In one of his columns he describes meeting a man coming home from the fields. ‘I asked him how he got on,’ he writes. ‘He said, very badly. I asked him what was the cause of it. He said the hard times. “What times?” said I; was there ever a finer summer, a finer harvest, and is there not an old wheat-rick in every farmyard? “Ah!” said he, “they make it hard for poor people, for all that.” “They,” said I, “who is they?”’ Cobbett yearned for a pre-industrial England of fine summer days and wheat-ricks, and yet his conservatism did not prevent him from becoming an evangelist of Improvement. As for ‘they’ – Cobbett knew what was meant; he later called it ‘the Thing’, and sometimes ‘the system’. He railed against everything that was wrong with English agriculture: low wages, absentee landlords, greedy clergymen, corruption; and he was prosecuted for supporting a riot by these same agricultural workers the year after he published Rural Rides. Cobbett saw how self-inflated governments could sit by and watch lives crumble. His discriminating rage has the tang of today. ‘The system of managing the affairs of the nation,’ he wrote in Cottage Economy, ‘has made all flashy and false, and has put all things out of their place. Pomposity, bombast, hyperbole, redundancy and obscurity, both in speaking and writing; mock-delicacy in manners, mock-liberality, mock-humanity … all have arisen, grown, branched out, bloomed and borne together; and we are now beginning to taste of their fruit.’
*
Rain was running down Nelson’s Column and Trafalgar Square was awash with visitors inspecting the lions. An American woman stepping into the National Gallery was worried about her camera lens. ‘This British weather will be the end of us,’ she said, as her husband shook out the umbrellas. In the Sackler Room – Room 34 – children with identical haircuts sat down on the wooden floor; they stared at the British weather of long ago, spread in oils with palette knives, and they, too, asked why it was always so fuzzy and so cloudy. One group sat around Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway. The instructor encouraged them to express something about the atmosphere of the picture. ‘Does it make you shiver?’ she said. ‘It’s like outside,’ one of the children replied. But most of them were interested in the hare running ahead of the train. ‘Will it die?’ one of them asked. ‘Where is it running to?’
The future. You feel the force of change in some of these weathery British pictures. Over the last few months I kept coming back to this room, and sitting here, further up from the Turners, looking at Constable’s The Cornfield. We see an English country lane at harvest time where nothing is unusual but everything is spectacular. Corn spills down an embankment, going to grass and ferns, going to pepper saxifrage or hog’s fennel, dandelion and corn poppy, down to a stream. Giant trees reach up to the dark, gathering clouds. At their foot, a small boy lies flat on his front, drinking from the stream. He wears a red waistcoat and has a tear in the left leg of his trousers. A dog with a marked shadow looks up and past him with its pink tongue out. The sheep in front of the dog are making for a broken gate that opens onto the cornfield. A plough is stowed in a ditch; the farmer advances from the field; and in the distance, which stretches for miles, you see people already at work.
The picture has philosophical currency: people will still say it is an important part of what is meant by the term ‘British’ – or at any rate ‘English’. This is the country delegates sing about at the party conferences, the one depicted in heritage brochures and on biscuit tins, the corner that lives in the sentiments of war poetry, an image at the heart of Britain’s view of itself. But here’s the shock: it no longer exists. Everything in Constable’s picture is a small ghost still haunting the national consciousness. The corn poppy has pretty much gone and so have the workers. The days of children drinking from streams are over too. And the livestock? We will come to that. Let me just say that a number of the farmers I spoke to in the winter of 2000 were poisoning their own fields. The Constable picture fades into a new world of intensive industrial farming and environmental blight.
The Cornfield is said to show the path along which Constable walked from East Bergholt across the River Stour and the fields to his school at Dedham. Last October I made my way to Dedham. It was another wet day, and many of the trucks and lorries splashing up water on the M25 were heading to the coast to join a fuel blockade. On the radio a newscaster described what was happening: ‘The situation for the modern British farmer has probably never been so dire, and a further rise in the price of fuel could kill many of them off.’
Before leaving I had rung a pig farmer, David Barker, whose farm is north of Stowmarket in Suffolk. Barker is 50 years old. His family have been farming pigs in Suffolk for four generations; they have lived and worked on the present farm since 1957. He owns 1,250 acres and 110 sows, which he breeds and sells at a finishing weight of 95 kilos. Among his crops are winter wheat, winter-sown barley, grass for seed production, some peas for canning, 120 acres of field beans, 30 acres of spring oats and 100 acres of set-aside.
‘Five years ago I was selling wheat for £125 a ton and now it’s £58.50,’ David Barker said. ‘I was selling pigs for £90 and now they’re down to £65. And meanwhile all our costs have doubled: fuel, stock, fertiliser. There’s hardly a farmer in East Anglia who’s making a profit. The direct payments from Europe have declined also because they’re paid out in euros.’
‘What about swine fever?’ I asked, innocent of the epidemics to come.
‘There are over five hundred farms that haven’t been able to move pigs since August,’ he said. ‘Immediately, this becomes an agricultural nightmare. The pigs are breeding, the feed is extortionate, and you end up relying on things like the Welfare Disposal Scheme, where pigs are removed for next to nothing. Gordon Brown’s bright idea: they give you £50 for a pig that costs £80 to produce.’
