990 to 2015,” the study concluded.

“Therefore, we conclude that while weather conditions in 2008–2011 may have slightly increased the predicted risk of CLR infection, long-term climate change is unlikely to have increased disease risk,” it added.

This doesn't detract from the problem that coffee leaf rust causes (although it can be treated - this isn't bananas) but it's a reminder that we're too swift to blame climate change - by which we usually mean global warming - for alterations in ecological balance where humans have sought to manage that environment (we call it farming).

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On efficient farming (and driverless tractors)

This really does matter (although it will cause palpitations in all the locavores, organic food nuts and pseudo-environmentalists):

Globally, therefore, adoption of American farming techniques could increase agricultural productivity so much that a landmass the size of India could be returned to nature, without compromising the food supply to our apparently “peaking” global population – the world’s population is likely to peak at 8.7 billion in 2055 and then start to decline. Last, but not least, tens of millions of agricultural laborers in Africa and Asia will be freed from back-breaking labor, migrate to the cities and create wealth in other ways.

If you are truly concerned about the future of humanity in general, and hunger, poverty and equality in particular, forget about The Hunger Games and embrace the driverless tractor instead.

Absolutely. The problem is that the wealthy do-gooders of the developed West are intent on destroying agricultural efficiency in a mad belief that this results in both a healthier world and a planet saved. Since neither of these things are true, it's time we recognised the benefits of industrial agriculture.

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Friday Fungus: Meeting the farming insects...

Ambrosia beetle farms (which you don't really want on your fig tree)

There are several insects that have, over the millenia, developed the intensive farming of fungus. And it all makes for a fascinating story:

Skinny lines of ants snake through the rainforest carrying leaves and flowers above their heads--fertilizer for industrial-scale, underground fungus farms. Soon after the dinosaur extinctions 60 million years ago, the ancestors of leaf-cutter ants swapped a hunter-gatherer lifestyle for a bucolic existence on small-scale subsistence farms. A new study at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama revealed that living relatives of these earliest fungus-farming ants still have not domesticated their crop, a challenge also faced by early human farmers.

All of which suggests that said insects aren't really all that hot at this farming lark (although by 'non-domesticated' we don't really mean wild but rather that the ants still have the fngal equivalent of crab apples despite that 60 million years of farming said mushrooms). Hence:

"We found that the selfish interests of more primitive ancestors of leaf-cutting ants are still not in line with the selfish interests of their fungal partner, so complete domestication hasn't really happened yet."

That being said, the leaf-cutter ants have a complex and sophisticated farming system that acts to minimise the production of fruiting heads (mushrooms to you and I) in favour of producing more of the hyphae that the ants actually eat.

So can we learn anything from these insect farmers? In some ways we can although mostly by reinforcing the value of long-established faming and crop management techniques. Here's some European research into ambrosia beetles:

Initial observations suggest ambrosia beetles plant different fungus varieties in a specific order, similar to crop rotation strategies employed by human farmers. They also utilize bacteria to promote the growth of their fungal crops and to combat pathogens.

"It was also really surprising to find out that in the fruit-tree pinhole borer, the ambrosia beetle species that I mainly study, the major fungus crop consists of a single strain that can be found across the whole of Europe," said Biedermann. "Humans also grow a few very successful cultivars of their crops."

These beetles lug around the spores for the fungus, caputure and use bacteria that kill off damaging pathogens and are careful to protect the interest of their farming environment, the host tree. This last point is perhaps a lesson to us humans in that the beetles that make their homes on living trees don't crop fungus:

'Another fascinating result was that fungi are only found in beetles that colonise dead trees. Beetles that dwell in trees that are still alive do not carry fungi as they would probably kill their host tree.’

The beetles also make use of endophytes - microorganisms that live in plant tissue and repel herbivores - to protect their gardens. And in a fun way the beetles experiment with naturally occurring anti-biotics to further protect and enhance their gardens.

