Surrey, perhaps, is familiar with the parched-brown cricket pitch look, and Kent has long been golden yellow with barley and wheat in summer. But for most of us, England really was, until recently, a green and pleasant land. Dark green oak trees, set in hazel-green hedges and edging shadowy green lanes, created a patchwork landscape of lush fields. Now, though, lots of England looks like Normandy, and I’m struggling to adapt. 

Yes, some people like to catastrophize. Yes, extreme weather isn’t proof of climate change. And yes, some summer droughting is to be expected. But England’s problems are about so much more than the views. Harvest would normally be in full flow about now. But with the sunshine and the heat, and the Environment Agency saying we have had just 3% of the average rainfall for July, across most of the country it happened a month ago, when the fairly pitiful crops all ripened early. No wonder reports suggest this could go down as the worst cereal harvest since records began in 1984, with farmers already reporting yields way below average. All told, they’re projected to lose some £390 million in crop value.

If crops wither in the fields, grass dries up too, meaning livestock farmers have to bring in harvested forage or buy feed from elsewhere. And, again, the impact is stark. Milk production fell by 18.5 million liters across the UK in July, as farms struggled to feed their cows and keep them cool. You might ask what all this has to do with you. You will find out when you go shopping in the next few months, and the prices are higher and products more scarce. Farming is a service industry, and we work for you. 

That is the big picture, but the details are equally stark. Jake Fiennes manages the Holkham Estate in Norfolk, where they graze cattle by the coastal marshes. Holkham has traditionally benefited from a chalk aquifer that fills the farm’s drainage dykes with clean, fresh water. But as drought dries up the aquifer, sea water seeps in below, forcing farmers to bring their cattle inside their barns for shade and piped water. And Fiennes is far from unique. Hannah Campbell and her mother Joy Dawson farm in south Lincolnshire. They have spent weeks carting water to their sheep after the usual ponds and river dried up. The irony, they say, is that after three months of drought each summer, they are likely to face six of winter flooding.  

Water — too little or too much — is only one problem. Hattie McPhee is growing a herd of milking sheep in Cumbria, to make cheese. She says the drought has made things hard: the sheep aren’t filling the tank with milk because their summer diet is so poor. The drought doesn’t end for farms when it rains, but when its effects and costs pass. Hattie is worried about making it through the next winter, as sales will be lower, and because the hay she has made is too dry and unpalatable. 

More from this author

Could Britain run out of food?

By James Rebanks

Tom and Tess Darlington have money worries too. They are tenant farmers on the Little Dalby estate, in Leicestershire, growing crops and rearing livestock. Collapsing summer yields have left a shortfall in their budgets of 300 tonnes of wheat, worth about £60,000. It means they will be extending their overdraft to buy next year’s seeds. Tom jokes that he might have to sell a kidney to carry on farming, especially when the costs of machinery only ever seem to rise, pointing out that a combine harvester for harvesting wheat now costs £600,000 or more. The investment required to make food “cheap” is insane.

On one level, clearly, a drought is just bad luck, the savage will of the gods. If it doesn’t rain for long enough, then every farming system grinds to a halt. But the severity of how drought affects a place is shaped by how it has been managed before. And the fact is that a lot of British farmland is now being farmed so efficiently — in monocultures, and fed with synthetic nutrients — that often it has quite low levels of soil organic matter. Now, this can work fine in years where there is plenty of moisture. But over time, we also know that degraded soils dry out quicker in droughts. 

The Rothamstead Institute estimates that every 1% increase in soil organic carbon raises the soil’s water holding capacity by about 354,000 liters per hectare: enough to fill five swimming pools. It isn’t how much rain falls from the sky, in other words, but how much we can hold in our soils that really matters.

Systems, in short, can be too efficient; fields need some buffer, some untapped potential, that they can call on in periods of stress and exhaustion. But our farming systems are being asked to run flat-out all the time. There is no slack, and very little resilience. The basic problem is that the economics of agriculture don’t pay for soil organic matter, or for farmers to rotate crops, or to let land have periods of recovery. In practice, that means that most of our arable landscapes are now poorly adapted for extreme weather events. 

No farmer looking across their once-green landscape wants to hear that they might have done something to minimize the drought. But the evidence is pretty clear that, somehow, we need to prioritize soil health. 

Andy Cato, one half of the electronic music duo Groove Armada, is also a regenerative farming champion, and has been preaching this mantra for years. He thinks our conventional farming systems are not yet adapted to the realities of the dry summers we are getting. This year, his farm, in the Thames area, has had yields for winter sown wheat as high as eight tons per hectare. There may be drought, but Cato has also spent years raising soil carbon, encouraging deep-rooting plants, growing cover crops, and keeping them nutritionally balanced. 

The ability of Britain to feed itself in the future may therefore depend on whether our farmers can learn to farm in ways that pack the living soil with organic matter. This might mean a return to mixed farming, with arable rotated with grazing. Green plants are especially useful here, eating sunlight — photosynthesis — then pumping carbons and sugars down into the soil. The animals themselves are vital too: half the country needs more sheep and cows, not less, as we are often told by well-meaning but profoundly ignorant environmental campaigners.  

Britain, of course, is far from alone. In July, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization found that their food price index had risen to its highest level since 2023, even as the OECD’s Global Drought Outlook suggests that economic losses to drought are growing from between 3% to 7.5% per year. Altogether, some 1.7 billion people worldwide now live in places where crop yields have fallen by at least 10% due to human-induced land degradation. 

All the same, the UK is especially vulnerable. Until a decade ago, we were part of the EU’s food system, which subsidized farming, and gave us access to alternative sources of food if ours failed. The risks were spread across mainland Europe, with access to arable heartlands like Ukraine beyond the EU’s borders. We ended that relationship, and now need a food system that reflects our post-Brexit isolation, one that can feed us in bad years as well as good. Economists say we can import what we need, from across the globe, but they seem curiously naive about the risks. 

More from this author

The myth of the King of the North

By James Rebanks

Once again, Ukraine is vital here. One of the bread baskets of the world, it produced 80 million tons of grain and oilseeds before Putin’s invasion, or the equivalent of about 10 kilograms for everyone on Earth. But, in case you’ve missed it, Russia is bombing the port of Odesa, from which this bounty leaves to reach our plates. It will be a good result if 50 million tons of Ukrainian grain gets to global markets this year. 

In short, the old assumptions on which we built our food system no longer hold. Geopolitics has changed. The climate has changed. Rainfall patterns have changed. Food production technologies have changed. The risk-sharing balance of old, between state and farmer, has vanished. Where we source vital synthetic nutrients from has also changed: much of Britain’s came through the Strait of Hormuz. All the while, our population is growing fast, and our available farmland now has alternative uses — from solar farms, to growing biomass for biodigesters, to rewilding — that gobble up vast acres.

Yet despite the urgent need to change ourselves, we are refusing to support thousands of farmers who have applied to government schemes designed to make our landscapes more resilient. Our political class, especially in the Treasury, seems either too agriculturally illiterate or just plain indifferent. Either way, we aren’t investing at anything like the levels we did before 2016. 

Political indifference and bureaucratic sluggishness is even more unfortunate given these are not things that the market, left to its own devices, makes happen. The market, after all, pushes farmers to get the efficiencies-of-scale that come with growing thousands of acres of one or two crops. That’s how you do cheap food — via mechanized monocultures — but it isn’t how you do food system that is resilient and robust, yet alone healthy. 

Beyond ensuring shelves are stocked, a farming revolution could offer benefits too, not least in spreading the risks and costs of feeding the British people. Already, about 20% of us, the poorest, struggle to access and afford healthy food, which has massive implications for the NHS and straining government budgets. 

All that’s for the future. For the moment, the drought continues. In my corner of Cumbria, the hillsides are withering, and the cattle stand by the water troughs huddled in whatever cover they can find. Some of our pastures have no piped water, so we will be moving the cattle nearer home in the next day or two. Even the crows look ragged and hungry, as they can no longer peck for worms. Our Southern friends have had it much worse, and are having to learn how to farm in such harsh conditions. And now, perhaps, our time is coming too.

But the word “North” still rolls from the tongues of political journalists with barely concealed contempt, as if it were some minor impoverished province of an ancient empire. You’d think Burnham was coming with a pre-formed cabinet that included the Gallagher brothers, or was leading an army of zombies dressed in JD Sports gear. It feels as though Westminster journalists and politicians have suddenly discovered something they spent years ignoring: place.

And that is what is really going on here. The fascination is not with Burnham being Northern, but with how he wins. Three mayoral victories, a return to Parliament and an ability to outperform Labour nationally and limit the advance of Reform have left Westminster asking what he has that other Labour politicians don’t. They are trying to work out whether the North is acting as a laboratory for a new kind of center-left politics, or whether Burnham is simply benefiting from the wider collapse of confidence in Westminster.

And in trying to explain that, commentators have found themselves talking about things they have long ignored: belonging, identity, roots, civic pride, accents — and the North. These are not trivial things. The future of Labour may depend on them.

In 2024, I attended my first ever political event: the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool. I went to plead with MPs from what would become the Starmer government that food, farming and the environment were vital issues that needed enlightened support. It turned out to be a complete waste of time — Rachel Reeves trashed the whole lot — but it showed me a little of how British politics works. 

I got to the reception desk and collected my speaker badge. The young man that met me had a broad Scouse accent, and seemed tired of handing out passes to besuited men and women. I’d passed a couple of hundred of them on the way in, and had wondered who they were. Lobbyists? Consultants? Think-tankers? Aspiring politicians? Academics?

They all looked the same. And they all sounded the same too: modern city professionals, anything but working class. And that, frankly, is just the reality of politics. Universities and private schools are the hothouses from which a disproportionate number of MPs come from, and the industries around politics are no different. 

None of these things is a crime, of course, but it was very noticeable to someone new to this world that they weren’t living working-class lives. People laugh out loud when Starmer insists his father was a “toolmaker”: he is clearly so far from any kind of working-class experience himself, and it’s painfully embarrassing seeing him try to connect to it. When he spoke to the nation it was like someone who was used to being billed out by the hour. 

Starmer made me, and perhaps everyone else, nostalgic for the older kind of Labour, for politicians who had once been miners, or factory workers, or shop stewards. MPs who had strong regional accents, and who, even if you didn’t share their politics, seemed an authentic and genuine representation of their communities. 

I know they weren’t all like that, but some of the great ones were — Nye Bevan, Barbara Castle, Dennis Skinner, or Alan Johnson. Hell, even their nemesis, Maggie Thatcher, was a penny-pinching grocer’s daughter from Grantham. Until recently, people belonged to a class and a profession rooted in a place. People would identify as, say, a “Shipbuilder from Tyneside”. But as working-class industrial jobs have ceased to employ hundreds of thousands of people, the occupation part of such identities has faded away, replaced with the much blander and vaguer, “Northern”.  

Labour politicians were formed by their occupation, class and sense of belonging. The British people have always been quite forgiving of politicians being of a different class or status to them, as long as you don’t hide it — Jacob Rees Mogg and Boris Johnson are accepted as posh boys, because they wear it openly. But politicians being fake about their background is almost unforgivable. 

In Liverpool, the young man passed me a badge with “Labour Party Conference” written on it, and I made a joke about Labour being the party of the “working man”. He laughed. “Seen many?” I asked. He grinned and shook his head. 

Suggested reading

Is Burnham too Northern?

By John Merrick

I think that was the moment I realized how disconnected from place (and perhaps social class) a lot of politics now is. And the irony with Andy Burnham is that, at least if you read his CV, he is very much a career politician. 

He is currently overplaying this image of someone Northern, rooted, local and authentic: an antidote to Westminster. Yet his biography is a textbook Westminster success story. First he went to a Catholic grammar school. Then Cambridge to read English. Then he swerved the real world and instead worked as a parliamentary researcher. From there? A special advisor, then an MP in New Labour from 2001. Then he was cabinet minister for Blair and Brown. Amid all this, he even found time to run two failed campaigns for leadership of his party. 

In short, if we are looking for fresh talents, untainted by Westminster, Burnham would be an odd choice. He isn’t a miner, a farmer, a factory worker or even an entrepreneur. He is, to his core, a politician. 

Why, then, isn’t he perceived as just another career politician? The answer probably tells us more about the state of British politics than it does about Burnham himself. Westminster is so insulated from place, and so dominated by a narrow professional class, that almost any politician who even appears rooted in a community now leaps out. 

Burnham’s talent over the past decade, then, has not been to escape the political class — but to escape being defined by it. While Westminster was chewing through reputations, he was safely up in Manchester. From Brexit to the bond markets, Burnham sat most of it out. He could have been in the Trafford Centre drinking cans of lager for all anyone cared. And those 10 years away from London gave him something increasingly rare in British politics: a national political profile without the stain of abject national failure.

I live two hours further North than “Andy” (a massive Northern flex). And I’ve spent time with regular working people all week: farmers, plumbers, cleaners, wagon drivers, caterers, carers, and teachers. And Burnham has come up in conversation a lot. That’s not exactly polling, or a focus group, but it perhaps reveals a little of the mood. He clearly has some political capital up here. It helps, for one thing, that they know who he is (I often ask people to name five MPs, and they struggle to name more than two or three). They also like the way he talks. He sounds genuinely down-to-earth Northern in a way that disarms many people — perhaps because sounding Northern is still associated with being working class. London increasingly feels like it is another economic universe — with wages, house prices, and a general level of affluence that is bewildering to the average person in Carlisle or Hartlepool. When we sense a politician is lost in the London bubble, we tune out. What do they know about our lives? 

People in the North like that Burnham was supportive of the Hillsborough families, and behaved honorably after the Manchester Arena attack. He showed character speaking for Manchester when she was hurting. They suspect he’s been quite a good mayor, though no one is exactly certain what he got done, as that’s too local and specific to make the news. The general consensus is that Andy is sensible and decent, and hopefully humble enough to carry Northern common sense with him as he returns to the national stage. 

The trouble is, everyone up here knows the country is broke. They don’t need an economist to tell them. And up here, particularly in rural areas, Labour politicians aren’t universally popular. Thanks to their hapless efforts, the Starmer-Reeves government has set back the Party’s electoral prospects by about 30 years. Their 25-year Farming Roadmap was published this week to widespread derision — asking farmers to produce more food, with less help, while also restoring nature and heading off climate change, with less support and investment than ever before. Absolute bullshit (a farming term, you understand).  

Andy Burnham hasn’t been costing you or me much money over the past 10 years. But that’s about to change. It’s easy to be soccer-dad Andy, playing the Smiths on a guitar, and talking about what politics should be when you are “King of the North”. It’s altogether different when you are the prime minister. 

His big idea of a “land tax” sounds scarily like it might include farmers — if it does, he will be continuing the politically disastrous culture war started by his predecessors. Will he reset the relationship with rural businesses, or make things worse for them? A lot of people up here are waiting nervously to find out.

But the media misses something else. The North is real — but it is not one thing. The “North” that Burnham represents is fundamentally metropolitan: a product of big industrial cities and their hinterlands. This is clear enough in his language, in his talk of “growth”, “infrastructure”, “investment”, “transport”, “productivity”. Close your eyes and we could be back in 2001; he is, in fact, the last survivor of New Labour. 

Yet that reflects only one version of Northern identity. It is worth remembering there is as much of England north of Manchester as there is between Manchester and London. And many of us living up here are no more convinced that Manchester speaks for us than London does. Up here the economy is on its knees — people need manufacturing, energy, farming, tourism, forestry and the food and drinks sector to thrive, and right now, things are dire. For years, our political class has preferred to talk in abstractions: growth, productivity, migration, public services. But voters experience those things somewhere. They experience them in places. 

That is one reason Reform has been so successful. The populist Right instinctively takes the side of people who feel attached to place against the forces they believe are changing it. They understand that identity is local before it becomes ideological. The center often delegitimizes these grievances, as it did by labeling negative experiences of immigration as “racism”. This is good for shaping a Westminster/BBC narrative about ignorant Northern communities, yet fails utterly to address the long-term issues, let alone retain the political loyalty of the accused.

More from this author

Could Britain run out of food?

By James Rebanks

Right now, Westminster appears incapable of solving the problems of our age — creating a strange moment of weakness and opportunity. Burnham is trying to seize it. He represents an idea of how that status quo might be challenged. But a Northern accent, a dark blue t-shirt, and fluttering your eyelashes will only get you so far in Westminster. 

The fantasy of the North is an imagined one, but it has a moral power. It’s an old story, one with roots far older than Barbara Castle. The North, or really the hinterland, possesses virtues that have been lost or squandered in the corrupted and decadent capital — honor, loyalty, duty and plain speaking. And Burnham is riding in to Westminster brandishing them all. How long he can retain them remains to be seen. For the South is powerful; it rarely rolls over for a northerner. And in the days since the King of the North pulled into Euston on his Avanti West Coast, you can sense it arming itself again — almost irritated that someone had the audacity to pull off this Labour coup.

The Strait of Hormuz crisis has exposed the extent of Britain’s vulnerability. The Food & Drink Federation recently announced that food inflation could hit 10% by the end of the year as a result of the war. Its earlier forecast was around 3%. Food shortages are also possible: The Times reported last month that a potential shortage of carbon dioxide — essential to the process of slaughtering livestock — could lead to a scarcity of chicken, pork and other staples in UK supermarkets.

Modern agriculture requires a safe and stable flow of fossil fuels, and so is deeply affected by what is happening in the Middle East. Two of the biggest costs for British farmers are fuel and fertilizer, and the prices of both are soaring. Growing crops requires a lot of fuel — whether you’re plowing, drilling and spraying crops or harvesting, drying and refrigerating them. Farmers are given some duty-relief on fuel in the form of red diesel, which helps to keep food prices down for consumers. But in wartime, this is not enough. Red diesel for my farm was 70-75p per liter before President Donald Trump sent in the first missiles. It is now more like £1-£1.15 per liter. 

Then there’s synthetic fertilizer, which is the biggest single variable cost for many farmers. In recent decades, the world’s food production system has become heavily reliant upon ammonia and sulfur from the Middle East. Around a third of the global trade in raw materials for synthetic fertilizers flows through the Strait of Hormuz. So the crisis has caused the price of fertilizer to skyrocket.

