I keep doing most of the time. I might watch telly on a nice wet night but usually I get outside in the garden and keep doing. I mend the house. I go fishing in the river. It is a good pike river. It is a good fish to eat, it tastes like cod. We usually gut it, bung it full of salt and soak it well over night, then we bake it. It is excellent. Perch are also good to eat but roach aren’t very sharp. I read about fishing and farming, and I also read the Farmer’s Weekly. I used to play rugby but I don’t now because my wife says that she isn’t going to have me keep getting bashed-up just for a game. I got into so many accidents. Now I play table-tennis and bowls. The country is all right if you can get about. You’ve got to have a car. As long as you’ve got something to get about in, the country’s all right.
I’m never more than 200 yards away from the flock. A shepherd is always close—he always has been, hasn’t he?
Roger Adlard · aged thirty-one · factory farmer
My father bought me a farm when I left school because I had decided that it was the only life for me. It was in my blood. I never wanted to do anything else. I come from a family of farmers. Great-grandfather farmed and his fathers before him, for as long as anybody can remember. Some of my family were Suffolk millers and carters, and some ran shops in the village. My grandfather was one of the first people to go to an agricultural training institution—at Chadacre. It was hard for him then and it is hard for me now. We bought this small place to give me a start but things have gone from bad to worse where I am concerned because we have never really had enough land.
You see, some time in 1953, when we bought this farm, the price of land was in the region of £50 an acre, although it could have been as much as £100 an acre; it all depended on the quality. And the agricultural wage in those days was about £6 a week. With land at £50 an acre it was possible—even if you only earned £6 a week—to think of saving up to buy an acre. But now, with wages at £10 a week and land at £300 an acre, there is no hope of extension. It is out of the question and utterly impossible. This is the sort of position which has made the small farm a trap for the young man. The smaller the farm, the greater the price per acre. If you imagine growing corn and realize the little return you are going to get from it, then you can’t possibly pay more than £200 an acre. But land value has just gone sky-high. I can never expand. A lot of small men like myself are just packing-up, selling their little farms, getting jobs in Ipswich. You can’t blame them. Why work and work, and save and save, and never have the slightest chance of adding to your land?
I do pigs and poultry. It is intensive farming. It is not what I wanted to do. I dreamed of being an arable farmer. This was one of those glorious boyhood dreams of harvest fields, hot sun and of being perched up high on a tractor. I feel that the kind of farming I do now isn’t quite “right.” Certainly it isn’t satisfying. I long to do arable; I still dream of it. But where would I get the kind of money for even the smallest possible arable farm? What I have actually got is a farmhouse, its out-buildings and ten acres, all of which have been sold away from one of the big estates.
At first we sold pigs and fattened them. We then found that the old type of farm building wasn’t suitable for this so we had to put up a modern factory and do the fattening in this. We think of it as a machine. Everything has to be in a straight line, which was something you never found in the old buildings. They were not only crooked, but too high, too wide, too unaccommodating for the thing we had to do with these animals. After a while, I decided that the thing to do was to produce weaners and sell them to other people for fattening because if you fatten in a small way it is a fiddling business, and, equally, if you are a big arable farmer who happens to keep a few pigs, weaning is a fiddling business. A big arable man doesn’t want to have to bother with sows. His arable system will be run with economic one-man efficiency, maybe, and he will want what stock he has to be equally efficient. The idea on these modern farms is that no breeding goes on. It is not a new idea; farming is simply splitting up into specialist groups and getting away from the concept of the old mixed farm. The old mixed farmer had a few hens, a few sows, a few bullocks, a little sugar-beet, a few greens, a little orchard—just about everything. It was all so cosy. What ever you do now you’ve got to do it big. I mean—twelve sows! We’ve got sixty and we’re still not nearly as large a unit as I would want.
