The Atlantic Ocean

by Andrew O'Hagan

  In 1999 the Blair government spent £52 million on developing GM crops and £13 million on improving the profile of the Biotech industry. In the same year it spent only £1.7 million on promoting organic farming. Blair himself has careered from one end of the debate to the other, swithering between his love of big business and his fear of the Daily Mail. Initially, he was in favour of GM research in all its forms: ‘The human genome is now freely available on the internet,’ he said to the European Bioscience Conference in 2000, ‘but the entrepreneurial incentive provided by the patenting system has been preserved.’ Other voices – grand ones – disagreed. ‘We should not be meddling with the building blocks of life in this way,’ Prince Charles was quoted on his website as saying. The government asked for the remarks to be removed. ‘Once the GM genie is out of the bottle,’ Sir William Asscher, the chairman of the BMA’s Board of Science and Education remarked, ‘the impact on the environment is likely to be irreversible.’ The Church of England’s Ethical Investment Advisory Group turned down a request from the Ministry of Agriculture to lease some of the Church’s land – it owns 125,000 acres – for GM testing. More recently, Blair has proclaimed in the Independent on Sunday that the potential benefits of GM technology are considerable, but he has also introduced the idea that his government is not a blind and unquestioning supporter. ‘We are neither for nor against,’ said Mo Mowlam.

  Poorly paid, unsung, depressed husbanders of the British landscape, keeping a few animals for auld lang syne, and killing the ones they can’t afford to sell, small farmers like Brian Carruthers, the man who lives outside Keswick with his Galloway cows and keeps his children on Family Credit, or the pig farmers in Suffolk, told me they felt as if they were under sentence of death from the big agricultural businesses. I asked one of them what he planned to do. His response was one I had heard before. ‘Move to France,’ he said with a shrug. Graham Harvey is in no doubt about where the fault lies: ‘In the early 1950s,’ he writes, ‘there were about 454,000 farms in the UK. Now there are half that number, and of these just 23,000 produce half of all the food we grow. In a period of unprecedented public support for agriculture almost a quarter of a million farms have gone out of business … It is the manufacturers and City investors who now dictate the UK diet.’

  The government has been stuck in farming crisis after farming crisis, but it recognises – though until now somewhat mutedly – the accumulating evils of the subsidy-driven culture. Its public position is to undertake large-scale, environmentally friendly tinkering with European funding, attended by vague worries about changes in the world market. An unofficial spokeswoman for Maff told me there were much deeper worries than the policy-wonks would be heard admitting to. ‘It is like the end of the British coal industry,’ she said,

  but no one wants to be Ian McGregor. In the time since BSE 110,000 head of cattle have disappeared: it seems that farmers were burning them on their own land. It’s a cultural thing, too: no one wants to admit that a certain kind of farming, a certain way of English life, has now run to the end of the road. People will supposedly always need bread. But there is no reason to believe it will have to be made with British ingredients. The disasters in farming aren’t so temporary. And they aren’t mainly the result of bad luck. No. Something is finished for traditional farming in this country. Not everything, by any means, but something – something in the business of British agriculture is over for good, and no one can quite face it.

  The day before I set off for Devon there was a not entirely encouraging headline on the front of the London Evening Standard: ‘Stay Out of the Countryside’. Just when it seemed there was little room for disimprovement in the predicament of British farmers, news came of the biggest outbreak of foot and mouth disease in more than thirty years. Twenty-seven infected pigs were found at Cheale Meats, an abattoir in Essex, a place not far from Nigel Rowe’s pig farm in Constable country. Infected animals were quickly discovered on several other farms. Suspect livestock began to be slaughtered in their hundreds. Such was the smoke from the incineration site in Northumberland that the A69 had to be closed for a time. British exports of meat and livestock (annual export value £600 million) as well as milk (of which 400,000 tons are exported a year) were banned by the British government and the EU. ‘It is like staring into the abyss,’ Ben Gill, the President of the National Farmers’Union, said. ‘On top of the problems we have had to face in the last few years, the impact is unthinkable.’