‘What can be done?’ The stormy weather was making his phone crackly.
‘Well, this government has no interest in farming,’ he said. ‘People in the countryside in England feel they are ignored and derided and, frankly, it appears that the government would be much happier just to import food. This is the worst agricultural crisis in dozens of years. We’re not making any money anywhere. Take milk: the dairy farmer receives 7p in subsidy for every pint; it takes between 10p and 12p to produce and it costs 39p when it arrives at your door. A lot of farmers are giving up and many of those who stay are turning to contract farming – increasing their land, making prairies, to make it pay.’
‘Is that the only way to reduce costs?’
‘Yes. That, or by going to France.’
David Barker used the word ‘nightmare’ at least a dozen times during my conversation with him. He told me about a friend of his, another Suffolk farmer, who, earlier in the swine-fever debacle, had sold his 250 pigs into the disposal scheme, losing £30 on each one. Barker himself was waiting for results of blood tests to see if his pigs had the fever. ‘If it goes on much longer it will ruin me,’ he said.
When I arrived at Nigel Rowe’s farm near Dedham only the weather was Constable-like. Out of his window the fields were bare and flat. ‘European pig meat is cheaper to produce,’ he said, ‘because we have higher standards and higher production costs. As soon as foreign bacon gets cheaper by more than 10p per kilo the housewife swaps. That is the rule.’
I asked him if he felt British supermarkets had been good at supporting bacon produced in Essex or Suffolk. ‘The supermarkets have been very clever at playing the different farming sectors off against each other,’ he said. ‘The Danish model is very centralised – they are allowed to produce and market something called Danish Bacon. We are very regional over here, very dominated by the tradition of the local butcher. Supermarkets want the same produce to be available in Scotland as you get in Sussex. Only the Dutch and the Danish can do that, and some of these foreign producers are so powerful – the Danish producers of bacon are much bigger than Tesco.’
Nigel has 2,000 pigs. But he’s not making money. As well as working the fa
rm he has a part-time job as caretaker at the local community centre. ‘In the 1970s we were all earning a comfortable living,’ he said, ‘and when I was at primary school in the 1960s at least thirty of my schoolmates were connected with farming. Now, in my children’s classes, there are three. I had 120 acres and I had to sell it recently to survive. I also had to sell the farm cottage my mother lived in in order to stay here. That’s what I was working on when you came – a little house for my mother.’
He looked out the window at the flatness beyond. ‘The arithmetic is simple,’ he said. ‘When I started in this game it took five tons of grain to buy the year’s supply of fuel for the tractor. Now it takes 500 tons. What do you think that means if your acreage is the same? The government seem hell-bent on the old green and pleasant land, but they won’t get behind the people who keep it that way.’ Nigel sat in his living room wearing a rugby shirt and jeans speckled with paint from his mother’s new house. ‘They’re not thinking straight,’ he said. ‘Our product needs to be marketed – branded, with a flag, which is presently not allowed. It’s all wrong. We have to import soya as a protein source for our pigs now because we can’t use other animal meat or bone fat. But this country imports tons of Dutch and Danish meat fed on bone fat.’
As we walked out of the living room I noticed there were no pictures on any of the walls. We went outside to the pig sties. The rain was pouring down, the mud thick and sloppy on the ground, and one of Nigel’s pigs was burning in an incinerator. As we looked out I asked him what had happened to the land. ‘The subsidies from the Common Agricultural Policy have got out of hand,’ he said, ‘because they are linked to production rather than the environment. Did you know the rivers around here are polluted with fertiliser and crap? We’re seeing a massive degradation of rural life in this country. Bakers and dairies have already gone, onions have gone, sugar-beet is gone, beef is pretty much gone, lambs are going.’
Before we went into the sty he asked me if I was ‘pig-clean’. ‘I’m clean,’ I said, ‘unless the fever can come through the phone.’ Hundreds of healthy-looking pink pigs scuttled around in the hay and the mud. He picked one up. ‘Farming is passed down,’ he said, ‘or it should be. A farm is built up for generation after generation, and when it starts to slip and go – you feel an absolute failure. That’s what you feel.’
We went around the farm and Nigel explained how things work. The notebook was getting very wet so I put it away. ‘You feel a failure,’ he said again, looking into the wind. ‘The other night I was at a meeting: 140 farmers at a union meeting paying tribute to four hill farmers under forty-five who’d committed suicide.’ He leaned against the side of the barn. ‘We are no longer an island,’ he said, ‘everything’s a commodity.’
*
Charles Grey, the leader of the Whig Party, won a snap election in 1831 with a single slogan: ‘The Bill, the whole Bill and nothing but the Bill.’ The Reform Act, which was passed the following year after several reversals and much trouble from the Lords, increased the British electorate by 57 per cent and paved the way for the Poor Law and the Municipal Corporations Act; this in turn killed off the oligarchies which had traditionally dominated local government. The misery and squalor that Cobbett had described in the late 1820s worsened during the Hungry Forties; it was not until after the repeal of the Corn Laws, and the subsequent opening up of trade, that British farmers found a brief golden moment. By the end of 1850 Burns and Wordsworth and Constable were dead, and the countryside they adored was subject to four-crop rotation and drainage. Something had ended. And the Census of 1851 shows you what: for the first time in British history the urban population was greater than the rural. Yet the cult of the landscape continues even now as if nothing had changed. Today some parts of East Sussex look like Kansas.