Group-farming has hit this area. The group concept is a useful one. I sell my products through a group called Framlingham Farmers Ltd—through their subsidiary called Porcofram, which is the pig group. I am a weaner-producer of the pig group of Porcofram. This is not riding the tractor in the corn, is it! We’re all members of this group, which is a company. We all have shares in it and we accept a certain amount of control in connection with buying and selling. So when I sell my pigs to Farmer A, I sell through the group. I tell them, “Right, for the next few weeks I will have so many pigs per week and that they will be between forty-five and seventy-five pounds in weight.” These pigs are shipped off to Farmer A and he fattens them. He pays the group, which imposes a levy and which then pays me as the weaner-producer. That is how it is done.
There is a certain amount of control in the type of boar which you must use. The kind of pig which I have is called a hybrid which has Landrace, Wessex and Large White in it. It is a cross-bred pig producing a heavy hog, and these are mostly sold to Walls Bacon Factory, who are the large curers. The heavy hog is not a bacon pig, although they make bacon from it; it is a cutter-pig. You can use it for a number of things. It is a dual-purpose pig. There are three different pigs in the butcher’s trade. The “butcher’s pig” is a light pork pig going between five and six score dead, the “bacon pig” goes between seven and eight score dead and the heavy hog goes about ten score dead. But I have a feeling that in time the big bacon-factory men will believe they have a better pig in the heavy hybrid hog than in all these. They will be able to do everything with it. That is the way things are going. It is a fast-growing pig which gets very fat and it can be sent to the bacon factory within 190 days from its birth—about six months old. A pig would normally live about six or seven years, but with our pigs it is a short life—and a happy one, we hope!
Gestation occurs in a gilt at four months old. It runs outside during this period and then it is brought inside to farrow. The young stay on the sow for six weeks and then she goes to the boar again. The running around began on grass but it is now bare earth—mud. There is a move afoot to keep them indoors all the while, and this will come, I have no doubt.
What do I think of the morals of factory farming? It is a question I am very sceptical about. I don’t know about the factory-calf men; one hears strange stories about these people. But I keep hens in batteries, which is the same kind of thing and which people say is very cruel, but as I have worked with hens and have a certain knowledge of them, I don’t really think it makes any difference to them. Pigs are different. A pig is more of an individual, more human and in many ways a strangely likeable character. Pigs have strong personalities and it is easy to get fond of them. I am always getting fond of pigs and I feel a bit conscious-stricken that one day I must put them inside for their whole lives. Yet, if you start to work out how much a pig walks about and how much time he just spends lying down and sleeping, you wonder if he is going to be worse off if he is confined all the time. Pigs are very clean animals but, like us, they all are different; some will need cleaning out after half a day and some will be neat and tidy after three days. Some pigs are always in a mess and won’t care. Pigs are very interesting people and some of them can leave quite a gap when they go off to the bacon factory.
There are an awful lot of petitions going about concerned with cruelty to animals. They are usually got up by people who keep pets confined in flats and I am not sure that such folk are entitled to hold these opinions. They cause a lot of trouble to us. But I suppose that one must be democratic and allow them to have their opinions. I do have moral qualms but I also know that everything ha
s got to go this way. Dreams of the past, like my dreams of cutting the corn in the sun, have got to be abandoned. Farming is not this lackadaisical business of yesterday. Yet I think of my grandfather and his father, and I think that although they had small profits for so much hard work, they had a carefree life.
All our factory animals have first-class veterinary treatment—that is something they didn’t have in the past—and their food is far, far superior to what animals once had to eat on a farm. Of course, you’ve got all the additives to make them get fat quickly. But then we have all kinds of additives in our food. Take bread, it isn’t natural bread, there are all sorts of things in it. It is bought all cut-up in cellophane and is horrible, but we eat it. We eat it because it is the food of our time.
My factory farm is a farm of our time. We have got 9,000 chickens in cages. Four years ago this would have been a lot but today it borders on the small. The battery-hen men are failing; those who have failed during the last couple of years are those who just kept 1–2,000 birds. If you run a battery-chicken farm entirely on your own you need to have at least 5,000 birds in order to make a living. I can remember the day when we could make £1 per bird profit each year; now you’re jolly lucky if you can make 2s. 6d. profit on a bird in a year. 1967 has been a very bad year indeed for the egg-sellers and a lot of people aren’t making any money at all. It is high input, high output. The foodstuffs present the most fantastic bill—£12–15,000. Our capital turnover on a nine-acre factory farm is higher than that on a 200-acre arable farm.
