Source: Country Life – https://www.countrylife.co.uk/comment-opinion/opinion-why-small-family-farms-should-be-the-future-of-agriculture-in-britain-241666
Many aspects of farming are expanding — and not always in a good way. Jason Goodwin argues that it needs re-balancing, with a return to multiple small family farms, neighbourly cooperation and a bolstering of the local community.
A debate at this year’s Oxford Farming Conference considered the motion that ‘the demise of the family farm has been greatly exaggerated’. After the stats and stories, the house — comprising many of the industry’s movers and shakers, of all ages — voted the motion down by 2 to 1. The family farm, they believed, was dying on its feet. However, neither the people who thought it was dying, nor the people who thought it was still flourishing, considered the death of the small family farm to be a good thing at all.
It isn’t hard to see why family farms might be in crisis. With property prices sky high and many tax advantages for people with money to invest in farmland, it has made sense for a lot of small farmers to flog their land, sell off the farmhouse and retire, dividing the proceeds between their children. The farmer who stays in the game adds that land to his, but looks for economies of scale, relying on contractors. Behind him or her, a barrage of agronomists, salespeople, seed merchants, vets, scientists and retail barons helps to ensure that a bare 7p of every £1 of produce returns to the farmer who created it. The farmer is always running to stay still.
Farming’s creeping tendency toward bigness is baked into our way of running policy. It is in the nature of big governmental bureaucracies to engage with other big organisations to formulate big policies that cover large areas of life and the land. The result is a country bereft of people, from where giant farms truck produce to join huge and complex supply chains, heading to big supermarkets, as their field margins are managed for eco-subsidy.
From a smallholding in Dorset that overlooks the sea, Jyoti Fernandes runs the Landworkers’ Alliance, the aim of which is to represent small and family farms. She argues fiercely against the idea that the family farm is dying, but agrees that it’s all about policy. Small farmers attending Defra meetings may find, for instance, that all the talk is about exports. ‘We don’t need export opportunities,’ she points out. ‘We need to open up our own domestic markets. Small farms are interested in strong domestic opportunities.’
These exist, and they urgently need expanding. The 20th-century retreat from the land has impoverished us as a nation. Plenty of British children (and some adults) can’t say if carrots grow on trees and believe that sheep are killed for their wool. Some of them are hungry. As fewer people work on the land, farmers find themselves getting blamed for a range of real and imaginary sins by avocado-gobbling drivers of electric SUVs, prompting their shy retreat from local life. Hunting is banned by townies with no sympathy for or understanding of the countryside. In villages now, as well as in towns and cities, people rely on supermarkets and are cut off from ideas of seasonality or basic food production.
“Nothing could gladden the eye like a countryside of small farms and smallholdings, in a patchwork of tiny fields, with a shack or a caravan or a Hobbit-house every few acres”
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