More from this author

Big Food has devoured British farmers

By James Rebanks

Right now, it is crop planting season. Farmers have two choices in the face of rising expenses — buy less fertilizer and accept lower yields, or buy fertilizer at the inflated prices and pass on the higher costs to the consumer. Either way, food will become much more expensive.

The farmers I’ve spoken to this week say that the cost of growing crops in the UK has risen because of the war by as much as £150-£250 per hectare. That’s £30,000-£50,000 in extra costs for a typical 200-hectare arable farm. At this rate, some nitrogen-hungry crops, such as wheat, barley and oilseed rape, might not be worth planting this year. Farmers are nervous of borrowing tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds to get a crop in the ground when they know they’re probably not going to get a fair return on their investment. Jack Highwood, who farms in Kent, tells me he used to grow 300-400 acres of arable crops, mainly milling wheat — “enough to feed Kent for a week”. But he has stopped sowing crops because the cost of growing is now above the market price. 

The dairy farmers I’ve spoken to say that the Iran war has added £200-£500 to the cost of every dairy cow, or £30,000-£75,000 to a herd of 150 cows. Many British dairy farmers were making a loss on every liter of milk even before the Iran war; they are now in a battle for survival, accruing huge debts. Even on a small beef and sheep farm like ours, the impact of the war is likely to be in the tens of thousands of pounds. 

Lou Osman, a shepherd from Cambridgeshire, told me he uses three tanks of fuel a week traveling between his flocks. His fuel costs alone have gone up £180 a week. He told me he hadn’t sown any synthetic fertilizer this spring so would have less grass and raise fewer sheep this year. He is unsure whether his business can remain viable with spiraling costs. He is not alone. 

All this probably means that your groceries are going to cost more. The Iran war has exposed a major flaw in our food system: after Brexit, the government stripped English farmers of their production subsidies, which up until then had ensured that producing food was always profitable — no matter the geopolitical climate. Now, the financial risk of farming falls entirely on the farmer. That means, in times of strain, farmers are likely to reduce their output to be on the safe side. And this makes the nation highly vulnerable to food shortages.

My father, who was a farmer like me, thought he had a social contract with the nation: to feed society in return for a degree of protection and support. That contract has been ripped up by successive governments; feeding the nation is no longer a political priority. 

For years, politicians have turned a blind eye to farming. In fact, recent governments have made farming more difficult at every opportunity: not only eliminating production subsidies, but failing to deliver universal environmental schemes, introducing inheritance tax, raising employment taxes, rolling out more red tape, and signing free-trade deals that undermine our farmers by forcing them to compete with cheap, poor-quality produce from abroad. There is little or no understanding in government about how these changes might affect Britain’s food production.

This is pretty dangerous considering the worst threats to our food security may be yet to come. New military technologies are emerging on the battlefields of Ukraine that could profoundly alter our national security. Highly sophisticated Ukrainian drones are now regularly attacking targets up to 1,000 kilometers away. If this technology fell into the hands of our enemies, think how it could undermine our civilian infrastructure. The day may come when drones will be able to travel even longer distances in unfathomable numbers, aimed at us by an enemy intent on disabling our country, or intimidating us into submission. 

Could Britain withstand a major attack on its food system? With a decent strategy it might have a chance. We have an amazingly productive land mass on the temperate edge of the Atlantic. We also have some of the best farmers in the world, who currently produce about 60% of the food we need. 

The problem is that the government has allowed food production to become unprofitable for farmers, as well as highly centralized — so we have serious bottlenecks in our food system. Most supermarkets hold very little stock. And it takes tens of thousands of lorries to transport the nation’s food every week from farms to shops and food outlets: even a 10% drop in available drivers can result in empty shelves (remember Covid). The supermarket system works out of a handful of giant distribution and processing centers with incredible throughput volume, but which are highly vulnerable because they are run by computer systems that can be hacked. It also relies on refrigeration, and so is vulnerable to energy shortages.

On top of this, Britain imports lots of its food from places vulnerable to climate change, natural disasters or geopolitical chaos. Traditionally, we imported many of our fruits and vegetables from Almeria in Spain, but that region is now struggling with water shortages. So, increasingly, we’re sourcing fresh produce from West Africa instead, especially Sierra Leone. The whole system depends upon stability, peace and the free flow of goods — but can we guarantee that in West Africa? What’s more, our imports are almost all squeezed through two ports: Dover and Felixstowe. If these ports were ever taken out of action, we’d be in trouble. 

Suggested reading

Foot-and-mouth was the start of the trouble

By Cosmo Adair

The good news is that there are plenty of ways to make our food system more robust. After the Second World War, British farmers started using ammonia nitrate to grow crops; now, we are addicted. But there are ways we can wean ourselves off this addiction — at least to some extent. We can lessen our reliance upon synthetic fertilizers by using rotational and regenerative farming to improve the health of British soil. By introducing crop rotations and re-integrating livestock into arable (crop growing) systems, we can fertilize more of our land naturally. 

We can also lessen our reliance upon foreign fruit and vegetables by supporting growers across the UK to make a sustainable living. We can design and develop horticulture in urban areas, with allotments and urban farms, where food production will be most needed in any future crisis. (Paris, remember, was once a leading light of food production, farming small areas intensively to feed countless urbanites.) We can stop subsidizing mindless schemes to take land out of food production in order to build houses or solar farms or pursue the worst excesses of corporate “offset” rewilding. We can be way more discerning about where we import food from, and encourage farmers to produce certain foods we’re lacking. And we can shore up our supplies of synthetic fertilizer by protecting the Billingham ammonia plant in Teesside — the last plant in the country that produces ammonium nitrate.

As it stands, a large part of Britain’s cheap food system relies upon massive fossil fuel flows, and we have done way too little to insure against the risks — risks that are swiftly becoming reality. A Which? report released yesterday found that three million UK households are already being forced to skip meals to cope with the rising cost of food. We urgently need politicians of all stripes to start thinking about farming and food as national priorities. 

As a farmer, I work hard to look after my land and my animals in a way that you, the consumer, would approve of. But in recent years, farmers have come to be seen as an unnecessary and archaic part of this food system, rather than its foundation. Whole foods make up only about half of the average Brit’s diet today; the other half is made up of ultra-processed food (UPFs) — these don’t come from farms, they come from factories, and even labs. A farm-free future is closer than you might think.

This shift from whole foods to UPFs is now being blamed for making our society sick. The evidence is mounting that some of the biggest players in the food system do not, in fact, have our best interests at heart, and that the “food” they produce may not be trustworthy. We’re being told that predatory companies producing harmful and addictive hyper-processed products have hijacked our food system and created an obesity crisis.

According to NHS doctor Chris van Tulleken, it all started to go wrong in the Seventies. That’s when the graphs begin to show diet-related health problems in the developed world swing wildly upwards. The problem: UPFs. Food manufacturers, van Tulleken explains, had invested billions of pounds in research to find ways to hack the human brain, encouraging us to gorge on their fatty, salty, sugary products without ever feeling full. They even used brain scanners to see which foods took us to a “bliss point” — and then left us craving more.

The result: a shocking rise in obesity and a direct effect on mortality. In the Sixties, obesity rates in America hovered at around 13%. Now, the figure is above 40%, with 10% severely obese. In England, meanwhile, 28% of adults are living with obesity. The number one cause of death in the developed world today, according to van Tulleken, is poor diet — specifically the overconsumption of UPFs. In the UK, 14% of early deaths could be linked to this.

Why would big business feed us stuff that makes us sick? The answer: profit. There is more money to be made from selling processed junk than real food, just as there was once more money to be made from selling cigarettes than admitting they caused cancer. The shocker in van Tulleken’s program is that cigarette money and taste and flavoring expertise moved across to foods as the tobacco market began to decline.

Massive corporations have made it their business to replace real foods in our diet with ersatz products they had created using cheaper ingredients. And in this new food dystopia, farmers and their produce are fairly marginal. The supermarkets and manufacturers want you to buy their crap from a packet way more than they want you to buy a carrot from a field. In fact, fresh vegetables have become almost a nuisance to be heavily discounted — often at the farmer’s cost, not the supermarket’s — to get people into the store. Just think of all those dirt-cheap potatoes and parsnips on sale over Christmas. The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has warned that such discounts send the “wrong message”, devaluing fresh produce and making it even harder for farmers to earn a fair return.

Why do we put up with this warped food system? Because we’ve been misled for decades by incredible levels of food propaganda. Big Food has actively encouraged us through advertising to ditch the model of traditional home-cooked family meals, with healthy fasts between them. What they want instead is for us to graze all day long on their snacks, which never actually fill us. Breakfast shakes. Cookies. Cheese straws. Diet drinks. That is a terrible basis for a human diet.

We should all be very suspicious about narratives that downplay the importance of farmers in feeding us. Not only are such narratives encouraged by Big Food, but they are now a commonplace assertion in Whitehall. When Minette Batters was head of the NFU, she was regularly told by civil servants that farming was a trivial matter, a tiny share of the economy; the government had tacitly accepted that Britain was no longer being mostly fed by farmers, but by their corporate friends. As farmers have been squeezed to breaking point, Britain’s “food system” has become a giant concentrator of wealth and power.

It’s clear that our government is in bed with Big Food. There is a single farmer on DEFRA’s Food Strategy Advisory Board, but he is totally outnumbered by representatives of companies that produce, sell or distribute UPFs. Our government — and the last several if we’re being honest — is being advised by the very same companies that made this system so bad, and which have a huge vested interest in blocking structural change. It cannot continue to turn a blind eye. The scientific basis for concern about UPFs is growing by the week. And in America, the court cases have already started.

In December, San Francisco sued 10 of the largest manufacturers of UPFs — including Kraft Heinz, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, General Mills, Nestle USA, Kellogg, and Mars. “Our case is about companies who design food to be harmful and addictive and market their products to maximize profits,” said the City Attorney of San Francisco, David Chiu. “Like the tobacco industry, they know their products make people sick, but hide the truth from the public, profit from untold billions, and leave Americans to deal with the consequences.”

Many of these companies sell their products in Britain too — though it is important to note that US food regulations are different to those in Britain, and products change to reflect those rules. If Chiu’s accusations turn out to be correct, then Britain is way more screwed than most other nations, because for decades we have been copying America’s dystopian food system.

Our European neighbors made different political choices: French households spend less than 15% of their budget on UPFs, Italian households 13%, and Portuguese households just 10%. These nations defended their traditional food cultures, as a matter of pride. They never stopped believing that eating well remained an essential part of a good life. They also used planning laws and local government to make life more difficult for Big Food corporations, and encouraged their politicians to say no.

Meanwhile, Britain’s government has allowed food deserts to emerge across the country, where UPFs are often the only option available. Visit any run-down community in the UK, from Motherwell to Blackpool, and you will easily find food environments where many people — particularly those without cars to reach supermarkets at the edge of town — have almost no access to fresh fruit and veg, dairy or good meat. When we allowed our town centers to be gutted by competition from out-of-town supermarkets, we created a country where anyone without a car is trapped in a land of kebab shops, burger joints, frozen-food outlets, and small shops selling sweets and snacks.

More from this author

Labour is crushing Britain's farmers

By James Rebanks

Britain is paying the price: a recent study, “The False Economy of Big Food”, estimates that our bloated food system costs nearly £68 billion a year in healthcare bills alone. It costs the state £268 billion annually if you factor in welfare support, social care, lost productivity and human cost. It turns out cheap food isn’t cheap: it is so devastatingly unhealthy it is bankrupting the UK. Yet because food buying is a private affair, while ill health is nationalized through the NHS, most people don’t put two and two together.

The good news is that there are ways out of this mess. At the household level, it is as simple as a return to home cooking with fresh ingredients. This isn’t, of course, “simple” to solve because it now needs to happen in households where men and women both go out to work, when time is scarce, and in food environments where buying the right stuff is difficult. But, if you can, start today and switch as much as you can to whole real foods. The food writer Michael Pollan once wrote that if your great-grandmother wouldn’t have recognized the ingredients, then it probably isn’t food, and you should try to avoid eating it.

The state also has a massive role to play in regulating and improving our food system. For one thing, UPFs ought to be taxed, initially to pick up the social costs they are creating on a massive scale to the NHS. But we also need to make these products less cheap and encourage people to buy real foods once again. The state should also do more to educate people about food and help them make better choices; many UPF products ought to be draped in warning labels for a start. This is a game that is rigged against individuals — especially the poor.

We can rebuild a real whole food system, but first we need to admit there is a problem. There is something supremely messed up about a food system in which farmers, the producers of real whole foods, can barely make a living, while the companies who make fake food that makes us obese and sick get ever more powerful and wealthy.

Just about the only attempt the current government has made to engage with farmers was to appoint Baroness Batters, the former president of the National Farmers’ Union, to do a review of farm profitability. She handed her report in to the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) last month, and then… well, nothing. Last week, sources told The Times that the report had been “buried” by the Treasury until after the Budget. This is outrageous: surely the Treasury needs to know what the issues are to shape the Budget accordingly. Surely they should be working with farmers, not burying the facts.

The apparently “locked away” review is expected to call for an urgent reset of the relationship between government and farmers. My guess is that it highlights what a shitshow the government has created for farmers, leaving them unsupported, exploited and barely able to function to provide the food we need. My suspicion is that burying all this avoids further embarrassment to Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who seems to have chosen farmers as her sacrificial victim.

The scale of the problem facing farmers was revealed in a separate report published earlier this month by McCain Foods, which found that one third of British farmers made no profit in the past year. More than half have considered leaving farming in the past year because of its dire finances; 40% think they will be forced to leave the industry in the next decade. And 92% of farmers think the greatest threat to the long-term growth of British farming is the government.

You might think these awful statistics would trouble our political leaders or make them wonder whether they’d got farming policy right, but we’ve seen no sign of any soul-searching yet. We’re told in soundbites that the government cares about farming — but their policies suggest otherwise, making real life on farms often close to impossible. According to the McCain report, only 4% of British farmers believe that current government support and protection is adequate.

Someone’s narrative about British farming is wrong. And I’d suggest you make a judgment: either farmers are all crazy, or else something has gone catastrophically wrong with the relationship between British politics and farmers.

It is worth acknowledging at this point that no one thinks the problems with our food system began with the current Labour government. But all serious commentators agree that this government, and the last, have screwed up massively — and worse, are actively choosing to double down on their stupidity.

Let’s remind ourselves how we got into this mess. Before Brexit, Britain was part of an EU system— the Common Agricultural Policy, or CAP — which, though far from perfect, at least attempted to protect farmers. The system often ripped off farmers by asking them to sell products below the real cost of production but bailed them out each year with production subsidies. That meant my dad scraped a living working long hours on our little farm in Cumbria, with nonsensical subsidized accounts that barely got above break-even. Still, the subsidies kept his farm afloat. Under this system, the consumer benefited from plentiful supplies of cheap food, while British farmers were protected by the Italian and French farm lobby and by EU bureaucrats who understood the boring vagaries of food systems.

The British Left hated this system: in their view, farmers seemed kind of “rich” — so why would anyone give them money? — and they certainly didn’t vote Labour. The old-school Tory toffs supported the CAP because it kept their tenant farmers happy, but when the last of these “wets” were pushed out post-Brexit by Boris Johnson and replaced by free-market wankers, all sympathy for farmers died in British politics.

After Brexit, Britain scrapped the CAP system and decided, thanks to Michael Gove, an enthusiastic Defra reformer, to implement a system that delivered way more nature on farms. The new mantra was “public payments for public goods”. We were promised that farmers would receive the same amount of money as always, though rather than being subsidized to produce bacon, milk, or bread, they would be paid to deliver good environmental stewardship by planting trees or wildflower meadows, making soil healthy, or creating ponds. The farmer would become a service provider, committed to restoring nature; meanwhile, food production would be left to the free market.

Everyone back then, including Labour, seemed to agree that the environment was a big deal. The Left’s distaste for farmers was assuaged with promises of more butterflies and birds, and the Right’s by the fact farmers would no longer be paid a “subsidy” but instead would receive the market rate for public goods.

The new system sounded promising. Yet the Conservatives failed to pay for it properly, breaking their promise that every farmer could receive the same amount of money for nature restoration as they’d previously got for food production. (This is when things began to go very sour, because farmers took the government at its word, and then it failed them). It also took Defra ages to create the new system, and when it was just about functioning and starting to look, dare I say it, quite good, the Conservatives lost a general election and Labour came into power. Since then, the whole damn thing has gone into freefall.

More from this author

A food apocalypse is coming

By James Rebanks

The Treasury, under Reeves, then pleaded ignorance that any such “public payments for public goods” contract existed with British farmers. Labour didn’t even attempt to make the new environmental schemes available to all farmers, instead making them competitive — so many, perhaps most, farmers have not got any kind of new deal. The schemes that do exist are either paused due to over-subscription, or have already fallen way behind inflation, so the funding is in real terms a fraction of the pre-Brexit investment. The result is this: half the farmers in England have been stripped of their production subsidies and left to the mercy of the global markets; the other half are being paid by the government to take land out of food production for nature restoration. But it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone at the Treasury that this might make food scarcer or more expensive, or force farmers out of business.

Barely any British politicians, and apparently no one at the Treasury, understands the dire position British agriculture is now in. After all these years of government ineptitude, I have concluded that we are, as a society, agriculturally illiterate. People increasingly talk about farmers like they are some archaic vested interest group, like miners, whereas they actually feed millions of people every day. Our politics merely magnifies that illiteracy, creating rooms full of people at the Treasury who don’t even understand the basics making decisions with massive implications for our food system.

One person who clearly has no clue is Reeves, who last autumn delivered her coup de grâce: reforming inheritance tax so that farmers lost one of their remaining sops in a lifetime of being ripped off. In the past, farmland had been exempted from the tax, but from April next year, farmers will have to start paying. But farmland isn’t cash, nor does it generate much cash — so farms will inevitably have to sell land, making them less likely to survive in the future. To farmers, this doesn’t make any sense.

You can’t understand the inheritance tax angst in farming communities without understanding the context and history. The slightly crap pre-Brexit deal said to farmers like my dad: if you work hard to produce food for minimum wage, you can at least keep your farm, and hand it on to your kids. Reeves’s new deal means that farmers are going to be ripped off their whole lives, blamed for everything, and when they die their farms will incur a staggering death tax that might take the farmer’s loss-making, or already half-broke, descendants as many as 20 years to pay off.