When the chickens are sold off they go to a processor who buys them live and who leaves you with a clear house in which to begin again. Most of them go into tinned soups. The old hens are best for soups because if you have a stringy old hen a lump of its flesh will remain in the soup after the rendering process. People who eat tinned soup like to find these lumps because they prove to them that the soup is made from real chicken. The feathers are no use because the chickens are wet-plucked, so there is only a mess. We don’t bother with feathers. We buy new chicks from one of the six huge hybrid chick-rearing companies. We take them as day-olds and expect to lose five per cent to “point of lay”—within the first sixteen weeks, that is. I take in just over 1,000 a month for nine or ten months. The pundits don’t advise doing this; I do it because it happens to suit my equipment. I don’t want a great “harvest,” as it were. I should have to employ extra temporary labour, usually untrained, so what use is that? By having 1,000 new chicks each month, I have 5,000 in a pipeline of various rearing moves.
I wouldn’t dare to say how many hours I work a week. I don’t start at the crack of dawn. Usually I don’t get outside until 7.30, then I work till six. I work seven days a week but I might take Saturday afternoons off to play cricket. Sometimes I stop and think, “All this work, this little profit—is it worth it?” Friends in Ipswich leave their work on Friday evening and don’t see it again until Monday, but if I take a week-end off I have to get-forward all through the week, which means hard slogging. I have had three ten-day holidays in seven years. But in some ways I don’t think I am missing life. I am thirty-one and I don’t get as excited about things as I used to. As well as play cricket, I sail on the Deben and in the winter I go to evening classes to learn navigation and welding. I have never found time to read. I am a participant.
I don’t have a strong village feeling. There is a little pub and that is where most people go, although I tend to avoid it. The village always wants to know what you are doing and if you don’t have too much contact with it in the pub, then they don’t learn too much. I just keep them guessing.
The new people want a great community centre. People who have just arrived in a village always want to do something in it or to it. What exactly they are going to have in this centre I don’t know. They keep talking about “amenities”; I suppose they mean a car-park and a big smart room. The young village people don’t want this. They don’t want to be organized and run. When their work is over they want to go off on their bikes to the bright lights of Ipswich. They don’t want twopenny-ha’penny dances with a record-player, they want to see the latest group. The new people have a desire to hold together all the old ways while at the same time making sure that they have all the latest things for themselves. The old village people don’t see it like this at all. What they see is a choice between what is old and what is new. So they choose the new. You don’t want more old things when you’ve had old things all your life, do you? The new people are often just kidding themselves that they are real village people. They don’t just want to be accepted, they really want to take over the gentry traditions. This is why they have come to live in a village. They want to do things “for the village” and it is all very exhausting if you happen to be an “old villager” and you just want to be left alone. The newcomers know all about that magic word “grant” and know where to get grants for this and that. So you can’t get out of doing something because you haven’t got the money. It really is exhausting. It’s no good saying, “But we can’t afford it,” because the new people will say, quick as a flash, “But there’s a grant!” So they’ve got you. What I can’t fathom is why a person who has got the wit to make enough money to come and live comfortably in the country, and have a centrally-heated house and a car, should want to put on entertainments in a hut. These people are just playing at village life—kidding themselves that they are genuine country folk. They wear us out. When their work is done they want to play in the village and when our work is done we want to play outside it. I suppose that sums it up. Of course, what they really want is the old power but they can’t have that because it is dead.
