Re British Farming

The question of food security had become vital during the French Wars of 1793-1815, a period that saw a great acceleration of Enclosure of land for commercial farming. In 1815 Parliament passed Corn Laws to protect farming, the Financial Sector and existing “Social Security” by protecting agriculture against cheaper foreign imports.

The Free Trade campaign resulted in the abolition of the Corn Laws in the mid-1840’s and within a few years Agriculture entered upon a Golden Age with more people working on the land than ever before, not least because population increase and rising standards of living in Europe meant a general increase in Demand.

But a Great Depression set in during the 1870’s because steam-power was “shrinking” the continents and oceans. There was a flight of UK workers from the land and a process of collapsing real-estate values and increasing dereliction of the countryside.

The German U-Boat campaign prompted a reversal during the First World War : and the impact of the war on global prices for raw materials, food, and commodities during the war and the immediate post-war period, along with a widespread disgust with modern urban industrial civilization and its new kind of war, made many people feel attracted back to life on the land.

In this respect the war did have some encouraging results. Economic activity and militarism had assumed monstrous dimensions during the steam age. But life on “The Front Line” depended a great deal on a mix of the old and the new. Muscle power-human and animal, plus oil and electricity at a human scale.

The Versailles Settlement reflected a mood of revolt and revolution against the monstrous industrial age of Imperialism, great cities and inter-continental railways linking the ports of the great “Liners”. The “New World” would revive the British Liberal idea of small Nation-States and, within those new nation states, people embraced the possibilities inherent in working the land for the sake of the nation and their own family. This applied even in the USSR where Lenin’s “Peace, Bread and Land” had promised final deliverance to the Russian peasantry.

Figures for global agriculture show a maintenance of high prices until about the mid-twenties, accompanied by increasing sales of agricultural machinery. But this uncontrolled rush by States and families to produce food, raw materials and commodities for the world market resulted in over-supply. Prices started to fall. Producers tried to maintain incomes by more massive and intensive use of the land, and in the USSR Stalin forced Collectivization on the peasantry to bring this about [Russia had traditionally depended heavily on exports from the Land in order to be able to keep some kind of Balance of Trade].

People have largely forgotten that by the late Twenties Humanity had solved the problem of feeding itself- except that the people producing the food could not actually earn a living doing so. The collapse of rural economies was a crucial factory in creating the Great Depression of the Thirties- and allowed the Nazis to break out of their urban power-base in the elections in rural Schleswig Holstein where they very successfully appealed to small-holders who, like many of their peers around the world, found themselves “in thrall” to “Jewish Bankers”. John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” chronicles the impact on one small part of the USA.

At a political level there were trade wars and dumping, all contributing to the World Chaos of the Thirties and the instability that produced the Second World War.

During the war there was a huge Land Survey in Britain with agriculture being brought very much into something akin to a National Plan for food security, and internationally plans were laid down for the establishment of a pro-active World Trade Organization that tries to regulate global production paying, for example, for the destruction of excess production- as happened in the late Thirties to some goods produced in West Africa and Brazil.

The idea of state organs like the “Milk Marketing Board” were important in the planned economy of post-war Britain, while Marshall Aid for the European Recovery Programme promoted the idea of an economically joined up Europe. So when the UK joined the EU the politics and market-distortions involved with it amounted to three layers complicating life and calculations for the farmer, complications made more complex by (a) the entry of new Lands ripe for low cost development based upon EU development funds- e.g. the Irish Republic, Spain, and Poland (b) the move back away from the monstrous State and back to Liberalism and market economics.

At a personal level, however, “The Sixties” was something of a throw back to pastoral romanticism and a renewed rejection of the City. This touched such iconic Sixties figures as Paul Macartney, Julie Christie, Ian Anderson and (at a folk level) Ralph McTell. “Back to the land” once again was more of a way of life than a business. Kate Humble and her husband seem to be following in a line of TV and Media people who have taken up the challenge basically as a side line to their money-earning careers.

But rural life has always been based upon working at a whole range of things and not just, as per Adam Smith’s Pat and Mick, focusing on just one basically quite simple task that anyone anywhere with an ounce of sense and the appropriate materials could do, and might do more cheaply.

But it is a way of life that has challenges that may prove daunting even to those who have grown up in a farming background. I think it was just over ten years ago that I met a Kent farmer at the house of a mutual friend, only to hear a few months later that he had committed suicide. Everest double-glazing adverts remind me of Ted Holt, a popular TV personality and farmer who used to front their adverts until he shot himself.