If farmers were fairly treated and had a decent chance of profitability, then I, for one, think they could and should pay the same taxes as everyone else. But the fact is that they’ve been exploited for decades. And this is the last straw.

One response to all this, perhaps from the Left, might be: Who cares? These farmers are always whinging and are just another vested interest group that wants more handouts.

More from this author

We're running out of eggs

By James Rebanks

And yet if we abandon our farmers, everyone will ultimately suffer: you, me, the environment, and the poorest people in our society. Farmers are the basis of our food system; if they withdraw their labor and capital because they can’t afford to keep farming, then who will feed the nation? So even if you think you don’t like farmers, going after them is still terrible politics. We need them to do their jobs.

We’re already beginning to see the inevitable and widely predicted consequences of our nation’s agricultural policy. Inflation is currently exceeding government targets, causing the Treasury terrible problems. And one of the key drivers of this is food price inflation, running at just below 5%, way in excess of the overall government inflation target of 2%. Food prices have risen by around 37% in the last five years. And this is disproportionately hitting the poorest in our society, who spend a greater part of their weekly budget on food.

This inflation is partly due to what’s happening on our farms. Since it has become very difficult and expensive to produce certain farm products without subsidies or protection, some farmers are simply producing less. And so prices are going up. Cattle prices have almost doubled in value since 2020, as farmland has gone out of production. And the number of dairy farmers has dropped by 56% in the past 20 years — some experts estimate that one dairy farmer a day goes out of business.

Then there’s the question of food security. Get support for farmers wrong and you’re taking a gamble that there won’t be enough food to feed the nation. Currently, according to Professor Tim Lang, the UK’s leading expert on food security, Britain’s food system is over-reliant on foreign imports and highly vulnerable to shocks and crises, such as disease outbreaks, extreme weather, or geo-political instability. Already, repeated droughts are impacting crop yields in the south-eastern triangle of England, which produces massive amounts of our food.

At the rate we’re going, the situation will only worsen. Earlier this month, a report from the All-Party Group on Science and Technology, “Feeding Britain sustainably to 2050”, warned that if the UK continues to prioritize housing, Net Zero, tree planting, and nature restoration, it could lose around a quarter of its productive farmland by 2050. This would see domestic food production reduced by a third, while the population continues to grow, leaving the UK far more reliant on imports.

Free-market ideologues say we can just import more food if we need to, but we’re living in La La Land if we think that’s a good idea in today’s unstable world. The rest of the world is increasingly focused on feeding their own growing populations, and climate change is already threatening global food supply chains. Almería in Spain, which has long fed Britain, is already drying out. Meanwhile, once-reliable exporting nations are now erecting trade barriers because of Trump-like protectionism. As an island nation, which now stands outside the EU, the UK is particularly vulnerable.

Farmers understand this, but it appears the Labour government does not. Our politicians would be wise to learn the lesson of rural America. When the grown-up parties of government fail to care about, and act upon, the pain of rural communities, the political fall-out becomes toxic. Social media finds disillusioned people and stokes their anger and alienation. This is happening now in online farming forums where Right-wing memes and explanations for the assault on farmers are spreading like wildfire. Reform knows exactly how to exploit this political failure to their advantage.

To be honest, I’m not really surprised that this government isn’t great at food, farming and the environment. All governments have blind spots and make mistakes. I can even forgive them some bad decisions. The issue is that they have refused to listen as the problems become ever more serious. The Treasury in particular seems to stubbornly dig in behind terrible policies — keener to bad-mouth farmers than hear them out. And now, at a time when we need an expert’s insights and analysis to inform a Budget, the government has buried its own farming review. It is shameful. Publish the review right now. And act upon it.

My family has worked in farming for 600 years or more, since before Columbus “discovered” America. So imagine my reaction when I saw Donald Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, ranting on Fox News about European beef: “I mean, [the] European Union won’t take chicken from America. They won’t take lobsters from America. They hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak.”

Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade advisor (and allegedly the “guru” behind his trade wars), was also venting on TV about “non-tariff barriers”, such as food safety standards, which keep American food products out of Europe and the UK. Many common American agricultural practices, including washing raw chicken in chlorine, feeding growth hormones to cattle, or growing GM crops, are banned in Britain and the EU, making it difficult for these countries to import US produce. And the Americans aren’t happy about this.

With a UK-US trade deal expected any day now, British farmers are on tenterhooks. Navarro is suggesting that any trade deal would require the UK to accept America’s “chlorinated chicken” and beef produced with hormones. And Labour’s inner circle appears to be preparing the ground to sign: last week, Chancellor Rachel Reeves shockingly called a “Buy British” campaign “insular” and “narrow-minded”. Meanwhile, Business Minister Jonathan Reynolds has promised that Britain’s food safety standards will not be relaxed as part of a deal — even in return for a reduction in tariffs. But this is a problematic pledge because it isn’t our food safety standards that are the issue: this is about whether we enforce our standards on imported American food stuffs.

The trouble is that, if we allow American food into Britain that has been produced with banned pesticides, or in unhygienic factory farms, or from pigs in farrowing crates, then we have to let British farmers use those same methods to compete on price, or else we lose our farms because of the unfair competition. An unfavorable deal could see British farming become a “race to the bottom” to compete on price with the American Midwest.

That said, there’s no denying an American trade deal could cheer up our ailing economy. Trade between the UK and US is fairly well balanced and is worth about £315 billion, supporting 2.5 million jobs. And America is Britain’s single largest trading partner, albeit way smaller than the combined EU27 as a market.

But while I’ve read the economic textbooks, and I understand the theory behind free trade, I also know that the real world is rarely as simple as a textbook. There are many sensible, real-world reasons why Britain doesn’t have free trade in some vital products and services. If we want to protect domestic car or steel production, or the producers of military hardware for national defense, for instance, then we often quite rightly find ways to shield them from market forces. We don’t want to be dependent on foreign countries for goods that are vital to the national interest.

When it comes to British agriculture, there are equally good reasons to limit free trade — especially with America. For a cautionary tale, just look at Mexico. The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) was ostensibly a free-trade agreement, but its impact on Mexico has been devastating.

Over the past decade, Mexico has been working to reduce the use of genetically modified/biotech corn and glyphosate — the ingredient in Monsanto’s weed-killing product, Roundup. This was partly to protect public health, since thousands of lawsuits have been lodged against the makers of Roundup claiming it causes cancer. And it was partly to protect the environment. Mexico erected barriers to American GM/biotech crop imports, and began to regulate the use of glyphosate in its farming systems.

The companies affected, Bayer-Monsanto, and Mexico’s National Agricultural Council (CNA), filed in 2021 for an injunction in Mexican courts to stop the regulations. Then, in 2023, the US government escalated the situation by pressuring Mexico to drop the domestic regulations. By imposing domestic standards on American imports, the US argued, Mexico had formed a “barrier to trade” and therefore violated the free-trade deal. In short, the Americans have used the deal and trade legislation to strong-arm Mexico into diluting its agricultural standards.

And herein lies a warning to the UK. For Americans, “free trade” now means they have the right to sell us goods produced in ways we may deem unsafe, and in ways we may even have banned domestically, and if we try to resist, they will come after us, calling this “non-tariff cheating”. They could demand, in time, that we reshape our domestic laws and regulations on the environment and public health, or else allow them to flagrantly flout the same regulations.

Suggested reading

We're running out of eggs

By James Rebanks

There are, of course, a bunch of good folks saying that we have nothing to worry about, because “we don’t have to buy American chicken or beef in the supermarket”, and that this is all an issue of “consumer choice”. But you really shouldn’t believe this.

Free-market evangelists in the Trump administration and elsewhere believe that even “nutrition labeling” is an illegal “barrier to trade”. There is an ongoing dispute between America and the EU about this very issue. The product labels aren’t going to make it clear that you are eating American chlorinated chicken or hormone beef, or GM crops, or products grown with UK-banned pesticides, or dyed with UK-banned colorings that might make your kids hyper.

They don’t want you, the consumer, to be able to make that informed decision, just as they don’t want American consumers to know what they are eating. Informed consumer choice becomes effectively impossible — unless you have the time, money, and education to recognize and buy the good stuff. This line of argument also ignores the fact that lots of this produce will vanish into the food chain as ingredients.

Before we really get into it, though, it’s worth saying that most American food is fairly safe, and some American farmers (especially those behind regenerative agriculture efforts) are really good at what they do. But there are aspects of the mainstream American food system that are substantially different to our own, and those differences affect both food quality and safety.

Let’s start with the chickens. The issue isn’t the chlorine, but the fact that the chemical has to be used in the first place because American farms and food production facilities are bigger, faster, and therefore dirtier than those in Britain and the EU. That means more chickens squeezed in industrial-sized sheds, and faster factory-processing lines for killing and cutting up birds. The faster the factory processing line is, the more money the facility makes. Yet it also means the meat is more likely to carry disease. American chicken needs to be chlorine or acid-washed at the end of the production chain to kill the bacteria resulting from the process — otherwise that bacteria will go on to make humans sick.

And Americans do fall sick more often because of their government’s laxer food rules. According to the charity Sustain, more than 14% of Americans get sick at least once a year from food poisoning — that’s roughly 10 times the comparable figure for the US. The rates of food-borne illnesses resulting in death are also much higher in the US, where around 380 people die each year from foodborne salmonella. The Food Standards Agency has declared that it’s now safe to eat a soft-boiled egg in Britain (if it’s British Lion-marked), while the US Food and Drug Administration recommends hard-boiling eggs only in America due to salmonella fears. Why would we choose to put British children in greater danger of food poisoning by importing American produce?

More from this author

A food apocalypse is coming

By James Rebanks

Another vital issue is the five-fold greater usage of antibiotics in US agriculture. British farmers are banned from using antibiotics in feed as American farmers often do. Why? Because it is estimated that, by 2050, 10 million extra people will die annually from drug-resistant superbugs. It is feared that some of these superbugs will emerge from dirty, moist, and warm industrial farm sheds where antibiotics are being used to promote animal growth.

Most British people don’t want to eat worse quality food just to please the Americans. And yet the danger is that an American “free trade” deal would undermine Britain’s ability to set its own safe and sustainable domestic food standards, which take into account both public health and the environment. This would represent nothing less than a capitulation of our food sovereignty.

The irony is that, once upon a time, Brexiteers were agitated by the EU dictating trading terms to us — enforcing rules regarding the shape of bananas and so on. But what few seemed to understand was that American “free trade” policies work in a similar way, dictating how and what you can do domestically, both in terms of buying and selling, but also, curiously, how you do things in your own country. It should be clear to everyone that when the Americans talk about “free trade”, they mean that we will trade on their terms, with their standards as a guide.

If our government holds to our historic red lines, protecting Britain, then the Trump administration won’t sign the deal. If we do give up on our red lines, then we will have a trade deal but will have done irreversible damage to our country.

I love many things about America. I respect the best of what that country and its people can do. But they can go to hell if they want to exploit and bully us. Starmer should grow a pair, and hold firm to our red lines, and, if necessary, send the American negotiators packing. But I’ll wager he doesn’t do that. I reckon he’ll fold and sign the deal. There is no evidence so far that he understands or cares a hoot for British food, farming or the environment. I hope I’m wrong, but I think my farm, my beautiful cows, and this green and pleasant land are about to be sold down the river.

The price of eggs in the UK has risen almost 20% since the start of the year; in Morrisons, a six-pack rose from £1.90 to £2.25 in just over a month. This is bad news for British egg-lovers, who rely on them as a cheap source of protein and nutrition in an otherwise obesogenic food environment. Last year, the UK consumed about 13 billion eggs — that’s around 200 for each and every one of us. And the poorer you are, the more of your income is spent on groceries, and so the skyrocketing cost of eggs hits even harder.

It’s a relatively new problem. For decades, cheap groceries were taken for granted; eggs became cheaper and cheaper over the past century, until in 2020 they were a third of their 1920 price. Yet food prices are once again becoming a hot political issue, in both Britain and the United States. During the most recent US election, nine out of 10 voters polled said they were concerned about food inflation. JD Vance visited a supermarket and lamented that eggs were $4 per dozen because the Democrats couldn’t manage the economy. The store sign behind him actually priced the eggs at $2.99, but, as ever with populists, the facts didn’t matter much, because Vance was tapping into a real public concern — one that urban liberals tend to ignore because farming is outside their zone of interest.

President Trump promised voters he would bring food prices down. But the cost of eggs has risen sharply since then. An American friend of mine recently paid $9 a dozen in her local store — and, in California especially, that’s no longer unusual. Some American supermarkets, including Walmart, are now rationing the number of eggs a person can buy per day. And last week, America’s agricultural secretary, Brooke Rollins, told Americans that if they wanted a reliable supply of eggs, they should keep chickens in their backyards.

So what is going on with eggs? The short answer is the HPAI bird flu virus, which has wreaked chaos globally. If you’ve been to the seaside in the past year or two, you may have seen dead seabirds washing up and down on the tide or lying crumpled on the sand. The virus is ever-present in wild bird populations, and creates havoc when it infects domesticated poultry, as it increasingly does.

We all like the idea of hens running around in a yard or field for a few hours each day, but when this happens, they often come into contact with wild birds, or with their feces or carcasses, and catch the flu. Given the compact nature of industrial farming, the infection will then spread quickly among other hens. The solution up until now has been to slaughter the affected flocks: more than 160 million American hens have been taken out so far, and 47 million since the start of December. In the UK, 1.8 million farmed birds have been killed on 33 farms since December, including more than one million on one Shropshire farm. One reason why we’re seeing the cost of eggs rise is simply that fewer are being laid.

Yet avian flu is by no means the full story, because lots of other food items are also getting more expensive. The more complicated explanation is that the era of ever-cheaper food is over. We are reaching the limit of our ability to cheapen food staples.

All around the world, populations are growing and becoming more affluent, and when people get richer, they want more and better food. Demand is therefore rising, but as the old saying goes, “they aren’t making any more land”. And clearing more forest or wilderness for farming is deeply unfashionable for sensible environmental reasons. So supply is not magically rising as it once did.

The challenge for farmers, then, is to produce more food from the same amount of land. For the past century or more, we have done this over and over again, thanks to innovations such as the Haber-Bosch process, which takes nitrogen from the air and makes it into little white globules that are plant food. We bred faster growing pigs, hens that lay more eggs, milkier cows, beefier steers, heavier yielding crops, and developed remarkably productive industrialized systems. Farming in the UK is 30% more productive overall than in 1990.

More from this author

A food apocalypse is coming

By James Rebanks

But it’s not clear that we can continue on this path of optimization, as our methods in some farming sectors are swiftly becoming less effective. The Haber-Bosch process, for one thing, is a time-limited magic trick that is now wearing off, as the synthetic ammonia it produces, which is used to make industrial fertilizer, is degrading the soil. This makes growing grain less efficient, and therefore costlier. And when the price of chicken feed goes up, so does the price of eggs.

Not only are productivity gains much harder to come by now, but we actually have less land devoted to food production than in the past. And with this we must feed many millions more people. Today, we need land for heaps of different things, from building a million new homes in the UK, to solar farms to rewilding projects to producing biofuels. All this drives up buyer competition for land, raising its value, and indirectly increasing the cost of food.

As a result, Britain’s farmland is vanishing. The Council for the Protection of Rural England estimates that, since 2010, 14,500 hectares of farmland that could grow 250,000 tonnes of vegetables a year has been lost to development. Nearly 300,000 homes have been built on 8,000 acres of prime farmland. And the government is waging a culture war on “nimbies” and “blockers” who want to stop them.

Can Britain afford to make such a sacrifice? The Office of National Statistics estimates that the number of people in the UK will rise to 78 million by 2050, and so the demand for food will naturally soar. But how can we feed all of these people without protecting farmland? We certainly can’t rely on foreign imports — as the developing world grows more affluent, it is grabbing the food Britain would once have relied upon, originally from our empire, and later from our membership of the EU. The old liberal global order, which we depend upon for our global food supply, is falling apart, and Britain has isolated itself from all the major geopolitical trading blocks. Trump made matters worse last week when he announced that American farmers should start producing more food for the US market, rather than for export, ahead of looming tariffs in April.

The British egg crisis is therefore part of a much larger agricultural catastrophe. We discovered a way to produce the cheapest eggs in history, through giant industrial farms, but in doing so made our food supply highly vulnerable to disease. This leads to volatility in supply, and inflated prices when it goes wrong. And it’s all part of a global just-in-time, super-cheap food system that relies on massive farms and processing facilities that are just too big to fail.

When we destroyed the old system based on thousands of small farms and allowed a handful of corporations to manage whole sectors of farming, as we’ve done in the egg industry, we laid ourselves open to exploitation, to anti-competitive cartels and monopolies. Indeed, there is a growing suspicion in the US that by manipulating bottlenecks in the supply chain, such as the number of chicks produced for laying hen farms, some companies may be “price gouging” — a fancy word for manufacturing scarcity to drive up prices and profits.

More from this author

Labour's war on the countryside

By James Rebanks

It doesn’t help that the British government treats agriculture with contempt and pays little regard to the problem of food security. It signs trade deals that allow foreign producers with lower agricultural standards to out-compete British farmers on the supermarket shelves. And it has created a greater tax liability on land, hitting elderly farmers who have failed to hand the farm on. It’s no wonder the average farm now struggles to make enough to pay the farmer the national average wage.

Then there’s the question of subsidies. The last Tory government dismantled production subsidies, and Labour has failed to replace them equitably with a much talked about “green transition”. This has had serious consequences — especially for farms like ours, which used to operate on the principle that we were feeding the nation; even if we lost money on the farming, we were always bailed out at the end of the year by the support payment. But now that support has been taken away, we simply have to make a profit. Which is fine for us but has a massive implication for the food system. If a food product doesn’t pay now, then we either produce less of it or charge more for it. And that’s why there are far wilder swings in food pricing than in the past.

This brings us back to eggs again. Although eggs were not part of the last subsidy system, egg farmers benefited from the cheap grain it resulted in. Now, when the price of grain and thus chicken feed rises too high, egg farmers can simply pause their operations until the price drops again. This signals a dramatic break from the old subsidy days: today, when farmers aren’t making a profit, they’ll just stop farming — which spells disaster for Britain’s food security.