We've barely scratched the surface of what we can learn from insects and the things we can extract from the bizarre world of fungi.

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Free range chicken isn't healthier or more sustainable. It's just tastes better and costs more.

I'm prepared to accept that free range chickens taste better. I also know that the way those chickens are bred means they cost a whole lot more than the chickens produced in batteries or other intensive farming methods. But this argument is wrong:

Despite the fact that sustainable poultry production systems deliver huge benefits to the environment and public health, the producers using these methods have no option but to compete on an unlevel playing field. Worse, we are paying for the damage caused by industrial food production in hidden ways, through taxes, in the form of misdirected subsidies from the common agricultural policy, through water pollution clean-up costs and through national health service treatment costs.

Firstly there's no evidence that intensive farming is more damaging to the environment than traditional or organic methods. In fact the reverse is true - traditional and organic methods are less environmentally-friendly:

Agricultural economists at UC Davis, for instance, analyzed farm-level surveys from 1996-2000 and concluded that there are “significant” scale economies in modern agriculture and that small farms are “high cost” operations. Absent the efficiencies of large farms, the use of polluting inputs would rise, as would food production costs, which would lead to more expensive food.

So far from there being an environmental benefit from moving away from agricultural intensification, the reverse is true - if we want a less polluting agriculture then intensification is the right choice. This is quite simply because that supposedly "sustainable" system is less efficient. We get expensive food and a more damaged environment.

The public health issues are equally misplaced. There is no evidence at all that organic methods are healthier than methods using modern pest control or fertilisers. - it's just that all those healthy looking chickens scuttling about in feels give us the impression that eating them will be healthier.

So when the Sustainable Food Trust tell you their methods are healthier and have less environmental impact they aren't telling you the whole truth. And, when they call for the system to be skewed to support their methods, what they are doing is making you pay more for food with the only benefit going to the organic farmers' bank balances.

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Cows aren't destroying the planet. Ignorant folk like George Monbiot are.

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George Monbiot is having a go at cows. Well, not just cows but sheep, pigs, chickens and goats as well. And probably alpaca, yaks and dromedaries too.

Raising these animals already uses three-quarters of the world’s agricultural land. A third of our cereal crops are used to feed livestock: this may rise to roughly half by 2050. More people will starve as a result, because the poor rely mainly on grain for their subsistence, and diverting it to livestock raises the price.

As usual with Monbiot, the article is replete with links to assorted stuff mostly from the more scaremongering end of the climate change community. And the premise seems superficially appealing - it does require a whole load of grass to fatten a cow and, if we're growing grass we can't be growing grain crops suitable for humans to eat. The problem with this argument is that the facts about agriculture's land use don't fit Monbiot's scare story:

Ausubel, Wernick, & Waggoner (2013) argue that ‘peak farm’ is already a reality, saying ‘while the ratio of arable land per unit of crop production shows improved efficiency of land use, the number of hectares of cropland has scarcely changed since 1990. Absent the 3.4 percent of arable land devoted to energy crops (Trostle 2008), absolute declines would have begun during the last decade.’

In simpler terms, improved agricultural efficiency is allowing us to feed the world's population while using less land. The main reason for this, of course, is that there is a lot less inefficient subsistence farming (the sort of farming that organisations like Oxfam spend a lot of time trying to preserve) and a lot more commercial and industrial agriculture. Moreover, in terms of resource use, this sort of intensive farming is far more environmentally friendly:

Agricultural economists at UC Davis, for instance, analyzed farm-level surveys from 1996-2000 and concluded that there are “significant” scale economies in modern agriculture and that small farms are “high cost” operations. Absent the efficiencies of large farms, the use of polluting inputs would rise, as would food production costs, which would lead to more expensive food.

