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.

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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. 

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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.

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Labour is crushing Britain's farmers

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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.

Surely it wasn’t because such stories couldn’t be found. Prolonged school closures disproportionately damaged urban students — precisely those whose families turned out heavily for Democrats. Their ambivalence on crime and policing left the working-class and minority neighborhoods of blue cities to bear the brunt of rising disorder.

And surely it’s not because pundits are reluctant to frame stories in terms of voters being hurt by the very politicians they supported. Quite the opposite. When it comes to rural voters, this genre of storytelling is practically its own subfield. Timothy Noah’s recent column in The New Republic is the latest entrant, warning that Trump’s new tariff proposals will again “badly screw” the very voters who support him. Jennifer Rubin repeatedly paints Trump’s base as a self-immolating mass of misinformed populists. And it is nothing new; this narrative was everywhere during Trump’s first term: “Trump Country Could Be Hit Hardest by His Policies”; “Trump’s Trade War Hurts the People Who Elected Him.” 

And yet, this peculiar framing — a mix of self-righteous indignation and condescending schadenfreude — seems reserved exclusively for Trump-supporting rural voters. Why?

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It’s not that these pundits don’t understand policy; they do. And I agree with them: Trump’s economic agenda — tariffs, trade wars, the fantasy of decoupling — is bad policy. I believe, without hesitation, that free trade and open markets have lifted more people out of poverty worldwide than any government program ever has.

But I also know this: those same policies have drained jobs, shuttered factories, and undercut the economic backbone of the rural communities I study and live in. That is why a majority of rural voters favor tariffs on China. According to the 2020 CES, 74% of rural voters supported tariffs on goods from China; 66% supported 25% tariffs on steel, excluding Mexico and Canada. Among Trump-supporting rural voters, the number was higher still: a full 91% of rural-Trump voters supported tariffs on China, along with 90% of the millions more urban and suburban Trump voters too. 

If Biden or Obama were that responsive to their constituents (a majority of whom also support tariffs), they would be celebrated for their commitment to democracy and the empowerment of the people. Instead, it’s easier to just overlook the fact that 66% of all voters in households making less than $60,000 per year want to abandon the liberal consensus, hike tariffs on trade partners, and try something new. 

You can disagree with these opinions, but to disregard them as “the dumbest idea yet” or that they’d “please voters and damage the economy at the same time,” is just reflexive emoting, passing for analysis in a media ecosystem more comfortable with sneering at discontent than confronting deep, structural inequality. It’s the kind of armchair clarity that comes easy when you’re writing from the winning side of globalization. And in the name of opposing Trump, many progressives have done a full about-face — defending the very economic order they once claimed was rigged. If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, only Trump could make “neoliberalism” great again. 

Personally, as one opposed to tariffs and committed to rural opportunity, I’d welcome a serious reckoning with trade policy — but not one that starts by mocking the people who’ve borne its costs. We could start by exploring all the ways in which free trade hasn’t actually been free — not just for its upwardly redistributive effects (which many, including Noah, lament), but its spatial ones as well.

We could start by asking whether free trade was ever that “free”  — not just for its upward tilt (as Noah notes elsewhere in his work), but for the way it hit some places far harder than others. American policymakers didn’t just fail to shield domestic workers from unfair practices like Chinese steel dumping or currency manipulation, they actively chose not to in the name of market integration. They embedded investor protections in agreements like NAFTA and the TPP, while stripping out any meaningful enforcement for labor standards in overseas territories, while subjecting American producers to a labyrinth of growing regulations. It created tax incentives that rewarded offshoring, kept the subsidies flowing as agribusiness consolidated, and told displaced workers to learn to code. 

If that’s “free” trade, it was free only for the powerful. Everyone else paid full price. So maybe the story isn’t that rural voters want to blow up the system — but that it took them this long. 