Suggested reading

Jeremy Clarkson: populist tribune

By Tom McTague

As it stands, the major British parties are failing to deal with food, farming, and land-based issues effectively. This is worsening an already difficult cost-of-living crisis. Inflation in the UK rose to 3% in January, and, according to the BBC, food price inflation is a key driver of that. Unless the Government can find the money to either subsidize inflated food prices or else put more money in people’s pockets, they’ll struggle to sell Net Zero, or many other expensive, progressive programs to the public. Rural America has already fled into the arms of the populists — and rural Britain may not be far behind.

This might, then, be a good moment for Britain to rethink its attitude to agriculture. We have to get real about the costs and risks of producing food. We also need to reward smaller farms, which tend to be more resilient and robust than industrial ones. If we had protected smaller farms in the past and paid a little more for their eggs, we would not be so dependent now upon industrial-scale operations that create vast price spikes when things go wrong. Cheapening food beyond a certain point is an illusion: at some point we’ll have to face up to the real cost of food, and that real cost is likely to rise.

The big question is how to ensure people can afford food at its true price — a problem solved in places like Norway by the redistribution of wealth. We currently rely on cheap food to mask the prevalence of poverty in Britain, but that trick relies on subsidized farming and technological breakthroughs that are now slowing. The thing to do now is to create far more jobs that pay decently, so that people can still afford their weekly supermarket shops.

For too long, we’ve acted like agriculture is not our problem: it’s a yokel issue, that’s nothing to do with us. But now we have no eggs for breakfast. We have neglected to think clearly about farming and food, and now it seems the chickens are coming home to roost — or not, because they are sick.

First up, Steve Reed, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, announced that his new “Nature Restoration Fund” would “speed up the building of new infrastructure and homes across the country” and support a third runway at Heathrow — the fund is part of a crazed plan to make 150 infrastructure decisions by the end of this Parliament, “while supporting nature recovery at scale”!

Environmentalists everywhere gasped at his audacity. This was Orwellian doublespeak of the most shameless kind. Building roads, houses and runways is literally the opposite of nature restoration. The point isn’t that we don’t need more infrastructure projects — we often do, but until now no one has claimed they are “green”, or that environmental funding should be used to speed them up.

This is the same Steve Reed who has failed to deliver thousands of farmers the “green transition” that they were promised, and allowed the Treasury to torpedo, or pause, several strands of environmental funding for farms. It seems that in our age of Austerity 2.0, the Government can’t foot the bill for any environmental programs it promised to pay for five years ago.

Oh, and that same week, Rachel Reeves claimed that “bats and newts” were holding up economic growth, and  we really ought to be less sensitive. And that aviation is now cleaner and greener, so we don’t need to worry about that anymore — seriously, Rachel? The Chancellor likes to say that she’s making necessary “ruthless decisions”. The question is whether she makes good ones. Her number one mission for this Government is “growth” — and clearly, this even applies to environmental policy. What could possibly go wrong?

Then Steve Reed popped back up, and told us we needed to have a “national conversation about land use”. Really, Steve? How do you think a national conversation is going to go when the giant polluters are rich and powerful with direct access to No. 10? How do you think Welsh or Cumbrian hill farmers are going to fare in that conversation? What we need instead is a conversation about how corrupted, confused and contradictory environmental policy has become, and how little trust any of us have in government now.

Up until now, we were assured we were “all in it together” when it came to fighting climate change and biodiversity loss in the UK. I might have to change my diet or type of car, my household heating system or how I manage my fields, but that was kind of OK, because everyone else was doing their bit too.

But recently, this solidarity has begun to fracture. The idea of reducing consumption isn’t going down very well with voters, to put it mildly. Donald Trump was barely in the White House for five minutes when he told Americans to ignore all the climate doom and gloom and embrace cheap energy. “Drill, Baby, Drill!” he bellowed.

A similar rebellion is taking place in the UK. Not long ago, almost everyone in British politics paid lip service to the idea that we really ought to address climate and biodiversity crises. Delivery was often slow, with ridiculously small budgets, but it at least looked like we were trying. But in their desperation for economic growth, the Left, as well the Right, is now ripping up previously sacrosanct environmental and political norms.

Yet should “growth” really be our only priority? The Chancellor needs to be careful because the grown-up green consensus is a fragile one. Solving big environmental problems is hard, and most of us don’t want to do it. So if we get the hint that we’re off the hook, then the project could fall apart pretty quickly.

As a farmer, I know how frustrating environmental policy can be. Ideally, farmers would like to dredge rivers, rip out hedges and trees in our fields, and use synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. All this would maximize productivity — and if “growth” was the sole purpose of our farms, we’d do all this and more. We would clear the last remaining forests and drain the last wetlands, and even reclaim the estuaries and marshes as we once did to feed Britain. But we know that doing this made our farmed landscapes into some of the most nature-depleted regions in the world. The awkward and frustrating truth is that growth isn’t the only metric that counts.

More from this author

A food apocalypse is coming

By James Rebanks

Yet the alternative — sustainable economic growth — is hard work and complicated. Not only do we have to think about boosting productivity, but we also need to consider the environmental costs. Only idiots get to “Drill, Baby, Drill!” or “Plow, Baby, Plow!” like we live in a world without consequences.

One way that economists have tried to square this circle is “carbon offsetting”. This is when individuals and companies invest in environmental projects elsewhere — often in developing countries — in order to balance out their own carbon footprint. They can then boast about being “carbon neutral”. In theory this system allows growth to happen, while also paying for the damage we do to nature. But it is a terribly flawed idea.

When we agree to the principle of offsetting, we accept that the cost of helping nature in one place is its destruction in another. That means a fossil fuel company can bribe a wildlife trust or NGO into greenwashing what they’re doing by offsetting their carbon credits. In this way, we are all made complicit in the systemic destruction of the natural world.

Offsetting creates vast flows of capital (as “carbon credits” can be traded), but it is inherently dishonest. It is a gold rush fueled by bullshit — it’s all about creating some numbers to put in a spreadsheet back at HQ so you can claim your airline, powerplant or supermarket is “carbon neutral”. Naturally, some good will be done with some of this offsetting money, and many environmentalists are doing their best. But in the end, it’s a smoke-and-mirrors game, which turns bad guys into heroes, and assuages the guilt and responsibility of the wealthy.

More from this author

What Oxford taught me about posh people

By James Rebanks

It’s above all a game that plays to the strengths of the rich and powerful. A new kind of feudalism is now emerging in the British countryside. Large landowners, who have always held their tenants and workers in contempt, can now get rid of them, let the land go, and claim vast sums of money for preserving nature and offsetting carbon emissions. You don’t need to be a qualified environmentalist to get your hands on this offset cash, just a plenty of acres, the gift-of-the-gab, some claims about “carbon sequestration” or “biodiversity gain” and a swanky website. These landowners have the scale required to play the game — and they’d far rather have a safari experience outside the back door than some grumpy tenant farmers.

What we’re seeing is a two-tier system of responsibility for the environment, with the powerful and wealthy given a free pass to pollute because they are the miraculous deliverers of “growth”. It has become a giant power play (which is about to get worse because of the vast energy needs of AI), in which the wealthy assuage their guilt by buying out everyone else — including farmers, who can’t possibly compete. Indeed, Britain’s landscapes are being rapidly bought up by wealthy landowners and giant corporations: more than 40% of land purchased last year was by non-farmers. And they seem to have our government in their pockets. They whisper about “growth” and needing deregulation and suddenly Labour becomes their pet. Meanwhile, the rest of us are bribed and cajoled into “offsetting” their mess.

Another problem is that offsetting is rarely a straight swap. A developer might bulldoze an ancient woodland, and pay for a new one to be planted elsewhere. But even if it’s twice the size, this low-quality replica won’t truly offset their damages. The ancient oak tree they felled to clear space for a new road would have taken centuries to grow, and it would have been part of an ancient ecosystem supporting hundreds of species of wild things. The new woodland they plant with plastic tree guards is an entirely false creation that will take decades, if not centuries to remotely resemble what they have destroyed. And given the logic of offsetting, someone else will in time destroy this new wood too. This cycle will repeat itself until nature is pushed to the lowest quality land and everywhere else is tarmac, housing and shopping centers.

More from this author

The farmers march on Westminster

By James Rebanks

The worst thing about offsetting, though, is that it stops us talking honestly about industries that do real damage — burning fossil fuels or using finite natural resources. It allows us to keep polluting under the illusion it’s all OK, and that the debt has been paid. Yet shifting emissions from one place to another, from a factory to a forest, won’t reduce the emissions. It just allows big business to keep on polluting.

The solution, of course, is for the state to pay for nature restoration, or mandate it through regulation, so we all pay the real price of pollution and nature destruction. But being broke is making our government desperate and weak. Rachel Reeves’s proposed Heathrow runway threatens to create so many emissions that all the offsetting we’ve done for years will be pointless.

I’ll go back to our hillside later today, to plant some more trees, out of sheer bloody stubbornness if nothing else. In a year or two this place will be different, an emerging wood pasture with lots of wildflowers. Productive, bio-diverse and beautiful, a once broken place helped to heal. From the crest I can see for miles out across Northern England — a bleak half-broken landscape that could be an inspired mix of nature restoration and thriving family farms. Such a landscape would be full of jobs and produce vital and valuable food.

We should invest in the work of restoring the countryside, not because it greenwashes some other ugly industrial thing elsewhere, but because it is a good investment itself. It would create something for us all. But, then, it seems that we’re not all in this together: some of us are being used, and it’s starting to feel like it is for nothing.

That’s where my interest in the show kicked in, because the future of our food system is something that I’m a little obsessed with. I am haunted by the memory of those empty supermarket shelves during the Covid pandemic, which didn’t quite lead to a food panic, but sent chills through anyone thinking about food security. We learned then that our just-in-time food system wasn’t very resilient and seemed vulnerable to collapse if given a major shock. (Spoiler Alert: Covid is nowhere near the grim end of the scale for disaster planning.)

I began asking questions about food security during Covid, and like a loose thread in a jumper, the more I pulled the more my already weak faith in the current food system began to fray. What I learnt is frankly a little scary. It turns out it isn’t zombies that we should be afraid of, but how poorly prepared we are for the future.

A lot of people assume that somewhere in Britain there are sheds full of food that we’d distribute in a disaster. Surely there is a grain or butter mountain somewhere? Surely the UK government has a plan for such a crisis?

Nope. No sheds. No stores. No mountains of food. No plan.

All politicians say that food security matters, but no one admits that basically we don’t have it. Britain probably has less than a week of food supplies. The only food in the UK is what’s on the shelves of our supermarkets now, and what’s in their lorries on the way to the shops. Oh, and whatever you have in the fridge, plus a few crops growing on UK farms or stored in barns, and whatever is edible and roaming around in fields. And perhaps you could hunt or forage if you have a gun or a trap or two.

If a major crisis hits, then, you better get to Asda quick before everyone else — or else pray that the trucks deliver more food to the store. And if that logistical system breaks down, let’s say during a major oil or fuel crisis, you are suddenly going to be paying a lot more attention to local food producers within walking distance of your house, and you are going to wish you had a garden or an allotment, or that your community had them.

In such a crisis, you are going to curse your little fridge-freezer because it doesn’t hold enough food, and you will suddenly wish you had a pantry like your grandma had, full of preserved foodstuffs, and a deep freezer. We used to have much more food storage in our homes and communities, but we outsourced that to the supermarket shelf from around the Eighties.

You might expect the government to bring you food in an emergency, but frankly, they haven’t got any — and Covid proved that the extent of their strategy is “leave it to Tesco”. But supermarkets helped to create this mess; they aren’t our saviours.

Nor can we rely on neighbouring countries to feed us. World leaders from Trump to Putin to Xi are busy securing their own food supplies and openly putting their own needs first. The liberal peaceful global order is dead. And Britain has worse trading relationships than ever. In 2016, we left the EU, a massive source of food stability. Before the EU, we had an empire feeding us, but that’s long gone — our former subjects haven’t forgotten that we abandoned trading with them fairly when we joined the EU.

Since then, Britain has grown addicted to just-in-time supermarket corporate structures. And this could be our downfall. This may be something no one wants to hear, but we need to hear it in order to make it better.

More from this author

The farmers march on Westminster

By James Rebanks

The answer is to be ready, with a more resilient and secure food system before something goes wrong. We need an inspired farming system that’s largely confined to our own island, and which we can rely upon in a crisis. There is no food security unless we can feed people locally in an emergency.

I spoke to Professor Tim Lang, a leading authority on food security and author of a forthcoming report for the National Preparedness Commission (NPC), about what the big “shocks” to our food supplies might be. Some are happening already, like climate change, and we have to adapt to be resilient to them. One in four UK homes is projected to flood by 2050. And our remaining fruit and vegetable production is concentrated in low plain places, like Lincolnshire, that are projected to flood with rising sea levels in the next century. According to Professor Lang, this means that we’ll have to move our horticulture “up the hill” in the years to come.

Climate change is also driving more extreme weather events globally that profoundly affect food supplies. This is already affecting crops in the fields and the availability of food staples. Twenty years ago, it would have been unthinkable that fruit and veg would be rationed in stores — but this has happened several times in the last few years. Whole areas overseas that feed us, like the greenhouses of Almeria in Spain, are becoming unviable as their water resources diminish. Production is moving further from home, often to Africa, increasing the risks.

Another potential shock is biodiversity loss, which can lead to ecosystem collapse that can wipe out crops from whole regions. The food industry is already worried about these risks. One 2024 report by the Institute of Grocery Distribution, “Resilience: A System Under Pressure”, highlights the risk inherent in our ageing farmer population. Labour is vital for production, and yet the average age of a UK farmer is 59 years old. The report also raises concerns that a botched roll-out of new farm support schemes might de-motivate farmers and discourage their investment in future production.

We can’t afford to ignore their warnings. The idea that we’d all be confined to our houses for months by a virus would have been considered science fiction prior to 2020, but now it’s a well understood scenario. Disaster planners have to model worse epidemics than Covid, and we need to be ready for them.

Perhaps the idea of being blockaded by submarines sounds a little unlikely, a strangely nostalgic fear left over from the Second World War. But war is far from over. There are three major conflicts affecting millions of people’s food supplies taking place right now.

The Israelis have used food supplies to try to bring their enemies to heel in Gaza, something that is illegal under international law. In Sudan, six million people are at risk of famine at present because of a civil war. And the Ukraine-Russia war has revolved heavily around food supplies — the Russians targeted Mariupol to gain control of Ukraine’s grain exports, and regularly target food markets to try to intimidate Ukrainians into ending their resistance. Britain is involved in the Ukraine conflict already, so it is not hard to imagine a scenario in which Russia sabotages Britain’s food system to punish us. Think less U-boats in the Atlantic, and more sabotage of computer software by bot-farms in Russia to collapse our logistics. A single electricity outage could crash our entire supermarket system overnight.

Suggested reading

Putin's plan to starve the world

By David Patrikarakos

The Ukraine war has taught us that our farms are often reliant upon hidden foreign inputs — synthetic fertilisers drive current crop yields, and imported feedstuffs prop up our milk, meat, and egg industries. The war doesn’t have to touch English soil for it to cut the yields of our fields by around 20-30%.

As we know, bad things never happen one at a time. Shocks can come from several directions at once and compound the damage of each other. Imagine a flooded city loses its electricity during a severe epidemic. Now imagine there is a war elsewhere in Europe that prevents food supplies coming to that city. Figuring out how we might find, move, cook and serve food for millions of people in such a scenario is a serious business.

There is an old saying that we are only three days away from anarchy, particularly with a food system breakdown. Yet Professor Lang is more optimistic. He says that what we often see in a crisis is not social collapse but instead people working together, finding ways to ration or share, displaying the best of human nature. But even with a lot of good will, people need a certain number of calories every day to stay alive.

It’s worth pointing out, as Professor Lang does, that access to nutritious food is not guaranteed in Britain even without a geopolitical crisis of the kind I am imagining. Millions of British people are suffering from food insecurity right now. In 2022-23, 11% of the UK population lived in a household experiencing food poverty — including 17% of all children. That same year, 2.3 million people lived in a household that used a food bank. So poor is the British diet that the average five-year-old is now shorter than they were 20 years ago.

Add to this the fact that many British people have very poor access to, or else cannot afford, nutritious foodstuffs. Our diet of processed foods, full of salt, fat and sugar, is making us sick. In his recent report “The False Economy of Big Food”, Professor Tim Jackson estimates that our failing food system costs us £268 billion a year.

We don’t need a meteor or a war or even zombies to screw up our food system. For millions of vulnerable people, it is already broken. And they will be the hardest hit by any future shocks.

There are many farmers who use the “food security” argument as a way to say that farming can’t change. Leave us alone or there will be less food — I get it, but it’s a bad argument. Due to the rise of supermarkets and industrial technologies, farming has become massively specialised and monocultural. What’s needed is a food system that’s far more diverse.

Suggested reading

Environmentalists have lost the plot

By Poppy Sowerby

We need lots more horticulture scattered all across the UK. We need orchards and urban farms. We need vast numbers of small and diverse food businesses to spread risks in the food system and avoid bottlenecks. And we need to support regenerative and nature-friendly farms that are less reliant upon imported inputs like synthetic fertilisers. Indeed, we need more farms not less, because giant simplified industrial farm systems are often the riskiest of all. Since they specialise in mass commodity production, they tend to grind to a halt when they can’t get rid of their pigs, chickens or milk because a processing plant stops working. They are also the most vulnerable to epidemics.

Furthermore, we need to create farms with closed nutrient cycles that utilise mixed livestock and cropping to restore soil and create resilience. We farmers can’t claim to be sustaining our food system’s future if we are degrading our soils — that strategy might produce cheap food right now, but only at the expense of our future. And no civilisation has ever survived that lets vital nutrients leak out of the food system. We need our waste to go back on our fields, rather than flushing it away.

Much of the farming we need, such as no-till organic horticulture, is human-intensive — it relies on human brains and skilled hands not magic bio-tech solutions. In order to make these changes, we’d need a whole new generation of brilliant farmers and some radical new thinking. Heaps of young people, including my daughter, want to farm, but the capital required to take on a giant industrial operation makes that a fantasy. We need starter farms, and opportunities for people from non-farming backgrounds to produce food and contribute.