Farming - not everywhere but in too many places - is treated as if it were some sort of cultural activity rather than the means by which we feed the world's population. Monbiot talks about waste management issues associated with farming but doesn't recognise that these exist because, unlike other industries, farming has not had to capture the cost of this waste. It is not an inevitable consequence of of the business. Moreover, as those chaps at UC Davis showed, less intensive production is more polluting.

Finally can we put this greenhouse gas malarkey to bed. The cow's only source of carbon is the grass she chews. And the grass only has one source of carbon - the atmosphere. A good chunk of that carbon ends up in those fine marbled steaks we eat. So saying that a lot of the 'greenhouse gas' emissions come from cows farting might be true, but only if we believe that somehow those cows are magically creating more carbon than they consume.

As usual Monbiot is telling half-truths and peddling misinformation.

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Why farmers won't be voting Labour...

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I've commented before how without EU subsidy and the benefits system we wouldn't have much of a farming business - or at least the sort of farming business us townies like to gawp at on Countryfile. Yes there are some rich farms with million pound plus incomes but the average farm income (that's farm income not farmer income remember) isn't anything close to that.

Still Labour politicians think farmers are nasty people who want to kill badgers and chase vermin like faxes off their land - so they're fair game for policy attack. And it's right between the eyes of some of the country's lowest earners:

The thing that is far more likely to sway farmers is a new Labour policy that has received scant publicity. This is the policy to remove the agricultural exemption from business rates for farm land and buildings and, effectively to tax farms in the UK as if they were out of town shopping centres. If implemented, this policy would have the immediate effect of reducing the average farming income in Britain from £46,635 (in 2012/13) to £40,137 overnight. That is a drop of 14%. It would affect some of the poorest workers in the country who are least able to afford it.

The Labour Party is happy to celebrate townies trampling all over someone else's land without a by-your-leave, to treat the farmed countryside as if it's some sort of playground for urban public sector workers with £200 boots and £500 anoraks. And to screw over the farmer.

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Life on the farm...

Catstones Moor from Tan House, Wilsden on a cold April day

From where I lie
The sheep can safely graze
The farm breasts through the haze
And all is still
From where I lie
A magpie skirts the vale
Reminder now of this o'er-deepening dale
And all is still

The old tractor splutters and coughs into the little farmyard, its days work done. Another day in its thirty years of lifting, shifting, towing and spreading on the sparse fields of a Yorkshire hill farm. The engine is stilled and the driver - the tenant of that hill farm - clambers down from the tractor's cab.

The farmer is old. Too old you might say. Having got down from the tractor he stands for a few seconds seemingly oblivious to his similarly old border collie and catches his breath. The next task is to close the field gate - the man is tired and he makes his hand into a fist so as to still the shakes that get worse with each passing day. With the gate closed, the days work is done or will be so long as nothing dies, breaks or falls. Last autumn the fox got into the chicken run and killed all but a handful.

The farmer shuffles slowly to his house. A house with no central heating, a leaky roof and single glazing but where the tenant farmer can't afford to run more than one fire - so he'll stay in his coat to keep warm and anyway he's tough and can cope with a little cold. His wife died a couple of years ago, his daughter's alright as she's a nurse in Sheffield and his son's driving tipper trucks for the big quarry company. The farmer knows nobody will succeed him - as he did to his father - in the tenancy and he frets about the animals.

We idealise farming - on the telly the life's not that of an old man with Parkinson's struggling to keep enough together so as to just about make a living. Instead we see a big strong man striding across the fields talking purposefully about the jobs and tasks around the farm. Or else some presenter's plaything of a hill farm - filled with a restored farmhouse, lambs, chickens and beautiful moorland views. A million miles away from our old tenant farmer, from the reality of hill farming.

Sat in his tatty armchair sipping a mug of tea our farmer might let his mind wander to the neighbour - the farmer dragged through the courts, broken and bankrupted because he shot a dog that worried his sheep, a dog that threatened his meagre livelihood. The village a short while away is filled with suburban dog-owners who see the fields as some sort of playground where the dogs can run.