We could continue the story — that it wasn’t just theory that failed rural America. It was the implementation, the politics, the choices — choices with a blue and red hue, but now which clearly benefit the core constituencies of the modern “Left”. 

And yes, Trump and DOGE threaten more than just higher prices; the unraveling of the rural safety net — that patchwork of programs and services that, while frayed, still holds many communities together. The closure of local USDA offices, the loss of community health centers, and the potential reduction in educational programs like Head Start have tangible effects on daily life. 

But if your experience of government is the extension agent who still has their job when your farm shut down; or your experience is that you couldn’t, in fact, keep your doctor after the hospital closed in the wake of the Affordable Care Act; or that the school bus route has got longer because two towns had to consolidate classrooms — then it’s not crazy to think the government isn’t working. When every program feels designed for someone else, when the “investments” go to tech corridors and consulting firms, and when your own town hears more from regulators than from repair crews, it makes perfect sense to choose disruption — even knowing, like most of my neighbors do, that it carries substantial risk.

But I doubt that is really what Sargent and others want. Instead, there is a certain glibness in the way they think of rural suffering. But one can believe that rural voters may end up economically worse off under another Trump presidency (I think that’s the likely outcome) and also hope the dividends flowing to New York investors in Cargill, JBS, or Tyson take a bigger hit than the family farms already scraping by. If someone has to feel the pain, let it dent the quarterly earnings call of Dollar General’s board — not the paycheck of a cashier. But even if they don’t, let’s be honest: the damage was done long before Trump came along. Rural voters aren’t choosing tariffs because they think it will make them rich — they’re choosing them because they’ve already lost faith in a system that keeps delivering gains to everyone else. If you’ve already lost the game under decades of “smart” policy, why not flip the board?

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Still, the “hurting themselves” genre continues, because it comforts liberal audiences by assigning blame downward. It allows political writers to bypass any reflection on how Democratic governance might also be failing. And it satisfies a deeper urge to feel vindicated, to watch the people who voted the “wrong” way suffer the consequences. Urban, college-educated voters are granted agency — their mistakes are tragic choices seen as complex, morally legitimate, and grounded in values. Rural, working-class Trump voters, by contrast, are seen as emotional, ignorant, even pathological.

But Trump’s voters know exactly what they’re doing. They’ve calculated — often correctly — that the programs designed to help them are more likely to help someone else. So go on sneering, comfortable in the knowledge that the real problem is out there, somewhere in flyover country. But if you actually care about democracy — and about preventing another Trump presidency — you might ask what stories like these really accomplish. Because they certainly don’t persuade rural voters. They don’t build coalitions. They don’t correct the underlying failures of economic governance. All they do is harden the divides they claim to lament.

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.

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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?

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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.

At around the same time, shit-posting Disney action hero and mixed martial artist Gina Carano spotted a grand historical pattern: “Mao attacked farmers. Stalin attacked farmers. Now, world governments are attacking farmers. Same group throughout history. It’s a playbook, it’s not a chance happening. Wake up.” Then Wide Awake Media posted an image of thousands of acres of “prime agricultural land” squandered by solar panels, captioned with a rhetorical question: “is this one of the reasons for the globalist war on agriculture?”

The global famine conspiracists lurk on X and Facebook and YouTube. They are the ones who repeatedly remind us that Henry Kissinger said “control foods and you control the people”, despite the fact he never said such a thing. They will try to convince you that lab-grown meat and red dye 3 and bird flu are all part of the same plan, and that the best defense against a cosmopolitan elite intent on confiscating your farm and foisting crushed beetles down your throat is a gun.

The conspiracy theorist is generally dismissed as an irrational animal, yet the preachers of global famine are obsessed with logic and reason. Their dystopian vision emerges from a complex yet idiosyncratic understanding of history that ranges from Joseph in Egypt to the German multi-national Bayer, engineers of genetically modified Roundup Ready wheat that can only be grown with the aid of their own patented Roundup Ready insecticides — thereby guaranteeing corporate control of the world’s bagels and buns.