If all this sounds fantastical and unlikely, just remember that our current food system is creating costs that are staggering. The status quo is not serving us. We can’t keep mindlessly copying a US food system that is fraught with costs and risks.

Change would require bold action and joined-up thinking across government departments. We seem to have lost faith in the government’s ability to solve problems. But remind yourself that we once rationed food to survive a wartime blockade. (Remarkably, the poorest 25% of the population were healthier under rationing than they had ever been before, with access to good food for the first time.) And remind yourself that we created the National Health Service. We can do hard things — and sometimes we have to.

Food system planning and delivery should be at the heart of progressive politics — a priority for investment, even in austerity. And it is an investment, not a subsidy. It will make us all healthier, happier, safer, and more affluent. It would benefit the poorest the most.

The current fight between the government and farmers about inheritance tax is staggeringly stupid. It is the wrong fight, with the wrong people, about the wrong issue, at the wrong time. It is terrible politics because the list of things we need from our farmers is long and growing. We need to help them, not undermine them, so they can invest to create the healthy real food production we need. After all, history is littered with civilisations that collapsed because they were unsustainable.

This whole shift requires a standard of political leadership that doesn’t exist at present. And leadership at the local level as much as in Westminster. We need to be more like the French and Italians, empowering local government and mayors to restrict the growth of supermarkets and fast-food outlets, and instead prioritising local and healthier real food growers and sellers.

The truth is we’ve gambled too long already on a risky and failing system. The world around us grows ever more hostile and we have chosen to be a stand-alone geopolitical unit. Whatever you think of how we got here, that’s our reality. We now need to do the work of building a strong and healthy food system for Britain.

He looked at me strangely and told me never to cost anything like a “businessman”, because it would only tell me that being a farmer was a terrible idea, and that we basically worked for nothing. His message was simple — if you want to make money, go do something else.

I’m pretty sure this mindset isn’t taught in business schools, but it is not uncommon on British farms. Being ripped off has become a way of life for farmers. Over the past century, the share of our household expenditure that we spend on food has dropped from about 30% to about 8%. But it gets worse — only about 15p in every pound we spend on food goes to the farmer, the rest is captured by supermarkets, processors and other middle-men. My dad, like many other farmers, worked for little more than minimum wage for much of his life, and with dreadful returns on his investment.

Yes, I’m sure you can probably find some super-wealthy farmers down south who don’t deserve your sympathy, and there are perhaps a heap of other folk who’ve retired to a house and a few fields in the sticks and call themselves “farmers” who probably don’t deserve tax breaks — but don’t mistake that for the reality for many people who work on the land. It takes many farmers half their working lives to sort out their parent’s succession, pay out their siblings, and get their business breaking even. Most farmers I know have second jobs to pay their bills. Some use food banks.

The Labour Government’s Budget has infuriated farmers, with its changes to inheritance tax and its withdrawal of much of the old payments systems faster than promised. Thousands are threatening to march on Westminster next week. But the truth is the system has been exploitative and broken for decades. Long before Rachel Reeves entered the Treasury, farmers have been pulling the short straw. And much of the pain inflicted was courtesy of the Tories. To really understand the heat of farmers’ anger today, you need to understand how we got here.

Britain’s social contract with farmers used to be simple, formed after the Second World War: grow a lot of cheap food so the country never runs out, and don’t trouble us too much about how you do it. Until Brexit, we farmers were part of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and received the same levels of support as farmers across Europe. The result was a period of remarkable productivity growth in farming and a prolonged period of cheap food for consumers.

More from this author

Can farmers trust Keir Starmer?

By James Rebanks

This period of prosperity would not last. From the Eighties, discontent began to swirl on both sides of the political spectrum. On the Right, the CAP was despised for subsidising food production rather than leaving it to market forces. Farmers had somehow escaped the economic reforms of the Eighties that shuttered the coal mines and other “anachronisms”. The CAP also created mad surpluses of certain produce by over-paying for them. On the Left, meanwhile, environmentalists began to point out the disastrous side effects of the CAP approach — that farmers were making fields monocultural and sterile for nature, and that we were exploiting the natural assets beneath our fields, namely the soil. By the 2000s, there was growing clamour for a more enlightened and “green” agricultural policy.

Europe was slow at delivering this and is still grappling with it, imperfectly. But in 2016, the UK voted to leave the EU and with it the CAP. Farmers were as bamboozled, deceived, confused, idealistic, and naïve as any other group of British people faced with that nonsensical binary choice.

After Brexit, the Government promised that the old level of CAP funding would be maintained at £2.4 billion for the foreseeable future. Yet the subsidy system would look different. The post-Brexit social contract was that each farm would be offered a transition from the old area-based system to the new Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes intent on delivering “public benefits for public goods”. If you were a progressive “green” farmer, you could go from the flawed old system to making money by providing things the country valued, such as hedgerows, trees, and wetlands.

Having been bashed my whole life for being a “subsidy junkie” farmer, I welcomed these changes. We would transition from a production-obsessed approach to a more balanced one, where we still produced food, but we did so in a far more enlightened way that also made space for nature. Suddenly, the state was paying you to have butterflies, birds and wildflowers on your land, alongside your usual private income from livestock sales.

We were first in line to apply for the new schemes, enthusiastic, like many other farmers. And everyone in British political life seemed to agree that this was what we wanted from our farmers. But the whole vision for this change rested on trust.

Trust that the winding down of the old scheme would coincide with the emergence of the new one.

Trust that progressive farmers could transition between the two so that their income need not vanish.

And trust that that the budget would remain something like it was in real terms, and ultimately rise to what it needed to be to transform rural Britain. At this point, it’s worth saying that, though the old CAP budget of £2.4 billion sounds like a lot, it is actually peanuts given the scale of the transformation needed — the entire budget for farming, food and nature for the UK is basically the same as the Manchester Health Trust.

We believed that the budget would not only remain the same in real terms, but that it would ultimately rise to meet our national objectives and legal commitments on addressing biodiversity loss and climate change. No one has even bothered to work this out yet, but estimates I’ve heard spread from about £4 billion to £10 billion per annum to transform British landscapes. This is not to “subsidise” farming as it would have done in the past, but to pay for the costs of nature restoration.

More from this author

What Oxford taught me about posh people

By James Rebanks

We believed that the Government would honour their promises and align their other policies, including, vitally, trade agreements. If you hold British farms to a higher environmental standard, you have to then protect them from carefree foreign competitors — otherwise it is all rank hypocrisy.

And above all we had faith that the Government would have our backs as we helped them achieve what would once have been considered the most un-farmer-like of feats — including restoring nature, mitigating climate change and alleviating downstream flooding.

Every single one of these promises has been broken in the past four years.

The old schemes have been wound down rapidly — and this month’s Budget sped up the process even further by capping the amount payable, so most farmers won’t get the money they were promised and budgeted for this year.

And worse, the new schemes have been slow to emerge, and due to shortages of staff and expertise at the government agencies, thousands of farmers have not been able to enter them. In the past financial year, the underspend on the new schemes was £358 million, and there is suspicion that that figure may double this year. This means that so far hundreds of farmers have presented their plans for nature restoration and been turned down or excluded from the new schemes. The economics of this farce were horrific, with the income for hill farmers dropping at least 38% because of this botched transition. We’re seeing a staggering squandering of good will and opportunities to restore nature around rural Britain.

The budget has remained at £2.4 billion, but because of inflation that is now worth about 40% less in real terms than when we left the EU. That’s a massive cut in funding in real terms. And the headline budget figure means nothing if farmers can’t actually access it because of the bottlenecks.

But British farmers have also been massively undermined by the Tories signing trade deals with Australia, Canada and other nations that gave away any semblance of protection for our farmers. A foreign farmer can now not only produce food cheaper because they work outside of UK regulations, but they can sell their products in British markets. You could scarcely devise a more unfair trading system. It favours the less sustainable farmer abroad over the more sustainable British farmer — and is leading to Britain importing ever more cheap food from abroad, which is often then processed and labelled as “British” in the supermarket. Our morals are applied at home, and yet are absolutely ignored when it comes to imports. We were promised by every prime minister post-Brexit that this wouldn’t happen — and yet it has.

You shouldn’t care about this because of the welfare of farmers, that would completely miss the point. It will be you and your family who go hungry if we hit a disaster, not the farmers. No, you should care because we have a highly risky just-in-time food system that isn’t fit for purpose in an increasingly fractured geopolitical world. Donald Trump is preaching “American First”, and he’s not alone in heading in that protectionist direction. The Chinese, Russians, the EU, and others are securing their food supplies for a future of scarcity — our dipshit policy is to “Leave it to Tesco”. That’s wildly unsafe in a world where global supplies can no longer be taken for granted.

Of course, few people believe we should have an entirely closed food system — it doesn’t make sense to grow bananas here. But there needs to be some kind of regulatory and support equity between British farmers and imported goods. British farmers now lag far behind their EU and American counterparts in terms of support and trade protections.

All the while, supermarkets shamelessly rip off British farmers and use imports of food we can easily produce in our own fields to manipulate prices. Farmers are almost entirely powerless in their dealings with them.

All this has been compounded by a raft of absurd offset schemes that allow other businesses to shift their carbon footprints on to land, inflating its value and outcompeting farmers. And everyone from house builders to pension funds has been hiding their money in land as a tax dodge — inflating the price of land way beyond its farming value, which is something the budget doesn’t address.

The reality of the “new deal for farmers” has been one damn rip-off after another. After 20 years of environmental rhetoric, and farmer bashing, Britain has failed to offer most farmers a shot at a decent future. Most have been left to return to a heavy production focus. And yet the environmentalists who led the attacks on the old production subsidies seem to have ghosted away, or lost interest in the fact that the brave new world hasn’t materialised, leaving their erstwhile farming allies deep in the shit.

The farmers who never believed a word of it, the hardcore sceptics who focused on productivity-growth, have been proven right, and the idealists like me have been left looking like naïve fools. And to make matters worse, Labour won’t even admit what they’ve destroyed. In the past few months, the very promises themselves have evaporated. It’s as if the last 20 years of talk about change never even happened. The bold environmental promises the Prime Minister made at COP29 are effectively nonsensical without a supported transformation of UK farming.

Labour’s Budget has created a firestorm about Agricultural Property Relief. The so-called “family farm tax” seems to have hit a nerve with people because it is deeply unfair and provides a useful stick for the right-wing press to beat them with.

And it is probably true that with some good succession planning and an expensive tax advisor, much financial pain can be avoided by most small farms. But that’s not really the point. The Budget doesn’t make sense as anything more than a short-sighted tax grab. Taxation should distinguish between working farmers and tax-dodging chancers. By all means go after the big estates. But going after working farms struggling to survive is cruel. Labour should distinguish between land being sold so their owners can make a profit, and land with an inflated value which often creates little or no wealth advantage to those holding it to farm. After all, land isn’t money.

The Budget fails to fit into any kind of coherent approach towards building a better countryside, viewing farmers purely as a source of taxation. Any kind of progressive vision for rural Britain needs farmers in their thousands to be agents of change — which is impossible when they’re under vast financial pressure. When the government cuts farmer support, it reduces the amount of “public goods” in the country — which crudely means less hedgerows, less wetlands, less birds, and less insects. It is profoundly self-defeating.

Many environmentalists have completely misjudged this issue. As less and less of taxpayer’s money goes to farmers, the Government has less and less leverage over how they run their businesses, and less right to ask anything of them beyond pursuing their own self-interest.

Someday, the Government will have to go back to farmers and rebuild that deal. And when that happens most of them are not going to play ball. Many will drift to the populist Right as they have done in America; they will say that if the progressives can’t deliver anything better, you may as well vote for the folks who will cut your taxes. You either believe politicians can come up with the funding for progressive change, and can honour their promises over time, or you don’t. And for most farmers the past few months have killed that belief — both Labour and the Conservatives carry their fair share of blame for that.

Our every field will now have to be worked harder and sweated as an asset. The progressive greener dream for UK farming has died.

***

James Rebanks’ new book The Place of Tides is published by Allen Lane.

During the election campaign, Keir Starmer promised there would be a “New Deal for Farming”, but, as with so much else about his campaign, he was fairly vague about the details. The Labour manifesto had 87 words about farming in it.

The vagueness kind of worked. But in truth, most of us would have voted for a lettuce rather than subject ourselves to five more years of Tory incompetence.

The post-Brexit Conservatives saw farming as something to be “disrupted”. Every time they were given the chance to choose to support farming, they chose the wrong way. In his book Politics on the Edge, Rory Stewart recalls his first meeting with his new boss Liz Truss — remember her? — when he was a junior minister at the Department for Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs. She told him to stop being “interesting”.

The Conservatives of the past idealised farming and rural places; the new ones wanted to unleash a culture war on it — taking on the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy and its legacy. The problem was that it was stupid politics. It set the Conservatives at odds with its core constituency — rural areas — turning them from protector to threat, from ally to enemy. They cared more about traders and bankers than farmers, and it was always felt as a betrayal. Now, huge swathes of rural England are no longer blue. In politics, as in farming, you reap what you sow.

So now we have a new government, what will its New Deal look like? Truthfully, there isn’t one yet.

The current, unwritten policy is that we can largely allow the market to sort out what happens on the land — a massive food and land-based economy that turns over way beyond £130 billion a year. Then we try to mend any damage that economy does by matching the agriculture budget we had when we left the EU — about £3.7 billion (some of which isn’t being spent on mending anything). It’s like trying to pull a half-mile-long super-tanker backwards with one of those daft paddle boards you can hire on beaches on holiday. The government intervention is massively overwhelmed by the huge commercial realities making things worse. We know the farming landscapes the free market gives you — and it is ugly.

If I had the ear of the new Defra team, I’d tell them to first work out what they want to see in the British countryside: what is the big progressive vision? Until you have that, there is only drift, contradictions and confusion.

You can throw money at farming and the environment and deliver not much; your policies need to be coherent and aligned. And yes, that’s a massive thing to wrap your head around, but that vision will affect everything about how we live.

Do we want our landscapes to be the product of global industrial systems — sterile, monocultural, ugly and poisoned — or do we want something different? I’m convinced that the vast majority of British people want something different — and that this crosses political tribes and demographics. Most of us want a beautiful countryside that feeds us and is full of nature and beauty.

We need a staggering amount of food to feed our growing population, and we only produce about half of what we eat now. We need amazing farmers, loads of them, because we live in a volatile world. Do you trust Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, the Chinese or the EU to feed us in an emergency? I don’t.

Every other nation is securing their future food supplies, making sure that in a future world of scarcity, they’ll have what they need. In Britain, much of our future food is going to have to be grown from our own land. Masses more food needs to come from horticulture and orchards, so we produce a whole healthy diet of real foods. The just-in-time globally distributed food systems we have come to rely on are massively risky. We need a food system that is robust enough to cope with worse global disasters than Covid, when our shelves were empty at times.

That means you need some basic food production within walking distance of where you live — wherever you live. Local food systems need to be developed, protected, supported, nudged to change and regulated to create a different outcome from, say, the American Midwest. You can’t just “leave it to Tesco”, the NFU or single-issue campaigning groups. And you then have to help the poorest people in our society to access and afford nutritious food, as they do in civilised countries. This should be a basic human right in modern Britain; no one need go hungry. And then there is the powerful link between our health and what we spend on the NHS. A healthy food system would massively reduce the cost of the NHS.

Suggested reading

Britain's farmers need to revolt

By Ben Cobley

The world will be saved, or destroyed, by what we consume — so a major part of the battle is what appears on our supermarket shelves, and what doesn’t. But the government can’t put all this on the “consumer”. Contrary to the mantra, the consumer isn’t always right. Processed foods are designed to make us crave their sugars and fats — to make us zombies.

And the consumer, more often than not, is still a mum, and she’s juggling her career and parenting, so she’s knackered and feeling broke, and she’s often distracted by kids hanging from her arm. That consumer doesn’t have the time, food knowledge or money to make perfect food and environmental choices. People need government, retailers, farmers and environmentalists to work together and do a heap of environmental and healthy diet thinking, and legislating, for them.

We need tougher regulation to ensure higher environmental and welfare standards. And we need to enforce fair dealing between supermarkets and farmers. That relationship often seems to be bullying and exploitative. A powerful Groceries Code Adjudicator is needed — one our over-powerful supermarkets are scared of. We need to ban “loss leaders”, where the supermarket gives away the farmer’s product, inflicting the loss on them. And we need to end the deeply misleading labels often found in British supermarkets, usually in the form of British flags above shelves of imported products. Does the Red Tractor logo even mean anything, anymore?

Our island is crowded and imperfect and we need lots of different things from land, ranging from dinner to renewable energy, carbon capture, commercial forestry, and healthy populations of insects and birds. Our landscapes are going to have to become much better at delivering multiple outcomes. Having a national “land use framework”, a plan for how we fit our disparate needs into our landmass, would be a good start. Navigating these choices is the work of grown-ups who know their stuff and who can find compromises.

The worrying news is that the messaging from the new government is that there will be “no significant change from current policies” in Defra. It is part of the “don’t scare the horses” strategy that won the election. But that isn’t a position you can hold for more than a few weeks. We’ve been drifting too long already; we need this government to be brave and bold.

The truth is you have to grapple with and manipulate things across the whole rural economy if you want our landscapes to be more progressive. Either you make this a priority and work across departments to get things done or you have to spend massively more on the farming and environment budget to mend the damage, probably both.

More from this author

What Oxford taught me about posh people

By James Rebanks

One of the key jobs is to grow the emerging Environmental Land Management (ELM) system for supporting farmers to deliver more nature. In England, we no longer have agricultural “subsidies” (unlike most of our commercial rivals and other devolved nations within the UK whom we compete with). The government doesn’t pay farmers to keep sheep or cows — they pay for environmental outcomes: buying woodland, wildflower meadows, or the flooding of fields by the hectare. If we want more nature, we have to buy it through this system. You now get exactly as much, or as little, as you pay for. But the budget was set at the moment we left the EU, years ago, and through inflation is declining rapidly in real terms. We are going backwards. So, there will be no “nature recovery” until this government commits to spending more.

A simple first step, that would cost nothing, would be publishing the latest numbers for the ELMs scheme. We simply don’t know if the post-Brexit agri-environmental schemes have the farmer take-up and reach to create the change that’s needed. Let the light into Defra and let the numbers out. Every farmer who can’t access such a scheme is an opportunity lost for change to more sustainable or regenerative practices.