In 1867 it became illegal to employ women and children in gangs providing cheap labour in the fields. This was a small social improvement at a time when things were starting to get difficult again: corn prices fell; there was an outbreak of cattle plague; cheaper produce arrived from America; refrigeration was invented in 1880 and suddenly ships were coming from Australia loaded with mutton and beef. At a meeting in Aylesbury in September 1879, Benjamin Disraeli, by then Earl of Beaconsfield, spoke on ‘The Agricultural Situation’, and expressed concern about British farming’s ability to compete with foreign territories. ‘The strain on the farmers of England has become excessive,’ he said. The year before, he claimed, the Opposition had set ‘the agricultural labourers against the farmers. Now they are attempting to set the farmers against the landlords. It will never do … We will not consent to be devoured singly. Alone we have stood together under many trials, and England has recognised that in the influence of the agricultural interest there is the best security for liberty and law.’ British farming struggled to compete in the open market until 1910, when the Boards of Agriculture and Fisheries and Food were established and the state became fully involved in supporting it. No one was prepared for what was coming next: squadrons of enemy aeroplanes would darken the fields, and out there, beyond the coast, submarines were about to reintroduce the threat of starvation.
The year 1914 was yet another beginning in British farming. John Higgs argues that the war found agriculture singularly unprepared:
The area under crops other than grass had fallen by nearly 4.4 million acres since the 1870s … and the total agricultural area had fallen by half a million acres. When the war began the possible effects of submarine attacks were unknown and there seemed no reason why food should not continue to be imported as before. As a result only the last two of the five harvests were affected by the Food Production Campaign. This came into being early in 1917 with the immediate and urgent task of saving the country from starvation.
This was the start of a British production frenzy, a beginning that would one day propagate an ending. Free trade was cast aside in the interests of survival, and agricultural executive committees were set up in each county to cultivate great swathes of new land, to superintend an increase in production, with guaranteed prices. The Corn Production Act of 1917 promised high prices for wheat and oats for the post-war years and instituted an Agricultural Wages Board to ensure that workers were properly rewarded for gains in productivity. Some farmers objected to having their produce commandeered for the war effort. One of them, C. F. Ryder, wrote a pamphlet entitled The Decay of Farming. A Suffolk farmer of his acquaintance, ‘without being an enthusiast for the war’, was quite willing to make any sacrifice for England which might be essential, but, as a dealer in all kinds of livestock, he knows the shocking waste and incompetence with which government business has been conducted, and thinks it grossly unjust that, while hundreds of millions have been wasted, on the one hand, there should be, on the other, an attempt to save a few thousands by depriving the agriculturalist of his legitimate profit.
Despite the words of the non-enthusiast, the war had made things temporarily good for farmers. But the high prices of wartime couldn’t be maintained and in 1920 the market collapsed. This was to be the worst slump in British agriculture until the present one. With diminished world markets and too much grain being produced for domestic use, the Corn Production Act was repealed in 1921. British farmers were destitute.
In A Policy for British Agriculture (1939), a treatise for the Left Book Club, Lord Addison, a former minister for agriculture, tried to explain the devastation that took place during those years.
Millions of acres of land have passed out of active cultivation and the process is continuing. An increasing extent of good land is reverting to tufts of inferior grass, to brambles and weeds, and often to the reedy growth that betrays water-logging; multitudes of farms are beset with dilapidated buildings, and a great and rapid diminution is taking place in the number of those who find employment upon them … Since the beginning of the present century nearly a quarter of a million workers have quietly drifted from the country to the town. There are, however, some people who do not seem
to regard this decay of Agriculture with much dismay. They are so obsessed with the worship of cheapness at any cost that they overlook its obvious concomitants in keeping down the standard of wages and purchasing power, and the spread of desolation over their own countryside. Their eyes only seem to be fixed on overseas trade.
There are those who argue that it was this depression – and the sense of betrayal it engendered in farmers between the wars – that led the government to make such ambitious promises at the start of the Second World War. Addison’s policy, like many agricultural ideas of the time, was based on a notion of vastly increased production as the ultimate goal. ‘Nothing but good,’ he wrote, ‘would follow from the perfectly attainable result of increasing our home food production by at least half as much again … a restored countryside is of first-rate importance.’
It was too early in the twentieth century – and it is perhaps too early still, at the beginning of the twenty-first – to see clearly and unequivocally that the two goals stated by Addison are contradictory. The vast increases in production at the start of the Second World War, and the guarantees put in place at that time, set the trend for overproduction and food surpluses – and began the process of destruction that continues to threaten the British countryside. The pursuit of abundance has contributed to the creation of a great, rolling emptiness. But in the era of the ration book, production was the only answer: no one could have been expected to see the mountains on the other side.
The Atlantic Ocean Page 11