The village men are changing. We are seeing the growth of the specialist man on the farm. The agricultural apprentice scheme is getting the kind of lad who can’t get into an agricultural training institute off the ground. The farmer is going to get the qualified man in the future, there is no doubt about that. And one is going to have to pay this man a bigger wage than we pay today. And there are going to be fewer and fewer farm-workers. If you get an intelligent boy going on to a farm today you can be certain that he isn’t all that concerned about money; if he were he’d stuff a concrete-mixer for twenty quid a week. The distance a village is from the big town is most important. Where the distance is only two or three miles you won’t get youths to work on the farms. The older men are different. They are the genuine people who have started off working to the old patterns. They can do anything. They haven’t been divided. But I can remember at least four young men who left school since I left school who went to work as boys on the land. Two of them have stayed but the other two have gone off to operate mechanical diggers on building sites, and get £20 a week at least. Then one has trouble of a different kind with the older men. The average age of the field worker in Akenfield is the top end of fifty, which I think is rather frightening. They are the remnant of the old pre-war fantastically large labour force—that is why there is all this talk about the farms looking so neat and tidy then, you know. Labour was dirt cheap and there wasn’t enough for everybody to do, so it was clip this and straighten that, and tar the barn. Now you may be lucky and have one really good man, and then stand the chance of losing him, either to industry in Ipswich or to some farmer who is more progressive than yourself and who has lots more machines. And so it works out that some farmers don’t have the funds to keep pace with modern technology and agricultural development, and because they aren’t up to date they can’t get the good young workers, who go for these things. It is a vicious circle.
And then there is housing. If you have old workers you may be in the position of a farmer near here who is bogged down with two old-age pensioners in his cottages. This farmer is a gentleman, so he isn’t likely to sling these old workers out on to their necks. But he is likely to get 5s. a week rent for his farm cottages, which stops modernization. I don’t know what will happen to this farm, perhaps it will just sink into the ground. Of course there was another side to it
in the old days, for you would often find the farm-workers using their great skills but the farm failing because the farmer himself was inefficient. This was often happening, although nobody likes to be reminded of it now. Having an old worker in your cottage is a nuisance but I suppose one has to think of all the work they did once. Farming was so hopeless round here during the thirties that when one went to buy a farm the agent used to say, “What do you want it for, hunting, shooting or fishing?” There is still a lot of heathland near the river which the old people can remember as ploughed fields. Newcomers think that it is just “natural and wild,” as they call it, but it is the old rich land gone to waste during the Depression, with great holes and tracks made in it by army manoeuvres during the last war. The village changed then and it changes now, but nobody likes these changes because they go against the grain of what we have a right to expect.
Derek Warren · aged twenty-nine · ploughman
Everybody likes Derek, which could be odd as he is clearly unsociable. He “likes a drink” but doesn’t go to the local, doesn’t play football, doesn’t attend either chapel or church, or join in any of their multifarious activities, and doesn’t have “much to say” with the other young men. Yet it would be hard to find a more village-locked, village-absorbed person, or someone more readily smiling and easy to get along with. He is not only head ploughman on the biggest estate but the ploughman of Akenfield. Fields which once engaged dozens of horse-teams and even quite a number of tractor-drivers nowadays see nobody but him. He ploughs solidly for eight and ten hours a day for two-thirds of the year. When one cannot hear his tractor, the village experiences a similar kind of dragging silence to that caused by a clock stopping in a room. He and his wife live in an estate house becalmed in a great park. They have been married for five years but Sheila still misses the little manufacturing (farm implements) town where she was born, and where they met one Saturday afternoon. Derek’s answer to her occasional complaints, although they are happy enough, is a kind of impenetrable sweetness. His smile is not unlike that of certain convinced fundamentalist Christians who “know” but who aren’t prepared to argue. One feels at first that one would like to shake such an assurance—until one discovers that Derek is as innocent of this as of anything else. He is a naturalist—birds, butterflies, moths, rats, bats, mice—and the behaviour of human beings has to be pretty drastic for him to notice it at all. He’ll talk about his work obligingly enough but he doesn’t even attempt to convey his particular village vision other than mentioning things like the rarity of linnets, the prevalence of rooks—sops, really, to one’s interest in an experience which lacks for him a sharing language. He is lightly-built and rather Irish-looking with his open yet defensive laughter. He helps to ring bats on the rubbish dump, where they feed on the swarming insects. “You must come and see me,” he says. “I am in my height and glory.”
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