Defra ministers need to get down to the Treasury and win the arguments about where money is needed and why. The NFU estimates that raising the agriculture budget from about £3.7 billion to £5.5 billion could bring about the transformation we need to see, and, though I might spend the money differently from them, it is probably not a bad estimate of what’s needed: £2 billion of new money. Raise that, when possible, to £4 billion in new money and you could radically transform our food system and our landscapes. For context, that’s how much was spent on unused PPE in the first year of the pandemic.

And, please Defra, avoid the same mistakes many previous governments have made. No new websites. No new schemes. No new abbreviations. No lengthy “consultations”.

The basic infrastructure for what is needed exists already. The knowledge for making the countryside better already exists. So focus on the resources and the delivery process. Make sure the existing schemes are open to as many farmers as possible, and ensure there are skilled staff at Natural England to process farmer’s applications: progress can die in those bottlenecks, as I suspect Liz Truss and others long ago realised.

We also need strict planning and emissions laws that make it impossible to create monster chicken, pig or dairy farms. And yes, when we stop our farmers doing that, the quid pro quo is we can’t then allow them to be displaced on the shelf by less ethical imports. When we do better than the global race to the bottom, we have to support the more ethical system we’ve created with our trade policies, something every prime minister says they’ll do then renege on.

On top of this, we must stop land being a tax dodge for the super wealthy. Nature-friendly small farms need support to continue, but the wealthy descendants of Norman warlords from 1,000 years ago don’t. Cap any farming support payments for vast estates, wealthy NGOs and pension funds. And while we are at it, land reform would be great in England — with a community right-to-buy of the biggest estates. It may sound like I’ve gone fully communist but fuck it… Imagine communities up and down Britain having their own food systems: their own orchards, their own horticulture, their own regenerative herds of cattle and sheep, their own eggs. Imagine how healthy, robust and resilient such communities could be. Imagine how green and pleasant that England could be.

We all really need that “New Deal” for farmers. I just hope that Keir Starmer has worked out what that means, and how bold he now needs to be.

I’m no genius, but I do know something about the social dynamics in that scene, because I kind of lived it.

All my friends got labouring jobs at the ages of fifteen or sixteen. To us, students were the middle-class kids who didn’t work, then left to go to “uni.” They never really came back, or if they did, they returned just to boss us around. Our home, for them, was something shitty to escape from. In their world, everyone babbled endlessly as if everything they had to say was fascinating. In our world, if you spoke self-importantly, people told you to shut the fuck up. They thought nothing of us; we thought nothing of them.

My experience of secondary education wasn’t good. I sat for five years in a crumbling comprehensive with thirty other bored working-class kids. There were fights in the corridors, bullying, shoplifting down the town at break times. We threw things at teachers, dragged our feet and our bags between lessons, and resisted every well-meant attempt to change us. Often disillusioned and half-broken teachers did their best to hold it all together. I hated it. I left as soon as I could with nothing to show for it.

My education might have ended there, but a decade later, I was talked into going back to school by my girlfriend. I got my A Levels by taking night classes at an adult education centre. A teacher there suggested I apply for university. I decided to give it a go. I didn’t tell my friends.

I was building a dry-stone-wall by a roadside, mulling over which through-stone fitted best, when the postman stopped to hand me a letter. He was a lad I’d been to school with. I opened it while I was chatting to him, and he seemed baffled when I told him the letter said I’d got into Oxford University. “But you’re thick like me,” he said.

After he’d driven away with a friendly wave, I thought, “How will I tell everyone?” Was I about to become one of the people I’d grown up hating? In fact, my people were proud of me and cheered me off to war against the posh people (they’d seen Good Will Hunting too).

I went for two main reasons, and neither of them were very nice. I went because our farm was struggling and had become very claustrophobic and small, way too small for me and my dad, and because I needed a new hustle: everyone I knew who had money seemed to have gone to university. But I loved books, too, and liked the idea that you could study just one subject, and skip the rest, which was handy as I was useless at most of the subjects. But it was terrifying. I didn’t want to leave the place and the people I was from, or give up being who I was. I wanted to come back afterwards, but had no plan for how that might work.

Suggested article

Confessions of a student Marxist

By Tobias Phibbs

Going to an elite university exposed me to the people that made me most nervous: the well-spoken, (supposedly) clever people. My first instinct was to flee from this strange new world with its archaic traditions, funny language and weird social habits. But I was too proud to go home defeated, so I decided to fight instead. It didn’t take long for me to realise that the posh kids were all leather shoes, woollen jackets, small-talk and bullshit. I soon shrugged off the idea that there were some mystical clever people somewhere that were better than me: I’d now met them, come up against them one on one, and they were often bang average. I could hold my own on anything substantive. I’d grown up among straight-talking tough people who loved to argue in smoky pubs, so Oxford tutorials felt strangely familiar.

If I’d been confined to a plastic chair, and told to sit in silence and listen for an hour to someone who wasn’t very interesting talk about a subject I hadn’t chosen to be interested in, I suspect I’d have messed about and misbehaved, just as I did as a teenager. But Oxford wasn’t like that. The teaching was personalised, flexible and interactive. That kind of system keeps people like me in the room, fired up and engaged. Kids like me, who don’t flourish in school, can benefit from such attention, and focus, and belief. A good society would strive to give it to them.

More from this author

How to save British farming (and the countryside)

By James Rebanks

But posh kids still dominate these institutions. I learned, when I was there, that their trick was not any kind of genuine superiority but pure conditioning. Their schools and families had taught them that university was as much a social rite of passage as an opportunity to learn. They aimed high, in terms of grades — and to be fair, often worked very hard to pull it off. I was from people with lots of excuses for not doing things out of the ordinary; posh kids strode into their extraordinary future with their heads held high. No one I knew had that kind of polish and swagger, but I soon realised you could fake it. I looked at them and thought: if you fuckers can do remarkable things, then why can’t I?

It was liberating to find that I was clever enough, if I worked hard. And I knew how to work hard — for hours, days, weeks and years. OK, my people didn’t achieve highly in education or the professional white-collar world, but we were proud farmers with a culture of striving. I simply switched that mentality and applied it to education — something I hadn’t realised was possible at school. I knew the posh kids couldn’t outwork me. And the fact that I’d failed a lot was a strength, faced with their easy but brittle confidence. I knew how to get back up off the floor. People from more disadvantaged backgrounds than mine often lack this self-belief. But what if they were surrounded by people and institutions expecting and helping them to excel, as the posh kids were?

So much of this is about self-fulfilling prophecies. For years university worked because we believed it worked. It turned out “clever” people for “clever” jobs with good salaries, and sent the rest down the mine, to the factory or the farm. No one asked whether these students were really the most intelligent people. The system just confirmed the advantages of birth and background. My odd, and entirely untypical, journey exposed me to the extremes of the British education system. It has left me with complicated feelings about what universities can and can’t do.

A lot of people treat you different when they think you are an Oxford graduate than when they think you are a farm labourer. They talk to you differently. They talk to you more. They invite you to their house and try to make friends with you. They talk about books. Some of this is perhaps based on not unreasonable assumptions. Some of it is just lazy snobbery. I knew people that would talk down to me or my friends because they thought we weren’t very bright or worth very much. With those people I’d shamelessly mention having been to Oxford to knock them back a bit. It was like sprinkling fairy dust. They’d shrink back as if I’d said the password — or worse, start fawning, when five minutes earlier they’d thought I was northern, common, and knew nowt. Snobs and the powerful fetishise ‘academic’ credentials. I didn’t even pick my degree up, but it didn’t matter. Once you are in the club the detail isn’t important. You just have to look at our leading politicians. Boris Johnson would be stacking shelves in Aldi or working down the chippie if he’d been born in Hartlepool.

Suggested reading

Why universities had to be challenged

By David Goodhart

My story is sometimes seen as a rags-to-riches tale. But I wasn’t exceptional; I was lucky. The point of this story is that a society that is blind to the potential of so many of its young people, is a wasteful, unfair and ineffective society.  I look at bookshop shelves and wonder where half the stories are. Where’s the book by the girl that works in the laundrette, the man who serves you in McDonalds, the Romanian woman who cleans your hotel room, by the lads that work on the railways or the building site? We don’t care about these people enough because they don’t get heard, and they don’t get heard because we build a success machine that they don’t want to be part of, or can’t access, or use, or afford. Instead of a fair system, the machine churns out entitled mediocrities, born to be heard, born to rule.

And though universities are trying hard to become more “accessible”, there is only so much they can do. Perhaps it’s too late by the time the kids are eighteen. And if working class kids don’t apply, what can an admissions system do?

Around this time eighteen ago, I was sitting down to take my final exams. I did well. I could probably have stayed and become an academic, but I was drawn home to my own landscape and work — to the place and people that made me. Oxford didn’t make me, as a person, or a writer, but I’ve returned there over the years. The people that once taught me seem sad. They say it has gotten worse: the posh kids arrive, use it, then leave to work in the City.

And perhaps all the debt this training requires means that the kids are right to be mercenary about it all. Work hard, get the grades, move to London, do the job, get promoted, earn more, pay it back. Love of subject, creativity, taking risks and experimenting: these things feel marginal. I can see why people are sceptical about universities, and angry at the elite ones. They are often now little more than training camps for the stormtroopers of capitalism. I may have been lucky to go when I did.

This piece was first published on May 31, 2021

Where are our superheroes? You and I don’t make laws or trade policies or regulate the extraction of fossil fuels, or set the rules on engines or flights, or whether soy or palm oil can be shipped to the UK from destroyed rainforests. It takes gatherings like COP26 to make the big changes, gatherings where our brightest and best (hopefully) are sent to negotiate targets or binding commitments to minimise fossil fuel usage or stop trashing ecosystems.

We are sending Boris Johnson to represent us in this vital juncture in human history. It’s like being in grave danger and needing Spiderman to rescue you, and Mr Bean turning up. You take one look, and know you are screwed.

It was when Boris started babbling on about “Build Back Beaver” at the Conservative Party Conference that my usually optimistic soul withered and died. There are a great many reasons for getting more nature back in the British countryside and being serious about climate change. But when politicians start using ‘rewilding’ as a Right-wing trope to mask policies that are actually making the countryside worse, then we are all in big trouble.

Our food chains are collapsing because of the mismanagement of Covid and labour shortages caused by Brexit. No problem, Build Back Beaver. 120,000 pigs to be culled and incinerated because of government mismanagement. No problem, Build Back Beaver. I have no issue with Beavers. I’m merely lamenting their being used by fuckwits.

More from this author

Britain betrays its farmers again

By James Rebanks

Climate change is pretty simple. Since the industrial revolution we have released vast quantities of trapped CO2 through the burning of fossil fuels. Agriculture is complicit in the problem, but if you think my cows burps or farts are a major cause of climate change you’ve lost all sense of proportion. Our farm has been carbon audited: it turns out that we sequester far more carbon than we release, and they measured everything down to the food I buy for the sheepdogs. Since then, we have planted close to 20,000 saplings and radically improved our soil carbon levels in our pastures.

Our farm isn’t typical, or perfect, but it shows what can be done. UK agriculture has significant problems. But 90% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions are not agricultural: 27% are estimated to be from the transport sector, 21% from energy supply, 17% from business, 15% from the residential sector and 10% from agriculture. So if COP26 overly focuses on meat-bashing, and fake food, then you should smell a rat.

Even when we look closely at agriculture in the UK it turns out that about 60% of the problem is associated with growing crops. This won’t surprise anyone who watched Clarkson’s Farm. In some plant crop systems, the ratio of fossil fuels used in a fertiliser to the amount of food energy created is sometimes as disastrous as 10:1.

The other 40% of agricultural emissions are associated with livestock — largely thanks to the massive numbers of intensively indoor-raised livestock eating human foodstuffs such as grain or corn. But if cattle graze on green (and permanently unploughed) pastures, with a healthy number of trees and hedgerows in the mix, and if those pastures are rested for long periods so plants in the soil optimise the downward flow of carbon through their roots, and (crucially) they aren’t fed grain, then it is entirely possible for the farms to sequester more carbon than they release. Such farming may result in fewer cows, and more expensive meat, but it can be done.

If we really want to solve the problems of British food and farming then we have to get real and engage with the issues properly. But agricultural illiteracy seems to be the norm among our political class. Some of them think that you can copy the American agricultural and food model and provide token bits of wilderness and wildlife around the edges, and all will be fine.

More from this author

What Oxford taught me about posh people

By James Rebanks

What we actually need is thoughtful reform of our whole model of food production so farming is more mixed (including livestock and cover crops), more rotational, and with landscape design which is sensitive to the habitats and processes that British flora and fauna need. We need to gradually regulate out of existence some of the worst fossil-fuel-reliant forms of farming and raise the cost of fossil fuels in agriculture. We need to grapple with the power of the cartel of supermarkets. We need to rebuild local food systems, such as local abattoirs and food markets.

There is no such thing as an ideal global diet, Britain has a temperate climate and is brilliant at growing grass and grazing livestock. We can also change our diets to eat more British fruit and vegetables from local small-scale horticulture, as this has a small land-use and is super productive. But when we do these tricky but essential things, we then need to protect a more progressive British system from being undercut by more ecologically destructive systems overseas.

Keeping the ecological footprint of our food as British as possible is almost certainly a good idea. It is not a choice between farming or nature, but how we marry the two. To do that we need brilliant thoughtful farmers and inspired local food systems. No one at COP26 knows anything about all this, so don’t be surprised if their solutions are wrong. Sustainable farming can play a massive role in the solutions, but isn’t even on the COP26 agenda.

This summer, Matterdale, where we farm, looked surprisingly like Tuscany. Brown fields under a burning sun. Sheep and cattle panting beneath our old oak trees, flicking their ears to clear the flies. For a month or so we found we couldn’t work through the heat of the day; our sheepdogs and sheep were so hot they wouldn’t move, so we jumped in the lake instead or had forty winks in the shade. We worked earlier, gathering the fell at 6am, and later to get the work done. Heat sounds romantic in a cold wet northern place, but if the future is hotter and drier then our farming will need to change. We have had fairly regular spells of drought in recent years and have built twenty ponds around the farm, so we always have water where we need it.

We have already experienced record-breaking rainfall events. The beautiful 18^th century bridge that crumbled and was swept away from Pooley Bridge in 2015 was a very visible sign that we are already subject to pressures that our infrastructure can’t cope with. Our landscapes need to hold and store vastly more water in wetlands and ponds (and probably man-made infrastructures) to slow the flow from causing horrific damage downstream. Perhaps the best way to store lots of this water is in our agricultural soils, simply by making those soils healthy and aerated through better soil management.

More from this author

How to save British farming (and the countryside)

By James Rebanks

The politicians and activists at COP26 haven’t a clue about this. So they latch instead on to batshit dietary choices and technological solutions such as carbon capture and synthetic farm-free food. They like solutions that can be delivered by people like them, from the top down, imposed through their own lofty power and influence. Bill Gates will fix it, or Monsanto, or Prince William or David Attenborough. But the real world doesn’t really work like that; the people at ground level aren’t interested in being passive victims of a massive corporate power grab of their land and their food supply.

We need to believe in farmers more, to help them to provide the complex mix of things we really need. The bad news is that the great and the good who attend events like COP26 seem almost completely disinterested in bottom-up changes, lost in a world of virtuous slogans and simplistic ideas. Or, worse, believe in solutions that are already alienating rural and farming people and creating a culture war.

Environmentalism has gone mainstream. That ought to be good news. But in reality, it is being mugged, used, abused and exploited wherever you look. The sad thing is that we have never needed good leadership so badly — yet all we get is a sinister clown blurting out ‘Bring Back Beaver’.

I am not starry-eyed about rural Britain or the state of farming. My last book, English Pastoral, was about the mess we’re in and why. We seem unable to understand — or care enough about — creating food systems that reconcile farming with nature. There is, whether we want to hear it or not, a collapse in farmland biodiversity. Since more than 70% of Britain is farmed, that collapse is devastating. And yes, a lot of this happened under the EU’s frequently barmy Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

We got into our current mess by copying the intensive farming methods of other countries after WWII: hyper-specialisation; mono-cultures; ending mixed rotational farming; making fields ever bigger; using artificial nutrients, herbicides and insecticides; over-ploughing; and separating animal livestock into intensive systems that are grain or soy-based — all propped up with an armoury of medicines, wormers and insecticides.

We took some of the edges off these policies by being in the EU, which regulated and constrained our agriculture (it was quick to ban antibiotics as growth promoters, for example — something that’s still legal in the US). For better or worse, we now have farming standards and sensibilities aligned with the EU.

Post-Brexit, we had a choice. Would we ask British farmers to compete with the rest of the world on equal terms — or not? Competing on equal terms under free trade would mean we’d have to follow the methods of other countries — probably of the world’s most intensive farming landscapes.

More from this author

Brexit is a betrayal of Britain's farmers

By James Rebanks

But we wanted something better on our islands. We were told that Brexit could be “green”, with farmers protected and rewarded for working with nature, not against it. We were told repeatedly by the Government that it wouldn’t sign trade deals that would allow imports of food produced in systems with lower standards. We were told that allowing them was unfair and would undermine efforts here to do better. Our farmers, we were told, would be asked to do exceptional things — and supported, but not through the blunt EU tool of propping up farmer incomes.

Many farmers were up for that. I was one of them. On our farm in the Lake District, we’re planting 25,000 trees, restoring three miles of hedgerow, restoring our old wildflower hay meadows, re-wiggling rivers and creating wetlands.

It is possible to find sensitive ways to produce great food, while helping repair nature in the British landscape. But when we signed the trade deal with Australia, we killed this idea stone dead. Now, we are asking British farmers to compete with Australian farmers on equal terms of free trade — regardless of the impact that competition might have. Regardless of their production methods and systems.

Welfare and environmental standards are completely different in Australia. According to the RSPCA, Australian farmers are legally allowed to keep hens in battery cages and sows in stalls. They can feed hormones to and hot-brand their cattle and take the skin off sheep in a practice called “mulesing” (perhaps don’t Google it). Of course, Australians can make their own rules and live by them, and you can make your own mind up about each of these practices. Not all Australian farms use them, but that’s not the point. The point is that all of these things are legal in Australia and banned in Britain.