Lately, their cup of evidence has runneth over: spiking commodity prices of coffee and cocoa, the mass death of bees, and the fact that a dozen companies own more than 500 consumer brands. Why else would the World Economic Forum force us to consume insects if they were not plotting to make farmers obsolete? Then there’s Tucker Carlson, who registered his famine fears during the Netherlands farmer protests in 2022: “Messing with the food supply tends to cause food crises, and then famine,” he surmised. “We should be worried with the big things. And the food supply is the biggest thing.”

One might be tempted to dismiss all this as the latest chapter of a longstanding story that historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed the “The Paranoid Style in American History”, a narrative that lays all our woes at the feet of covert operations. Yet when it comes to global famine, the theorists and their longstanding nemesis — the CIA — are on the same page, along with another unlikely ally, the United States Department of Defense. They all agree on one thing: how fast civil society can crumble when starvation knocks.

The espionage professional knows two truths about hunger: the first is that people do not starve because there is not enough food, but — as Nobel Prize laureate Amartya Sen has proven over and over again, from the Bengal famine of 1943 to Bangladesh in 1974 to Somalia and Sudan several times over — they starve because they cannot afford the price of food. In his groundbreaking work, Poverty and Famines, Sen showed that during the worst period of the Irish famine of the 1840s, ships packed with wheat, oats, cattle, hogs, eggs, and butter sailed south from the hardest hit areas to the markets of London. Similarly, during the worst of the Ethiopian famine of 1973, the country’s food production did not decline. The problem was that the food that could have saved famine-struck regions like the Wollo province and Tigray went to more affluent purchasers in Addis Ababa instead. Such food “counter-movements” led Sen to conclude that famines had as much to do with money and politics as with agricultural output,  which in turn indicated that direct cash supplements, for instance, could help solve the problem. No matter how many poor people starved, the rich never lost their most basic entitlement: a full stomach.

The second truth is that one of the quickest paths to massive popular demonstrations — and even regime change — is food inflation, hashtag the 2011 uprisings and conflicts throughout Syria, Iraq, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen, collectively known as the “Arab Spring”.

These ideas have defined American government policy. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the newly formed United States Department of Homeland Security defined the food sector as one of 17 federally recognized “critical infrastructures”. War games ensued, such as the “Silent Farmland” exercise in North Carolina, the “Silent Prairie” exercise in Washington, and “Exercise High Stakes” in Kansas. “Food defense” became a term of art, closely followed by a stream of white papers that introduced the idea of “agroterrorism” — that is, chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats to the food supply chain. Such concerns gained credence in 2018 when swine flu swept China, the home of around 400 million pigs — half the world’s supply.

That same year, an eclectic group of academics from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (in other words, the CIA), the United States War College, the Department of Defense, Los Alamos, and NASA’s Earth Observation for Security and Agriculture Consortium published an in-depth study on the risks of catastrophic failure. “Consolidation has become a defining characteristic of the evolution of the global food system,” noted the report. “Capturing any individual concentrated node within the global food system can have widespread and lasting ramifications.”

The way to strengthen the system was clear: build a more complex and resilient web of supply chains, originating from a widespread network of farms. Buying produce from your local green market had become as valuable an asset as signal intelligence from the Mossad. No one noticed the irony that the DOD had come around to the same set of social imperatives as the radical Left La Via Campesina, aka, the Global Peasant Movement: support local farmers.

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All of a sudden, everyone agreed — from the tinfoil-hat basement dwellers to cloak-and-dagger spooks to the overalls and pick-up crowd. And today, as American food prices ratchet up hand in hand with Trump tariffs levied against Canada, Europe, Mexico, and just about any food importer anywhere, food security has become an even bigger unifier.