Or the farmer might think of tomorrow's tasks - the wall to fix where someone decided to liberate some stone for a little garden feature of a wall, there's maybe muck to spread, later there'll be hay to cut and gather. And there's always paperwork. Endless paperwork - from DEFRA, from the Council, from the benefits people. Plus the bank - he smiles as he remembers the local farmer who drove his muck-spreader into Keighley and treated the front of Barclay's Bank with some choice muck - and the suppliers he hopes to put off paying for a few weeks.

Farming in England's uplands is dying - quite literally. Our farmer is all too typical - it's not a business he's running, he's only kept from starving by subsidy and the benefits system. And there is no succession, no new farmers. Why should there be when no-one can make a living from running an upland farm - even with the Common Agricultural Policy. Yet we expect that farmer to provide a service to us all - keeping footpaths open, mending fences, treating and keeping the land and raising livestock. All so we can get all misty-eyed as we talk about the unique moorland environment and campaign for special designations so that place can be protected from heaven knows what.

If we want to conserve those uplands - so we can walk, cycle, ride horses across it or maybe just drive through it to a pub with a view - then we need to ask how we are going to pay for it. Because those farmers - old, tired, ill and poor - simply aren't going to be there to do all the heavy lifting of loving and caring for the place. So next time you see two old men and a lad fixing a stone wall don't just admire the skill or even appreciate the effort. Instead ask how your free enjoyment of the countryside - enshrined in law - is being paid for. Then before you get back into your new-ish motor to drive back to town, blush a little in guilt at how a poor man's money is being spent on providing you with a playground.

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So Fairtrade may be making some Africans poorer?

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One of the things about studying development in poor places is that you quickly realise that it isn't as straightforward as the aid charities would like to have you think. We are given a picture of poor farmers scraping a meagre living - either through subsistence alone or commodity crops such as cocoa, coffee and bananas. However, as I recall from studying both Latin America and South East Asia, the reality on the ground is much more complicated. Indeed, the very poorest people in these places, the ones who were going to get done in first when the drought and famine arrives, are what we'd call 'landlass labourers'.

So part of me is pleased to have my ancient geography lectures confirmed by a comprehensive study - this time in Africa:

...wage employment in areas producing agricultural export commodities is widespread. FTEPR survey results from the short questionnaire addressed to a very large proportion (in some cases 100 per cent of the sub-site populations) show that a large percentage of people had experience of working for wages specifically on farms and processing stations producing the commodities that were the focus of the research.

The people who own the farms on which these labourers toil are not the poorest. Yet the focus of development efforts is directed at these owners and, in particular, through Fairtrade at the small and medium sized commodity growers. These findings come from the Fair Trade, Employment and Poverty Reduction (FTEPR) unit at London's School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS) and they remind us that, as we should know, the most vulnerable in any society are those without wealth. And in Africa wealth means land.

What FTEPR go on to describe is perhaps more worrying still for policy-making and suggests that the western narrative on development and poverty in Africa is mistaken:

This research was unable to find any evidence that Fairtrade has made a positive difference to the wages and working conditions of those employed in the production of the commodities produced for Fairtrade certified export in the areas where the research has been conducted. This is the case for ‘smallholder’ crops like coffee – where Fairtrade standards have been based on the erroneous assumption that the vast majority of production is based on family labour – and for ‘hired labour organization’ commodities like the cut flowers produced in factory-style greenhouse conditions in Ethiopia. In some cases, indeed, the data suggest that those employed in areas where there are Fairtrade producer organisations are significantly worse paid, and treated, than those employed for wages in the production of the same commodities in areas without any Fairtrade certified institutions (including in areas characterised by smallholder production).