Suggested reading

The slow death of French cheese

By John Lichfield

The problem is not that Australian farmers are terrible or have an awful product. I’ve been on many Australian farms. They are fine people, and some are exceptional farmers (I have learnt a lot from them). They operate in an entirely different ecological and economic context, and the British people have a different sensibility about key issues. There is no credible defence for allowing foreign farmers to import their produce into our country, when they can undercut us by farming beneath standards we insist on here. Especially if this fact is then hidden from shoppers by vague labelling, or hidden in processed or cooked foods.

No one wants our farmers to achieve the scale of Australian sheep farms. The British landscape can’t scale up enough to compete, without grave damage to its remaining biodiversity. Ideally, we need a landscape of small fields with hedges, wildflowers, grasses, scrub and trees — which allow our native flora and fauna to thrive. There is no doubt that we can feed ourselves well from better farming, if we get serious about it and support it.

But this week British farmers realised that, for all the “green” talk, we are now being asked to do more (not less) of the things that got us into our current mess. Get big. Get efficient. Or get out.

Suggested reading

Tories have to choose between beef and liberty

By Danny Kruger

There is, theoretically, an emerging system (called “Environmental Land Management Schemes” or ELMS) that might reward farmers for promoting public goods — nature — alongside their farming. But in practice it is nowhere to be seen, probably highly bureaucratic, and almost certainly lowers the income of farmers relative to the old CAP system — therefore increasing the pressures to exploit land more, not less.

The problem is ideological — it is all based on a misunderstanding that we can be as “efficient” as North America on our productive land and have nature round the edges. We can’t. We actually need patchwork mixed farming landscapes that replicate our native ecosystems. Farming intensification robs us of that. This isn’t debatable, it is the ecological truth.

In the wake of the Australian free trade agreement, we will be told the usual nonsense about cheapening food for the poorest in our society. (The people who say this don’t care two hoots about poverty in any other context.) In reality, cheapening food is more often a mask for the horrific cheapening of labour, and a sop for people caught on the wrong end of systemic inequalities. Let the plebs eat KFC — but for God’s sake don’t raise taxes and redistribute wealth.

This should be seen for what it is. A displacement. A scam. A government that won’t put its own land and its people first isn’t worthy of the name. It is little more than a self-serving ideological cult.

Farmers are drawing a simple and obvious conclusion: intensify or die. And this is a disaster for the British landscape: a total, unmitigated disaster that will unfold over the years.

Perhaps worst of all, for me, is that this deal has killed support among farmers for higher welfare and ecological standards and regulation. I can’t win that argument with my farming friends now — not now they’re unprotected from being undercut by imports. They say, “We are competing with lower standards … We don’t run fucking butterfly farms”. Sadly, they have to do what they have to do, and we will all be the poorer for it.

I’m no genius, but I do know something about the social dynamics in that scene, because I kind of lived it.

All my friends got labouring jobs at the ages of fifteen or sixteen. To us, students were the middle-class kids who didn’t work, then left to go to “uni.” They never really came back, or if they did, they returned just to boss us around. Our home, for them, was something shitty to escape from. In their world, everyone babbled endlessly as if everything they had to say was fascinating. In our world, if you spoke self-importantly, people told you to shut the fuck up. They thought nothing of us; we thought nothing of them.

My experience of secondary education wasn’t good. I sat for five years in a crumbling comprehensive with thirty other bored working-class kids. There were fights in the corridors, bullying, shoplifting down the town at break times. We threw things at teachers, dragged our feet and our bags between lessons, and resisted every well-meant attempt to change us. Often disillusioned and half-broken teachers did their best to hold it all together. I hated it. I left as soon as I could with nothing to show for it.

My education might have ended there, but a decade later, I was talked into going back to school by my girlfriend. I got my A Levels by taking night classes at an adult education centre. A teacher there suggested I apply for university. I decided to give it a go. I didn’t tell my friends.

I was building a dry-stone-wall by a roadside, mulling over which through-stone fitted best, when the postman stopped to hand me a letter. He was a lad I’d been to school with. I opened it while I was chatting to him, and he seemed baffled when I told him the letter said I’d got into Oxford University. “But you’re thick like me,” he said.

After he’d driven away with a friendly wave, I thought, “How will I tell everyone?” Was I about to become one of the people I’d grown up hating? In fact, my people were proud of me and cheered me off to war against the posh people (they’d seen Good Will Hunting too).

I went for two main reasons, and neither of them were very nice. I went because our farm was struggling and had become very claustrophobic and small, way too small for me and my dad, and because I needed a new hustle: everyone I knew who had money seemed to have gone to university. But I loved books, too, and liked the idea that you could study just one subject, and skip the rest, which was handy as I was useless at most of the subjects. But it was terrifying. I didn’t want to leave the place and the people I was from, or give up being who I was. I wanted to come back afterwards, but had no plan for how that might work.

Suggested article

Confessions of a student Marxist

By Tobias Phibbs

Going to an elite university exposed me to the people that made me most nervous: the well-spoken, (supposedly) clever people. My first instinct was to flee from this strange new world with its archaic traditions, funny language and weird social habits. But I was too proud to go home defeated, so I decided to fight instead. It didn’t take long for me to realise that the posh kids were all leather shoes, woollen jackets, small-talk and bullshit. I soon shrugged off the idea that there were some mystical clever people somewhere that were better than me: I’d now met them, come up against them one on one, and they were often bang average. I could hold my own on anything substantive. I’d grown up among straight-talking tough people who loved to argue in smoky pubs, so Oxford tutorials felt strangely familiar.

If I’d been confined to a plastic chair, and told to sit in silence and listen for an hour to someone who wasn’t very interesting talk about a subject I hadn’t chosen to be interested in, I suspect I’d have messed about and misbehaved, just as I did as a teenager. But Oxford wasn’t like that. The teaching was personalised, flexible and interactive. That kind of system keeps people like me in the room, fired up and engaged. Kids like me, who don’t flourish in school, can benefit from such attention, and focus, and belief. A good society would strive to give it to them.

More from this author

How to save British farming (and the countryside)

By James Rebanks

But posh kids still dominate these institutions. I learned, when I was there, that their trick was not any kind of genuine superiority but pure conditioning. Their schools and families had taught them that university was as much a social rite of passage as an opportunity to learn. They aimed high, in terms of grades — and to be fair, often worked very hard to pull it off. I was from people with lots of excuses for not doing things out of the ordinary; posh kids strode into their extraordinary future with their heads held high. No one I knew had that kind of polish and swagger, but I soon realised you could fake it. I looked at them and thought: if you fuckers can do remarkable things, then why can’t I?

It was liberating to find that I was clever enough, if I worked hard. And I knew how to work hard — for hours, days, weeks and years. OK, my people didn’t achieve highly in education or the professional white-collar world, but we were proud farmers with a culture of striving. I simply switched that mentality and applied it to education — something I hadn’t realised was possible at school. I knew the posh kids couldn’t outwork me. And the fact that I’d failed a lot was a strength, faced with their easy but brittle confidence. I knew how to get back up off the floor. People from more disadvantaged backgrounds than mine often lack this self-belief. But what if they were surrounded by people and institutions expecting and helping them to excel, as the posh kids were?

So much of this is about self-fulfilling prophecies. For years university worked because we believed it worked. It turned out “clever” people for “clever” jobs with good salaries, and sent the rest down the mine, to the factory or the farm. No one asked whether these students were really the most intelligent people. The system just confirmed the advantages of birth and background. My odd, and entirely untypical, journey exposed me to the extremes of the British education system. It has left me with complicated feelings about what universities can and can’t do.

A lot of people treat you different when they think you are an Oxford graduate than when they think you are a farm labourer. They talk to you differently. They talk to you more. They invite you to their house and try to make friends with you. They talk about books. Some of this is perhaps based on not unreasonable assumptions. Some of it is just lazy snobbery. I knew people that would talk down to me or my friends because they thought we weren’t very bright or worth very much. With those people I’d shamelessly mention having been to Oxford to knock them back a bit. It was like sprinkling fairy dust. They’d shrink back as if I’d said the password — or worse, start fawning, when five minutes earlier they’d thought I was northern, common, and knew nowt. Snobs and the powerful fetishise ‘academic’ credentials. I didn’t even pick my degree up, but it didn’t matter. Once you are in the club the detail isn’t important. You just have to look at our leading politicians. Boris Johnson would be stacking shelves in Aldi or working down the chippie if he’d been born in Hartlepool.

Suggested reading

Why universities had to be challenged

By David Goodhart

My story is sometimes seen as a rags-to-riches tale. But I wasn’t exceptional; I was lucky. The point of this story is that a society that is blind to the potential of so many of its young people, is a wasteful, unfair and ineffective society.  I look at bookshop shelves and wonder where half the stories are. Where’s the book by the girl that works in the laundrette, the man who serves you in McDonalds, the Romanian woman who cleans your hotel room, by the lads that work on the railways or the building site? We don’t care about these people enough because they don’t get heard, and they don’t get heard because we build a success machine that they don’t want to be part of, or can’t access, or use, or afford. Instead of a fair system, the machine churns out entitled mediocrities, born to be heard, born to rule.

And though universities are trying hard to become more “accessible”, there is only so much they can do. Perhaps it’s too late by the time the kids are eighteen. And if working class kids don’t apply, what can an admissions system do?

Around this time eighteen ago, I was sitting down to take my final exams. I did well. I could probably have stayed and become an academic, but I was drawn home to my own landscape and work — to the place and people that made me. Oxford didn’t make me, as a person, or a writer, but I’ve returned there over the years. The people that once taught me seem sad. They say it has gotten worse: the posh kids arrive, use it, then leave to work in the City.

And perhaps all the debt this training requires means that the kids are right to be mercenary about it all. Work hard, get the grades, move to London, do the job, get promoted, earn more, pay it back. Love of subject, creativity, taking risks and experimenting: these things feel marginal. I can see why people are sceptical about universities, and angry at the elite ones. They are often now little more than training camps for the stormtroopers of capitalism. I may have been lucky to go when I did.

I think George Eustice, the PR man turned Secretary of State for the Environment, was still telling homely stories about his Cornish farming grandfather when my mobile phone starting ringing. I was moving my flock of sheep down a lane with my sheepdogs and had planned to catch up with the news when I got back to the farmhouse. I looked at the missed calls then stuffed the phone back in my pocket.

Lots of people, including journalists and friends, were calling to ask what I made of the new agricultural policies announced by Mr Eustice. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised: I wrote a book called English Pastoral about how farming and nature in this country got into this mess, so people expect me to have some kind of intelligent opinion on what is happening and whether it is good or bad. And so, having read the documents and listened to Mr Eustice, here is mine.

More from this author

Why doesn't Britain value its farmers?

By James Rebanks

Our agricultural policies are going to change — hugely — from what they have been under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). And since the tragic decline of biodiversity on British farmland happened under that policy, this is overall a welcome development.

A massive shift is needed to take us from the post-WW2 cheaper-food-at-all-costs production model to something more sustainable. We now know that those policies had loads of negative effects, like the disappearance of farmland birds or wildflower meadows. We asked (and paid) British farmers to make their land factory-floor efficient; they did, and the results aren’t pretty — nature in Britain is on its knees.

You might ask why governments need to interfere in farming and land management at all, but you’d be about two thousand years too late. States have always manipulated farming to regulate food supplies, cheapen food for the poor, make food safe, avoid famines and food shortages, and encourage domestic production for times of war and national crisis. The Bible is full of pharaohs storing grain, or passing decrees about food to achieve one thing or another.

This meddling went into overdrive in the 20th century, during and after wartime, when it became apparent that our freedom depended on being able to grow enough of our own food on our own land. As a result, farm economics are deeply weird — and quite unlike any other sector or industry.

Suggested reading

Factory farming will kill us all

By John Lewis-Stempel

The price you pay for food in the store, and the price the farmer receives, do not reflect the real cost of producing that food — not even close. According to government statistics, 58% of a British farmer’s income is from subsidies (remarkably, that figure only drops to 46% for “very large” farms.) It doesn’t matter what kind of farmer you are, upland or lowland, arable or livestock, intensive or extensive, nature-friendly or monoculture: you can’t earn enough from commodity food prices, so your business is propped up by these payments.

It is bonkers, but it’s a global problem, because the commodity prices are set globally and farmers globally tend to be subsidised. The US has a particularly insane system that encourages terrible industrial farming and then dumps its excess stuff on world markets at beneath true cost.

So, it’s clearly time to reform farming subsidies — and that’s what Mr Eustice was suggesting. The new system is called “Environmental Land Management,” or ELM, and it is going to pay for things much more clearly in the public interest, like helping the British landscape to recover, and making farming more sutainable.

Great.

Good idea.

I am obsessed with making my farm more nature-friendly; we have planted 15,000 trees in the past five years, and plan to get another 10,000 in soon. We have re-wiggled the river, created 15 new ponds, restored old wildflower meadows and taken part in a project to restore a peat bog on our fell.

This policy shift might just pay me more to do good things that make the world a better place — and I’d be grateful for the help. But as I read the documents behind the enthusiastic and progressive speeches I, and lots of other farmers, got a shock — not by what was in it, but by what was absent.

More from this author

How to save British farming (and the countryside)

By James Rebanks

There is no real vision of progressive agriculture behind these changes, no talk of rebuilding the lost local food infrastructure and shifting our culinary culture away from corporate-made processed foods and unhealthy junk. There is no suggestion of the radical changes needed to rein in the power of supermarkets and other big corporations that drive down prices, and through that encourage destructive farming.

There is no mention of “food security”, or the very real risk that outsourcing our food supply places on pristine, natural and unprotected environments like the Amazon. There is little or nothing said about raising standards (an anathema to US trade negotiators) or shifting farming to be more “regenerative”.

And the details are hazy as hell.

How ELM will work and what it will pay for haven’t been worked out yet. Of course, it may develop in the next few months into a really brilliant and enlightened scheme that does great things for both agriculture and nature. But they better get a bloody move on, because it is four years since the referendum, and just a few weeks until we may crash out of the EU transition period without a deal — and ELM doesn’t replace the CAP.

The current plan is for a seven-year transition period, in which we carry on with the old systems and payments, but year-by-year phase them out and replace them with the new system. A new system which hasn’t been worked out yet.

It is not a prospect relished by farmers. As one of my peers put it, “it is like shifting from a salary to a per hour contract, with your salary halved by the fourth year, and the hourly rate not revealed”. It looks like a great many of us will lose financial support, without being able to get onto the new schemes that would allow us to fill that hole with payments for anything more progressive. Details matter, and they are in short supply.

Suggested reading

How coronavirus exposes our fragility

By James Kirkup

The problem for me as a farmer is that despite being blessed with wonderful TV adverts telling me to plan for a “no deal Brexit,” I haven’t a clue what to plan for. I don’t know what to produce, or what I will be paid for. My options at 1,100ft above sea level on a pasture-based rocky farm are limited. I also know that the main market for what we produce is the EU — worth £14.5 billion — and if we leave without an agreement then British farm products will go from zero tariffs to a 62% on lamb, 85% on beef, 45% on cheddar cheese and 51% on barley. The National Farmers’ Union projects farm incomes would crash by 60-80% in a no-deal scenario. It would be catastrophic.

So the problem with Mr Eustice’s plan isn’t the hazy ELM scheme that may, or may not, emerge soon — it is the long-term vision.

The Secretary of State was very clear that in seven years, British farmers are going to be competing with farmers from across the globe without the support of any subsidy for farming itself. It is about the oldest of neoliberal dreams — killing off state involvement and throwing open our country (and countryside) to free trade and deregulation. In any other industry this might make sense, but given the screwed-up nature of global farming economics it doesn’t. And it’s worth noting that the one or two places that don’t subsidise agriculture have suffered dire ecological results.

A cynic might say that this looks rather like Thatcherism 2.0, with farmers as the new miners, rural deregulation wrapped in glossy-green wrapping paper. Whichever way you look at it, it’s a terrifying ill-thought-out approach. Politicians are rather fond of talking about competition being a good thing, but they are sending us out to compete with farmers who have the state support that we lack, and who are protected by tariffs. This isn’t competition as anyone sane would recognise it.

We are to be collateral damage as the politicians try to deliver Brexit at any cost, imposing free trade, deregulating the countryside and unleashing wilfully blind free-market economics on farming. Their vision of the future is brutal, and barely lessened by the years of help to “transition” from the CAP. It is like someone telling you they are going to throw you off a cliff in seven years’ time but not to worry because they will teach you to fly first — you ask them how, when no one else has ever done it, and they shrug and say, “we haven’t worked it out yet, but you are definitely going off that cliff”.

Suggested reading

Brexit makes more sense than ever

By Peter Franklin

The future they are creating is a perfect storm of crappiness — massive tariffs imposed on what we sell to our main markets, a slashing of the support payment system that we were part of in the EU, a lot of deregulation, and a whole heap of new competitors through new “free trade” deals which will allow imports produced in ways that are illegal here.

Even the green bit — the ELM — has yet to commit to paying a fair or decent price for things that will do a great deal of public good, like carbon sequestration or flood alleviation. It is not even clear that they have a methodology for paying for these natural outcomes.

We have a farming and food economy that is worth well in excess of £100 billion a year, and if it encourages farming that isn’t ecologically sound, as it often does by driving down prices beneath the cost of sustainable production, then you can’t make it all okay with £2.7 billion of ELM type payments. You have to grapple with trade policies to protect farmers from being undercut on price by worse farming systems; you have to regulate poor practices to raise their cost; you have to curb the cartel-like power of supermarkets; and even do the unthinkable, and make food more expensive to reflect its true cost (and make sure to help the poorest in our society by redistributing wealth  so they can afford it). If your focus stops on the £2.7 billion you are tweaking round the edges of a disaster, not fixing it.

Unfortunately, the idea that food and farming can manage without state support is a fantasy in a world in which every government is entangled in its domestic agriculture. Trying to disentangle this will drive down prices and lead to further intensification on farmland, potentially making much of farmed England worse for nature (yes, that’s possible) and exporting our food footprint to places where we don’t see the damage or costs.

