home and local food

What Has Happened to British Farming?

What has happened to British farming is a long story, but one crucial episode which occurred in the 1930s is related by Marjorie Hessell Tiltman in English Earth (London: Harrap, 1935). The main thread of her narrative is about a crisis in farming which peaked in 1929, causing a shockwave of farmer bankruptcies and rural unemployment, followed by the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1931, opposed bitterly by farmers, but the Government persisted and the farming industry rallied. Everyone today who is waking up to the realisation that we shall need to, and indeed want to, grow our food locally in future, should read this optimistic book, and realise from our privileged position of hindsight, that a rural livelihood is scarcely, if at all, an option; those who reside in rural areas now have an urban lifestyle. We might not want to return to traditional farming methods, but the skills and knowledge, the understanding of land, water, animals, rural crafts, natural materials, and country people, could all be applied differently, or to new land holding and community arrangements. There are three aspects or phases to what Tiltman describes in her book: farming as it was, how it was already changing in the 1930s, and the opportunities for ‘improvement’ – and I put ‘improvement’ in scare quotes to mark the doubts anyone reading this in the twenty-first century must have about the measures the Government took seventy years ago to make farming economically viable, more ‘efficient’ and ‘productive’.

One cannot simply put the present crisis in British farming to an economic crisis in the 1920s and 30s, and government action to deal with that. The loss of farming skills, knowledge and commitment is surprisingly recent. In his book, Can Britain Feed Itself? (London: Merlin, 1975) Kenneth Mellanby says that Britain could produce enough food to give 100 million people a basic diet, and at time he was writing, we were importing nearly half our food. And then only twenty five years later we have Andrew O’Hagan’s The End of British Farming ( London: Profile & LRB, 2001), written around time of the major foot and mouth outbreak, and the author travelled around Britain and witnessed ‘the death of farming’. One is bound to ask, how could this have happened in so short a time? The answer ‘supermarkets did it’ is not far wrong. In the 1970s, apparently, imported food was expensive, but supermarkets made it cheap and readily available all the year round, and this, together with subsidies which encouraged superficially ‘productive’ large-scale and monocultural ‘farming’ over real farming, which was more labour intensive and mixed. O’Hagan describes poignantly how farmers clung on to the bitter end. So one can say, ‘supermarkets, world trade and subsidies did it’, but that is not the full story; there is also Mr Smedley.

‘Who’s Mr Smedley?’ you may well ask, but not if you are of my own generation, who will remember the name from the labels on tins of peas, plums, and ‘new’ potatoes. Tiltman has a chapter on ‘The Tin Revolution’, with the story of an enterprising Mr S.W. Smedley, who set up a business in a big shed in Wisbech, bought and installed machinery from America, first of all simply to put lids on cans and seal them automatically, later to sort and prepare the fruit or vegetables, again automatically, and the machines and production lines were extraordinary, even in the 1930s. What is most significant though is the arrangements Smedley and other canners had to make with growers, ‘long-term contracts’, on which Tiltman observes: ‘Although the arrangement meant a comparatively poor price for the latter (the grower), it brought him a certain return when his fellow-growers were complaining that they were on the verge of ruin.’ Long-tern contracts saved the farmer from insecurity, his greatest enemy. So in those early days, everyone gained from mass production, mechanization and long-term contracts, not only with the canning industry, freezing and drying too began in that period ‘between the wars’. A few decades later on, a similar setup suited supermarket buyers, who could get fresh produce to put on sale loose or in packs, and demand contracts with growers, and perfectly fresh and uniform produce, automated cleaning and sorting, and any other condition they cared to impose – or else the buyer would buy from abroad, shipping and air-freighting having got cheaper and cheaper, and foreign suppliers having learned to suit their production to the demands of supermarkets world wide.

A very topical concern about British farming and mass production is the farming practices used for chicken and egg production (see, for example, ‘Playing chicken’ by Yvonne Roberts, The Guardian, 12 January 2008). Again, Tiltman provides insights into how this started, and that it once seemed to be good for everyone. [To be continued.]

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