This challenge to Fairtrade is serious. We are not talking here of some right-wing think tank but a highly respected institution presenting findings that suggest Fairtrade, far from being a way to address poverty, could merely be enriching the relatively wealthy smallholder at the expense of increasing poverty among the landless peasants employed to harvest that smallholding. And the research also challenges the presumption that the Fairtrade governance model is beneficial - concluding that Fairtrade organisations (and the retailers that exploit the branding) overclaim the beneficial impact of the model, that the co-operative model is unequal in that it favours the larger producers within the co-operative, and that policy-makers need to shift their focus away from producers and towards those who are employed by those producers.

As someone who has been critical of Fairtrade for some while, I guess I ought to be happy that a major piece of research confirms its weakness. However, such an enormous amount of good will has been invested in Fairtrade products by a lot of good people - it will be very hard for them to come to terms with the fact that, while the model has benefited some people, it may be creating a bigger divide between the family farmer and the landless worker. It will be interesting to see the response of the Fairtrade organisations to the work - they've faced criticisms before but never from such a comprehensive review or in such a critical form.

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Tim Farron and the illusory wool boom...

Like Tim Farron, I represent a lot of sheep (although these are now going for economic reasons to be replaced with beef cattle and horses) so I'm always struck by his strange and limited connection to economic reality:

Tim Farron, South Lakes MP and chair of the all-party parliamentary hill farming group, said: "We need to do all we can to support our farming industry, particularly in the uplands where life can be a real struggle. This support and funding could make a massive difference to upland farmers throughout Cumbria and help show the next generation that there is a real future in a career in farming."

OK there's some votes in this for Tim but is he really saying that there is a 'career' in upland farming when - a breath earlier - we read this:

An upland farmer earns, on average, only £6,000 a year, which has led to a number of people leaving the industry.

Six grand-a-year! That's half the minimum wage and Tim Farron thinks that this is some sort of sustainable industry? There's more - despite a (rather illusory) 'boom', here's the economics of upland sheep farming explained:

Will Rawling, chairman of Herdwick Sheep Breeders' Association, said he was getting about 50p a fleece. It costs him 70p to have each animal sheared; bundling and transport fees take the total cost per sheep up to about £1.50, three times what he gets back. 

To be fair the article also says most farmers are "breaking even" but it does seem that, not only isn't there a boom, but farming sheep on the fells isn't a viable business. If Tim Farron had said this and continued with 'but we need to find ways to continue the job, done by hill farmers at the moment, of caring for the fells', I would be with him. But he didn't, he simply called, like the good liberal, for price fixing.

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More slippery slope - Tim Lang and the denormalisation of meat

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I think we've been here before. Professor Lang has been peddling his eco-waffle for some while, wrapping it in ethics, lies about animal welfare and misdirection on food safety. But these days, of course, it's 'climate change' that's the daddy in the Prof's campaign against an efficient, effective international food system that might actually feed the starving and ensure they get fed up to the likely peak population somewhere between 2030 and 2050.

Here's Prof Lang (via an excellent critique in Samizdata):

Without a shadow of a doubt, the ubiquity and cheapness of meat and meat products, as a goal for progress for Western agriculture, let alone developing world agriculture, is one we have to seriously question now for reasons of climate change, emissions, ecosystems and local reasons.

See what he's saying here? Yet again we get the "cheap food is bad" line from the food fascists. And not for the first time.

Is the priority to keep food cheap or to lower its carbon footprint and the cost of diet-related health care? Are consumers modern gods, or should they have their choices restricted before they even see the food on shelves? 

Prof Lang, of course, answers his questions in the affirmative - the idea of free trade in food sticks in the craw of his localist, eco-farming and sad obsession with claiming that the western diet is the cause of starvation elsewhere (it isn't). More to the point there's that "diet-related health care" - caused by the food industry rather than by people grazing on stupid quantities of processed carbohydrates (certainly not meat, it's not the burger but the bun that's the problem). No evidence to support Prof Lang's contention yet he makes it time and time again.