  The National Pig Association estimates that the relatively small outbreak of swine fever last year cost the industry £100 million. The last epidemic of FMD, which took hold in October 1967, led to the slaughter of 442,000 animals – a loss of hundreds of millions of pounds in today’s terms, only a fraction of which made it back to the farmer in compensation. Last month’s ban affected more than half of Britain’s farmers and no one doubts that many of them will be ruined.

  The county of Devon seemed dark green and paranoid when I travelled there the day after the ban was introduced. It seemed to sit in fear of the disinfecting gloom to come, and as the fields rolled by, I considered the ongoing assault on Hardy’s Wessex, the trouble on all sides, and the sense of an ending. Yet I’d originally planned my visit there as an opportunity to gaze at a vision of farming success. Stapleton Farm, my destination, was the one named by the Sainsbury’s executives on the day I walked with them around the flagship store on the Cromwell Road, as an example of the new kind of partnership that can exist between supermarkets and farmers. Stapleton produces the quality brands of yoghurt and ice-cream admired by Sainsbury’s: their optimism seemed hard to recapture on the way to Devon that morning.

  Stapleton Farm is not far from Bideford, near Great Torrington, and there isn’t a cow to be seen there. They use bought-in milk to make the yoghurt and ice-cream that is so highly regarded by the people at Sainsbury’s. No livestock, no fields, no manure, no tractors, just a small manufacturing unit that couldn’t be doing better. This is the enterprise Sainsbury’s put me onto when I asked about the partnerships with farming that mattered to them. This is the new thing.

  I found Carol Duncan in a Portakabin she uses as an office. She was surrounded by Sainsbury’s invoices and office stationery. Like her husband Peter, who soon arrived with a marked absence of flat cap or wellington boots, Carol considers herself a modern rural producer. ‘I was absolutely delighted when we managed to get rid of the very last cow off this farm,’ she said. ‘That’s the thing about cows, you know, they just poo all the time.’ Peter’s father and his grandfather had run Stapleton Farm in the traditional West Country way; they had livestock and they worked the fields through thick and thin. ‘But from an early age I wasn’t interested in that kind of farming,’ Peter admitted. ‘I wanted to be inside reading books. And then, when my time came, I was interested in the different things you can do with milk. In the 1960s we farmers needed to diversify and head ourselves to somewhere better. The traditional way had been to stand around waiting for the government price review. I wanted to make yoghurt and change things around here. My father would say: “Who’s going to milk the cows?”’

  ‘He just wouldn’t stop being a farmer, his father,’ Carol said.

  Peter laughed. ‘Yes. But we started with three churns. Carol was an art teacher and that kept us going through the difficult years. We made yoghurt and started selling it to independent schools.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Carol said. ‘If you’re paying between £13,000 and £16,000 a year for a school, you want to make sure your children aren’t going to be eating rubbish. We had to fight for our markets. In 1994 the price of milk in Devon went up by 29 per cent. We had to increase the price of the yoghurt by 5 per cent and we lost some of our German contracts. I went out and fought to get them back. It was horrible: 200-year-old cheese-makers were shut down, and hardly a Devon clotted-cream maker was left standing. But there’s too much milk. It’s in oversupply. Six years ago we thought we were going out of business.’

 
; ‘We started exporting our stuff,’ Peter said, ‘to Belgium especially. We supply an upmarket supermarket chain called Delhaize.’

  ‘Until this morning,’ Carol said. ‘We’ve just been banned from exporting.’

  ‘We’re hoping it will only be a matter of weeks,’ Peter said, ‘but this is the sort of thing that can ruin people. We’re praying it doesn’t spread.’

