English Pastoral by James Rebanks (100 books to read .txt) 📕

were children. Most of us don’t think about a carcass, or about making a range of meals from all of its parts. We don’t make broth from the bones. We don’t know how to perform the basic tasks that make eating it possible: the killing, the plucking and the chopping. Nor can we influence how the chicken is farmed. The food company is so big they are unlikely to notice our concerns as we stand in front of the shelf at the supermarket.

Local food production once gave people greater ability to see and judge farming, and to influence it. In those face-to-face transactions between farmer or butcher, and our grandmothers, they could tell the man with the chickens what they liked or didn’t like. The local food market was more than a financial or commodity exchange, it was also an exchange of knowledge and values; it bound people into a kind of shared morality about how things should be done. The supermarket food system told us we didn’t need to worry about such things any more. We are all encouraged to be apathetic and disinterested. Nearly all the food scandals and farming crises that have eroded our trust in farming have come about as a result of the drive to reduce costs – through dubious practices, as farmers and others in the food chain have sought to cut corners behind the scenes, doing things their fathers and grandfathers would never have dreamed of in order to make food cheaper than it really should be.

This was business-school thinking applied to the land, with issues of ethics and nature shunted off to the margins of consciousness. There was no room for sentiment, culture or tradition, no understanding of natural constraints or costs. The modern farming mindset didn’t recognize these external things as relevant. This was farming reduced to a financial and engineering challenge, rather than being understood as a biological activity. It was exactly what supermarkets demanded, because it could guarantee year-round supplies of food products, with entirely uniform product consistency. We convinced ourselves that farming was just another business, subject to the same rules as any other – but that is coming to seem like the most foolish idea ever.

We created a society obsessed with food choices and ethics, while disconnecting most people from the practical agricultural and ecological knowledge to make those choices. Now people worry about what they should eat, but have largely lost sight of how their local landscapes should be farmed, and what foodstuffs they can produce sustainably. Most people are now largely illiterate when it comes to agriculture and ecology. This is a cultural disaster, because the global challenge of how we live sustainably on this planet is really a local challenge. How can we farm in ways that will endure and do the least harm? And what does that local farming produce for us to eat? This is not an argument for entirely eating local foodstuffs – I like bananas as much as the next person – but a reminder that it is good sense for a lot of our food to be produced around us and under our gaze.

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The economists are wrong. Farming is not a business like any other because, crucially, it takes place in a natural setting and affects the natural world directly and profoundly. As farmers collectively made the land more efficient and sterile, whole species of birds, insects and mammals vanished and ecosystems collapsed. All the major surveys of wildlife in Britain in recent years have revealed the same thing: an astonishing and rapid loss of wild things from farmland. One comprehensive survey spoke of Britain being ‘among the most nature-depleted countries on earth’.

From an ecological perspective the effects of the changes in farming are black and white, because we judge the outcomes, rather than engaging with the causes and processes. The human causes, as my family experienced them, were complex and confusing and difficult to navigate. It would have been much simpler if I could have picked the good guys and the bad guys and told a morality tale. But the truth is messier and more nuanced than that. Ethically it is complicated. My family and my friends did these things: good people, not fools or vandals. The financial pressures on them were and are immense. The levels of stress and hefty workloads do not provide the right conditions for seeing and valuing nature, or for enlightened thought. Some of the criticisms target the remaining farmers, most of whom are going broke trying to hold on to their land and way of life, instead of the large corporate and political forces. They are seen as the ones really driving farming in the wrong direction. But this is the equivalent of blaming the badly paid checkout workers in the supermarkets for the sins of the billion-dollar companies they work for.

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None of this is to say the old ways were perfect: they weren’t. Some of the changes were good and necessary, and perhaps inevitable. And it wasn’t an absolute shift from perfectly bucolic to hellishly industrial. Some farmers still try valiantly to show the same respect and love for their land as their families always have. Some of the new farms have improved animal health and reduced rates of disease; not all animals in the old traditional farms were well treated, and not all animals in the new farms are badly treated. Many of the changes on the new farms are actually evolutions of older practices, like selective breeding. In practice, farms in Britain and elsewhere, including ours, are all now somewhere on a spectrum between the most intensive industrial farming and traditional farming. Almost all have modernized, but some much more than others. ‘Farming’ is now a term that tries to encompass a vast messy range of activities.

And so now, as we search desperately for a way to make things right, we must avoid overly simplistic solutions. History gives us many examples of reductionist thinking being applied to farming with