And - agreeing with Tim is one Camilla Toulmin who looks at meat production and concludes:

In 20 years’ time we will look back at it in the same way as we now look back at smoking as it was 20 years ago.

Yes folks - the denormalisation of meat begins!

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Very rich hobby farmer wants poor people to pay more for food

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We've known for a while that our future king is, how do we put this? Ah, yes - rather too much of a hippie for his own (and our) good. All the talking to plants, alternative medicine, organic farming and old-fashioned architecture is rather sweet. But when he talks about food and the food industry he displays the arrogance of being, not merely a hippie, but a very wealthy hippie.

Charles said the drive to make food cheaper for consumers and to earn companies bigger profits was sucking real value out of the food production system – value that was critical to its sustainability.

Now Charles might not be living in a recession but the rest of us are and telling us that food should be more expensive is really quite objectionable. Especially when it's wrapped up in all those trendy, middle-class green movement words like "resilience" and "sustainability". Worse still, our king-to-be has discovered nannying fussbucketry and the blaming of obesity on the food industry rather than on people choosing to eat too much.

What is most striking (and this is very typical of this sort of wealthy man greenery - Transition Towns being a fine example) is that Charles is chiefly interested in the producer - those farmers - rather than the consumer.

"It has also led to a very destructive effect on farming. We are losing farmers fast. Young people do not want to go into such an unrewarding profession.

"In the UK, I have been warning of this for some time and recently set up apprenticeship schemes to try to alleviate the problem, but the fact remains that at the moment the average age of British farmers is 58, and rising."

The cause of that decline isn't that we've stopped consuming farming product (especially if you take Charles' obesity point as true). The decline is because - despite the subsidies and price fixing - many of our farms are uneconomic. And whilst it's tough on the romantic notion of farming (the sort Charles plays at with his tailored tweeds and hand-crafted shepherd's stick) most of us would rather have the cheap food.

And the farming won't go away - it will intensify. Which means fewer input costs to produce the same amount of fine food. If we wibble on about soil and local systems, we are completely missing the point and worse, we'll be making food more expensive and poor people poorer.

So next time you hear this wealthy - very wealthy - hobby farmer calling for higher food prices, just remember who benefits. It isn't you and me - we're going to pay more for our food and drink. Instead it's Charles and his castle-dwelling German farmer friends who'll suck up the higher prices and syphon off the new subsidies. And maybe a few ageing, overworked hill farmers might stay on a year or two longer than they should.

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Does Laura Sandys realise what she's saying about food policy?

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Let us take her comments:

The Prime Minister is right to use the Olympics to focus on global hunger. But while the main focus of this summit must be to address the problem in poor countries, it’s important to remember that food poverty exists in every country – rich and poor – in the UK as well as Somalia. Food banks are emerging in our cities, and charities like Fair Share are becoming part of daily life in our most deprived communities. In 2010, public health officials calculated that malnutrition costs the NHS £13bn.

Now I'm not going to comment on the public health guffle in this quotation except to say that the last sentence is probably complete and utter tripe. Nonsense that will be repeated again and again until - like the lies about obesity and the misinformation about drinking - it becomes accepted truth.

But for now let us accept that all this is true and that Laura's later comment is also true:

We must increase food production and overcome our squeamishness to modified crops

If there isn't enough food then increasing production is the right thing to do. However, Ms Sandys then dredges up a load of protectionist nonsense that runs entirely counter to the need for greater production and lower food prices:

...our import levels – the largest in the developed world – expose us to currency volatility and export bans

It beggars belief that, having concluded that intensification, genetic modification and greater efficiency is needed to meet demand and reduce prices, Ms Sandys then proposes a measure that will cut supply and increase prices. This is the crass myth of "food security" that results in gluts and corruption in developed world agriculture while at the same time seeing thousands of Africans barely subsisting for want of markets for the products they can grow.

The idea of "food security" is just protectionism bundled up as something else. And protectionism is just a tax on consumers transferred to a selected group of producers.

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