When I was a kid, a scrapman used to come to the farm in a white van and would occasionally buy machinery or old gates, or rolls of rusting wire for scrap money, or take it to “clean it up”. It was sometimes a useful function, because the scrap had to be got rid of, but the fella was dodgy, and my old man used to say “keep an eye on him, or we will find things missing when he’s gone”. I think I feel the same way about the Government’s plan for agriculture — it may do some good for rural England, but if I were you I’d keep an eye on it, because later on you might well notice that some valuable possessions have gone missing.

And, let’s be fair, there are reasonable grounds for concern. The RSPB’s State of Nature report paints a gloomy picture of disappearing wildlife in our overwhelmingly farmed landscapes. Beloved species like curlews, yellowhammers, or hedgehogs, common as recently as my childhood, are disappearing or declining. The scientific consensus is that the rapid and ongoing intensification of agriculture has made our landscapes more monocultural, and sterile, with less habitats and less food for the things that once shared it with us.

We could have a lively debate about who’s fault the intensification of farming was — and I might argue it was driven by the demand for cheap food, the overweening power of a handful of food industry corporations, poor public policy, disruptive chemical and engineering technologies that emerged in the post war period, and which are still intensifying field work, and lastly the societal belief that farming’s job was solely to produce ever cheaper food — but I’m less interested in haggling over blame, and much more interested in what I can practically do about this mess on our land.

The practical challenge on our farm is fairly simple: I have to pay my bills, and earn some kind of living for my family, by producing things to sell and try and be a good steward of this place.

Some of the solutions proposed make just about zero sense on an actual farm — like the idea that we should just step aside and let it be totally wild. My bank manager isn’t so keen on that, and neither are several of my ecologist friends who point out that abandoning land isn’t remotely the same thing as restoring an ecosystem if key species that once made it all work are now missing.

“Rewilding” is very fashionable, and I can see why it inspires — sometimes it offers ambition, scale and a sensible focus on natural processes, but that often isn’t very useful in the real world many of us live and work in. When I plant trees and they get nibbled off at the ground by roe deer, it isn’t very useful to tell me we should have wolves here to kill the deer. If millions of trees are to be planted and we want them to survive, then we need real here-and-now practical solutions.

We are the “hyper-keystone species” in our landscape, one settled a long time ago — the question is what we can do to play that role decently and sensibly to make it all as sustainable and biodiverse as we can. Here’s what the last five years of listening and learning have taught me about what we can do for nature on our farmland:

We need to change the way we see and think about farming.

We all see land through our own biases — and mine was, until recently, a traditional farming mindset. We looked at our fields and saw something made productive and good by our toil. Our land had been “improved” to produce food, which we thought of as pretty much as our sole purpose. Producing food is a noble endeavour, one that has somehow come to be taken for granted. Covid-19 ought to have taught us that British food security matters, and that our just-in-time global supply chains are too fragile and risky. We need an enormous amount of food to be produced in British fields, and for that we need some of the smartest farmers on earth.

But, and it is a big “but”, I now accept that my job is more than just producing food any which way I please — we can’t pretend farming is just an productive industry, because it takes place in a natural setting, and can do grave ecological damage. In my lifetime I have witnessed once common birds and insects vanish from our farmland — there was once a curlew in every other field of ours, and now they are vanishing.

More from this author

Why doesn't Britain value its farmers?

By James Rebanks

The sensible people in farming increasingly realise that we have to reconcile two complex demands — we have to work out how to farm productively but in healthy ecosystems, which in some cases we are going to have to rebuild. I am not at the cutting edge of this “regenerative agriculture”, or a guru of it; for most of my life I thought the people talking about this stuff were cranks. I am a second wave enthusiast, and have come to realise that the “cranks” are right, and the post-war mainstream ideas are deeply flawed.

A few years ago, I began inviting ecologists to come to our farm. I was curious about how true the criticisms of our farming were; I wanted to know the truth, however painful that might be, so I asked them to tell me what state our land was in. They were very polite, but the brutal version goes like this: More or less all farmland is downgraded ecologically from the wilderness that preceded it.

I knew that bit and was ready for it. I told them we changed the world to be able to live, and it largely happened here centuries, or thousands, of years ago. And they bought and ate the food we produced. Yeah okay, they shrugged, but then pointed out that I had rose tinted spectacles about the recent past… and then highlighted the deterioration just in my lifetime, as well as the decades before that.

There was the declining plant diversity in our hay meadows caused by synthetic fertilisers between the 1960s and the 2000s, the loss of wetlands because my old man drained fields with a digger, the straightened rivers that are wrecked for fish because we dredged them every ten years, the hedgerows that had grown old, gone unmanaged, and which were now falling down, leaving a much barer landscape, and the trees, which I had always thought were everywhere, but which are mostly older than a hundred years because almost no young trees have grown up on our land in generations.

Ouch.

Turns out that this land should be a place full of multi-age trees, with everything from saplings to rotting wood in order to give all the creatures of the once wild woods a chance. Our pastures were slightly better news, because they had never been ploughed, so have pretty good soil. But we have grazed them too continuously with sheep and made them worse than they should be (a practice known as “set stocking”). The more I hung out with ecologists the more I realised how little I knew. In fact I could have written my total knowledge of soil microbiology and photosynthesis on one side of a matchbox.

So, what had seemed largely unchanging for much of my life turns out to be half-broken and getting worse — turning in to a barer, less habitat-diverse farm with much less food for insects, birds and other wild things.

The point of all this is not to add to the chorus of gloom about farming, or to confirm for you that farmers are all evil — only to see the effects of our land management through nature’s eyes. You can’t have a proper stab at nature-friendly farming unless you are willing to be this honest with yourself.

The second step for me was to get my head around what our land would once have been in its wilder form. This question is loaded with issues and debates, but let’s keep our eye on a simple truth — wild things generally want the habitats they called home before the arrival of humans, with the natural processes creating the niches they evolved to take advantage of.

So, what was it?

The short, simple answer is our valley was a swirling and dynamic dance of oak woodland (temperate Atlantic rainforest), thorny and willowy scrub, and meadow clearings either grazed by the large herbivores or created by beavers, with some other habitats scattered around like peat bogs, and ponds and lakes with reedy edges. And it is more than just having token habitats; it also had the natural processes which made those habitats “dynamic”: rivers are meant to wiggle, trees are meant to fall and lie rotting, herbivores are meant to graze and shape ecosystems, and predators are meant to move nervous herbivores around and occasionally kill them.

So, how do we, in the imperfect reality of now, create more of those key habitats, and keep them dynamic?

The good news is that some of the ways my father and grandfather farmed kind of mimicked some key natural processes. We don’t plough. We stopped using synthetic fertilisers years ago. A lot of nature still exists on our farm — we have over 200 species of wildflowers and grasses on our land. Intensive silage fields might have one or two species; our traditional hay meadows have lost maybe half a dozen species in the past century, but they are still exceptionally diverse. Our cattle-only grazed summer pastures have about 100 species of plants including wild orchids. Our soil is full of organic matter and worms, and fast improving.

Above us is a large remnant of very old oak woodland that still pulses life outwards. And our floodplain is regressing to something scruffy and wilder because no one drains it anymore. Our peat bogs are in mixed condition, after centuries of drainage and harvesting, but some areas are recovering well. Last year we did a major restoration project to make it wetter and function better, reversing two centuries of abuse. Our fell has recovering vegetation from its overgrazed state in the past, and has been un-drained and “wetted up”. And we have the remnants of lots of other good habitats that with a little help could be returned to their former glory.

Suggested reading

Why Britain needs a million new farmers

By Aris Roussinos

It isn’t black and white; it isn’t all trashed. We are going to need a lot of very productive farmers, so some places are going to do more for nature than others. I accept that our valley ought to be at the high end of the nature-recovery scale — because it has so much good nature left and is in a National Park.

The truth is, even here, we can’t recreate the vanished past, with migration of significant herds of wild herbivores and large carnivores. But we can ensure we have a good chunk of the original habitats (even if we have to cleverly create them in the least productive bits of the farm or valley), and mimic some of the processes that made it tick. These days I’m most excited by finding ways to produce good quality food in nature-friendly ways — using planned grazing of my sheep and cattle to mimic those lost herds of wild herbivores, moved by me rather than a predator, and creating around our fields lots of hedgerows and willowy scrub, and planting thousands of native broadleaf trees we can graze beneath.

It won’t be perfect, but it can be a hell of a lot better than it is now, at least as good as it was a century ago, and probably much better if we work with ecologists, and if the rest of you back us to do it. At present I am having to try and rebuild the patchwork of habitats on our farm while being paid the lowest prices in history for wool, beef and lamb. We have asset-stripped the countryside, and it won’t be mended until we start reversing that process. We may need to devote a greater share of our GDP to food production to do it in ways that make our countryside somewhere to be proud of — it is at about 10% at present, a quarter of its value a century ago.

Of course, I have farming friends who still think our sole job is to produce things for the table, and politicians and economists love the idea of ever cheapening food, because it is their get-out-of-jail-free card for unleashing grossly unequal societies… Let the poor folks get paid minimum wage and eat KFC. That is not a recipe for a good or healthy society.

Suggested reading

The blight of farm suicides

By John Lewis-Stempel

I think British farming has to ask itself a simple question: how do we regain the trust of the British public so that they believe in us and want to help us in the shops, and contribute through their taxes to supporting us?

The answer, I believe, is so simple it is staring us in the face. We need to support farmers to become the genuine stewards of our countryside. We should shift away, to the greatest possible extent, from pesticides, synthetic fertilisers and other 20th-century disasters. We should restore soils and maximise photosynthesis on our land using better techniques like rotational grazing, and on crop land by using mixed rotational farming instead of monocultures.

The good news is that I and many thousands of other farmers can do this, and many of us want to, if given half a chance. But let’s be blunt, it comes with a cost, not covered by the pitiful prices we are paid now, nor through the environmental schemes we have at present. I don’t think you owe me a living, but unless we create a new system, the current farming model is going to trash what’s left of nature in the British countryside.

We need to make being an ecologically sound farmer financially viable. That requires a new deal between farmers, government, retailers, taxpayers and the consumer — a deal that protects and supports good farming and environmental stewardship. A deal that creates viable local food economies in which everyone has access to affordable good food.

We need to sustain and encourage good farming instead of undermining it. And this means protecting us from being undermined by cheap imports produced in systems that are worse than our own, and walking away from a US trade deal if the price demanded is too high. Sorry Mr Trump, but we don’t want that race to the bottom.

Now isn’t the time to abandon faith in farmers. It is the time to back British farmers, support them, help them to learn new things, and transition to better ways.

James Rebanks’ new book English Pastoral is published by Allen Lane.

I always imagined that the apocalypse would look a bit like the movie of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. But this valley seems oblivious to the crisis — it is all daffodils, snowdrops, birdsong, and trees bursting into leaf.

My flock is down in the valley bottom. The first lamb of the year was born today and is now lying with its mother. I come in from the fields and the TV news is like something from a science-fiction movie — they are building giant makeshift hospitals in the city centers. People are dying in their hundreds every day. But not far from the farmhouse a duck has made a nest by our pond and has laid thirteen pale green eggs in the midst of a perfect downy circle.

It is hard to connect the green fields where I work each day with the world of the virus. Hard to think it is the same world. But, of course it is. The virus has shown how connected we really are.

Suggested reading

How coronavirus exposes our fragility

By James Kirkup

Our elderly neighbours have locked themselves inside — we take them groceries and urge them to wash their hands and stay away from town. The schools have closed, so our children are helping us on the farm. And once a week, my wife travels to the local supermarket for supplies.

At first, she reported panic runs on face masks, disinfectant wipes, hand sanitiser, and toilet rolls; then it was staple foodstuffs, like rice, pasta, flour, and meat. Now, she describes the quiet (but very palpable) fear that has emerged about the robustness and resilience of our food supplies. The system doesn’t feel quite as permanent as it did.

It is because of that fear that people are hoarding. British people have a billion pounds’ worth more food in their homes than they did 10 days ago. Their panic and the subsequent spike in demand took stores — and Government — by surprise and we all need to calm down.

But the unexpected demand isn’t the whole story. The whole story is the fragility of our just-in-time food system, which the crisis has exposed.

Suggested reading

Why I fear isolation more than the virus

By Mary Kenny

It’s a logistically brilliant system — it has allowed us to shop whenever we want for whatever we want, regardless of season or whether harvests have been good or bad — but it isn’t nearly as robust as it might need to be. Like our banks, which we learnt in the 2007-8 banking crisis were “too big to fail”, we now have food systems that are so hyper-efficient that they have little slack capacity for a crisis.

And the crises are coming thick and fast — the Australian bush fires destroyed 140,000 sheep and cattle — and many orchards, vineyards and crops; the African swine fever in China has killed millions of pigs and is spreading. The farming systems we have created are vulnerable; the more specialised and monocultural and crowded they are, the greater the vulnerability.

The obsession with efficiency in our food economy has done its best to destroy a distributed local and diverse food economy — local abattoirs are now as rare as hen’s teeth, farmers markets have very limited capacity, and most areas are so specialised in their farming focus that they rarely produce the things that would give us a balanced diet.

Barely any of us know the fields that feed us or grow a significant share of what we eat. There is way too little local fruit and vegetable production in most areas, and there has been a general loss of the food culture that once existed to turn local products in to great meals.

The Herdwick lamb and mutton we produce was used to make countless different meals in the past, using the whole carcass. Today, we eat only the most expensive plastic-wrapped bits of a chicken, sheep, pig or cow; the lower value cuts are generally exported or processed. Such pickiness suddenly becomes a problem in a crisis, because if exports close down, or kebab places are in lockdown, the system backs up with products with no market. Last week, for example, sheep prices collapsed, because the system was suddenly frozen with confusion and log jams.

And after months of media noise about everyone going vegan, we can now see the reality laid bare in the supermarkets: people want the foodstuffs they have always eaten. The meat, milks, dairy and cheese shelves are noticeably empty, and the plant-based fake food shelves are remarkably well stocked and uncrowded — as my neighbour stated in the store, “No one really wants to eat that shit”.

Suggested reading

There's no such thing as a green vegan

By Mary Harrington

The argument has always been that we simply don’t need the old, mixed farming systems anymore — in which farms produce crops and raise livestock. But is that true?

Normally, we don’t all shop, eat or cook from these local sources, but a food system isn’t safe if it only works in the good times. Like sound healthcare systems, sound food systems need to have slack capacity for freak events. Britain produces about 60% of the food it eats; the other 40% is imported. It probably isn’t sensible to aim for 100% self-reliance (growing bananas in greenhouses in cold wet places in Britain is daft), but we need to be really careful about dropping too far from current capacity. It will make us vulnerable in times of crisis.

Norway has a deeply protectionist food system that supports its farmers as a matter of national strategic importance. Farmers there, for example, produce 80-90% of the national demand for beef and sheep meat. Since large areas of Norway aren’t globally competitive for agriculture, it doesn’t want to ‘outsource’ what food production it is capable of and put its rural communities — where family-run farms drive the local economy — at risk. It may turn out to be a very sensible policy. Ask yourself whether you trust Donald Trump to keep food supply lines to Britain open in a time of genuine food crisis? Or whether he might look after America’s interests first?

Many of us were politely pointing all this out as we headed into discussions about a free trade deal with America, which might reduce the share of Britain’s diet that is produced domestically, if the gates are opened for cheap food to flood in from North America.

No one was listening.

Suggested reading

The slow death of French cheese

By John Lichfield

Less than a month ago, a UK government advisor, Professor Tim Leunig, was quoted in leaked emails as saying we didn’t need farmers, because the value of their output was a tiny share of the UK economy and we could import all the food we needed, perhaps at lower prices.

And for the past decade, a virulent strain of anti-farming environmentalism, led by noisy hard-Left radicals such as George Monbiot, has argued for us to turn away from farming towards producing food in synthetic industrial ways (with the promised pay-off of freeing more land for wild nature). This ‘land-sparing’ obsession embraces the worst industrial farming and corporate food systems.

Coming, as it does, from both ends of the political spectrum, this end-of-farming narrative is deeply worrying. My farming neighbours were rolling their eyes in disbelief a month ago at the absurdity of it all.

The obvious truth is that it takes a lot of food to feed 65 million souls — a fact that is so easily forgotten in the good times. With a full belly, everyone knows better than farmers how to manage land, and how to care for the countryside.

The lunatic anti-farming voices are rather quiet at the moment, though. The national discussion is, instead, about empty shelves, whether our food supplies are secure, and discussing whether farmers and others in the food sector are classified as ‘key workers’. Suddenly, more measured experts are being given airtime, farmers are being listened to — and our value understood.

Suggested reading

The blight of farm suicides

By John Lewis-Stempel

Today, an estimated 8.4 million people are at risk of running short of food — and food banks won’t cope with that sort of demand. The closure of restaurants, pubs, cafes and bars hasn’t helped: we get something like 25% of our calories from these places nowadays. And the supermarkets are going to experience demand unlike anything they have ever known — with challenges that they aren’t used to coping with. Our fruit and vegetable farms often rely upon migrant seasonal workers who can now no longer travel to the work.

Professor Tim Lang, one food system expert, is now openly calling for the UK government to impose food rationing before we descend into a greater crisis. It’s no wonder people are panicking and behaving in ways we haven’t seen in generations.

There is public fear that our food system might not be up to it, but I think we probably can avoid a genuine food crisis in the developed world. Governments have responded relatively quickly to this virus, and it will be overcome. You shouldn’t read this piece and panic.

Instead, you should stay calm and shop sensibly. And you should eat what you buy: remember, we waste 40% of our food.

Suggested reading

There's no such thing as factory farming

By Peter Franklin

We do however need to think very carefully about how the nation feeds itself, because in the long run we will need a truly robust and resilient food system, with strong local food economies. This is our wake-up call to respect farming once more — not uncritically: we have an absolute right to want more nature on farmland, high welfare standards for farm animals, and safe and healthy food. But Britain must seek to understand and remember the value of farming and food production.

Things are going to get a whole lot worse if, after this is all over, we continue as though nothing has changed and throw British farmers to the mercy of global free trade and systems that are big, bad and ugly. We need to protect this key national resource so it is there for us through thick and thin.

Because if another disaster strikes — and it will — then I want a significant share of my diet to be available within walking distance of where I live. I want to know where I can source food for my family, and if that means I pay a bit more for food in the good times, then so be it. As one Twitter wag recently posted, the City of London may offer a better way to get rich than farming, but “You can’t eat credit default swaps, kids”.