  There were a number of people coming and going outside the Portakabin window. They seemed different from most of the farming people I’d met: they were young, for a start, and they seemed like indoor types, a different colour from the field-workers I’d come across in Essex and Cumbria, Kent and Scotland. The Duncans have over thirty people working at Stapleton Farm – chopping, grating, mixing, packaging, labelling, loading. The buildings where the yoghurt and ice-cream are produced are old farm buildings that have been converted. They look typical enough among the high hedges of North Devon; yet inside each shed there are silver machines and refrigerated rooms that are miles away from the world of cows. Peter tells the story of the Sainsbury’s development manager coming down to see them in 1998 as if he were relating a great oral ballad about a local battle or a famous love affair. ‘The woman came down,’ he said. ‘I thought she seemed so fierce. They had already taken samples of our yoghurt away. They said they liked them. But when the woman came that day she just said, “I suppose you’d like to see these,” and it was the artwork for the pots. They’d already decided we were going into business. I nearly fell off my chair.’

  Carol laughed in recognition. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘and they say, “How many of these can you produce a week?” So we started aiming for 10,000 pots a week in a hundred Sainsbury’s stores. They were very pleased with the way it was going, weren’t they, Peter?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘and we were putting yoghurt into the pots by hand and pressing the lids on. It was incredibly hard work.’

  ‘Then they wanted to double it,’ she said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he echoed, ‘they wanted to double it. We had to get better machinery. So it was off to the bank for £80,000. Come February 1999 we were doing 50,000 to 60,000 pots a week.’

  Carol swivelled in her office chair. ‘We think Sainsbury’s are geniuses,’ she said. ‘We just give them yoghurt and they sell it.’

  Stapleton Farm processes all its own fruit by hand. All the milk they use comes from three local farms. Recently, they started giving the milk farmers half a penny more per litre, because of the hard time the farmers are having.

  ‘It’s been a music-hall joke for years,’ Peter said, ‘about farmers complaining. But now that the worst has come true the whole thing’s beyond belief.’

  In the face of all this seriousness, I remembered some lines of George Crabbe’s, from ‘The Parish Register’ (1807):

  Our farmers round, well pleased with constant gain,

  Like other farmers, flourish and complain.

  ‘The ladies who work for us all come from within three miles of here,’ Carol said, ‘and they’re working for housekeeping money. The farms they live on are struggling and they are here to earn money to feed their kids. But it’s a struggle for us too. Most of the people who work here take more away from it than we do, but it’s our little dream.’

  The Duncans’ dream has been one of survival and self-sufficiency, and of being free of that last cow. But as environmentalists they may have trouble living with the price of their own success: expansion. The week I spoke to them they were reeling from having bought a £68,000 machine that wasn’t yet working. Sainsbury’s want them to produce more and more and they are aware of the fact that doing well entails spending more, so that demand can be met. They are now heavily in debt but also rejoicing at their own success. In the autumn of 1999 their contact at Sainsbury’s suggested they have a go at making ice-cream.

  ‘Oh God,’ Carol said, blushing at the recollection, ‘I didn’t know how to make ice-cream. I just made a litre in my little kitchen Gelati and we sent it off. They said they had eighty samples to try. And they decided they liked ours the best. So that was it.’

  ‘Yes,’ Peter said, ‘that was a visit to the bank for another hundred grand. We had about ten weeks to get the production into full swing. And in the first twelve months of production we sold £750,000 worth of ice-cream.’

  Carol is more forthright, and I would say more conservative, than her husband. She obviously hates the idea of farming but likes the idea of country-related things: ‘An art student wouldn’t be seen dead near a farm,’ she said at one point. ‘Farmers just have the wrong attitude.’

  ‘No,’ Peter said, ‘not all of them. The problem was the Marketing Boards, which gave farmers the wrong idea. They thought someone would just take their produce away and turn it into money. This has been the situation since the end of the war. No other country in Europe was like that. That is why we are so far behind.’

  Carol heaved a huge sigh. ‘I’m so pissed off about the foot and mouth disease. We had a whole lot of ice-cream going into Spain next week. Not now. I hope it doesn’t spread to here.’

  ‘Starting to do business with Sainsbury’s feels a bit like being mown down by a bus,’ Peter said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Carol, ‘but I was so relieved when we got rid of that last cow and that old farm. That’s the thing with a lot of the farmers around here: they have the potential to get into tourism, get into the farm cottages side, caravans and all that.’

  Supermarkets want to be able to rely on volume. If Stapleton Farm’s yoghurt continues to grow in popularity – which it will, as part of Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference range for the more discerning shopper, costing 45p, against the Economy brand’s 8p – then they will have to get bigger. The charm of Stapleton’s smallness cannot last; the supermarket culture requires commitment and tolerance of the highest order from producers. ‘I remember once thinking,’ Peter said, ‘that maybe yoghurt would end up being produced by about three factories in Europe. And it may go like that.’

  ‘Our girls,’ Carol said, ‘have been brought up to believe that Europe is their oyster. And at this moment we are just what Sainsbury’s wants.’

  I asked the Duncans if they were worried about having all their eggs in one basket. What happens if people get fed up with Devon yoghurt? What happens if Sainsbury’s find somewhere cheaper, or somewhere better able to meet the volume required? Or if it falls for the new kid on the block? Carol met my gaze evenly. ‘We’ll survive,’ she said.

  Before going into the factory with Peter I had to put on white boots and a white jumpsuit, sterilise my hands and pull on a hairnet. Peter stopped in the middle of a chilled room, with the sound of clicking going on further along the line, the sound of mass production. ‘This was a cattle shed when I was little,’ he said. ‘I can remember it quite clearly.’ We stood beside a pallet of strawberry yoghurts bound for Sainsbury’s. It had the special label already attached. I asked him who paid for the Sainsbury’s packaging. ‘Oh, we do,’ he said.

  That afternoon Tim Yeo, the shadow agriculture spokesman, said that the government had responded in chaotic fashion to a chain of farming crises. ‘I wish he would shut up and go away,’ Nick Brown replied. ‘He is trying to make political capital out of a terrible situation.’ And when I was barely out of the West Country news broke of another farm where livestock was found to have contracted foot and mouth disease. The farm was in Devon. And the farmer owned thirteen other farms.

  *

  The most comprehensive guide to British farming performance is provided by Deloitte & Touche’s Farming Results. ‘Despite cutting costs and tightening their belts,’ the report for autumn 2000 concludes, ‘farmers have suffered the lowest average incomes since our survey began 11 years ago.’ Several facts stand out, so unreasonable do they seem, and so shocking. ‘In the last five years the net farm income of a 200-hectare family farm has plunged from around £80,000 to just £8,000 … Those farmers who have expanded their operations dramatically in recent times �
�� cannot sustain profitability in the face of tumbling commodity prices.’ ‘The bad news,’ says Mark Hill, the firm’s partner in charge of the Food and Agriculture Group, ‘is that we predict small profits becoming losses in the coming year. This is due to a further fall in output prices and yield plus rising costs of £25 per hectare in fuel alone.’

  An equally gloomy drizzle was making a blur of Otford the day I visited. Hedges were loaded like wet sponges, the short grass squeaked underfoot, there was mud in the road and mud at the farm gate, with a cold whiteness in the Kent sky that darkened quickly in the afternoon. Ian and Anne Carter were sitting in the drawing room of their farmhouse. She is a Justice of the Peace, groomed to a fine point of civic order, wearing a blue suit with a poppy pinned to its lapel. She is well spoken, opening up her world in good clear Southern English, the language of the prep school and the Shipping Forecast, and her generosity seems to go perfectly with the rationale of the teacups. Ian stretched out his long legs like a teenager: he is likeably comfortable with everything he knows and everything he doesn’t know; he is right as rain and habitually nice. They both shook their heads.

  ‘You need to have 2,500 acres to make farming work nowadays,’ he said. ‘Not so long ago you could have 600 acres and second-hand equipment and send your kids to a good school and holiday in the South of France. That’s all gone now.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Anne, ‘there has been pressure from the fertiliser companies to use certain fertilisers. There are too many sheep owing to these awful subsidies. The whole countryside out there has changed almost beyond recognition.’ Over the fireplace hangs a Constable painting: a portrait of one of Anne’s ancestors. There is something darkly lively about the picture. For a while we all sat and stared into it. ‘It’s not at all famous,’ Anne said, ‘all the famous ones are out there being admired.’