For the person who benefits the most from unaffordable guacamole on Super Bowl Sunday is Vladimir Putin, a man who has made it his life’s work to study the dynamics of regime change — and has now put it in action. As a recent white paper from the Center for Strategic & International Studies noted: “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused the greatest military-related increase in global food insecurity in at least a century.” The Russian president has repeatedly targeted Ukraine’s agricultural infrastructure — its farms, fields, food processing facilities, and agricultural labor force — causing more than $40 billion in losses. The CSIS report concluded that the ensuing trade tensions “undermine European support for Ukraine.”

All this means that food security has become a hot topic in the mainstream media. The faux populists at The New York Post have been all over the food inflation story, noting that since the first of this year, egg and poultry price gouging reports were up more than 840%. The New York Times delivered its inimitable bourgeois version of the crisis, mapping the rising price of beef bourguignon at Le Bouillon Chartier in Paris, thereby revealing the untold story of buttered carrots (the price of the root vegetable has skyrocketed 20% in the last five years, and butter 30%).

Trump isn’t helping the matter. Already, his USDA has canceled one-billion dollars’ worth of funding for local food purchasing for schools — that is, money to buy produce from nearby farms. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s DOGE has attempted to defund the World Food Program. And Trump’s new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, is doing his best to stop lawsuits against Bayer for their Roundup-induced cancers. If hunger spreads because people can’t afford the price of food, why is the Trump administration tinkering with social security benefits and the SNAP program for school breakfast and lunch, both of which are now in the sights of the DOGE minions?

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Yet, for once, the conspiracists don’t want to hear it. At a time when food security talk consumes the mainstream media — with The New York Times headlining famine in Sudan and Gaza, and even the staid Economist writing of “The coming food catastrophe” — the global famine conspiracy theorists have gone silent. Since Trump came to office, Ted Nugent has been content to hock 50th-anniversary autographed Stranglehold t-shirts. Wide Awake Media is back to analyzing the hidden truth bombs dropped by internet paint-by-numbers phenomenon, Bob Ross, RIP. Illuminatibot has reverted to publicizing the evils of Frazzledrip — the “elites drug of choice”.

Concerned that after 5,000 years the global hunger conspiracy might have gone silent, I dropped into the DMs of my old friend, Jacob Angeli-Chansley, aka the Q-Anon Shaman (the tattooed young man who wore horns to the January 6 insurrection, then went on hunger strike until he was provided with organic prison food), with whom I had spent some quality time in Phoenix last April. I was gratified to learn he had recently acquired his own cryptocurrency, $haman. Perhaps this was a hedge on food inflation?

I wanted to know how long the MAGA mafia could continue to harness the social media machine before the price of bacon and eggs took down the administration. After all — and just as the Department of Defense and Ted Nugent predicted — it was food inflation (plus a shot or two of senility) that took down Biden.

As usual, Jake was happy to provide the media with true facts: “Whether it’s to make people obese and die early or deathly thin and die early, hunger is the weapon used by tyrants and psychopaths to get their way, when all other means have exhausted themselves.”

Of course, after Trump pardoned him, the Shaman’s first move was to trade in his bullhorn and spear for something far more effective when it comes to protecting his daily bread. As is his wont, he posted it:

“NOW I AM GONNA BUY SOME MOTHA F— GUNS!!!”

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

It’s worth asking what sort of person could read this without wincing — because, if Wall Kimmerer’s influence on eco thought leaders such as Caroline Lucas and Jane Goodall is anything to go on — her fans are many. One explanation for her disciples’ tolerance for the saccharine is that they are mostly American. The week after thousands of Barboured British farmers took to Whitehall to protest Rachel Reeves’s inheritance tax changes, the tone of our own rural culture cannot be more different from the world of Wall Kimmerer, in which she considers, in return for a load of berries given to her by a neighbour, “offering a song of thanks that sends appreciation out on the wind”. Meanwhile in London, the legions of Jeremy Clarkson lookalikes, led by the big man himself, presented a no-nonsense, rugged and masculine front against the out-of-touch Westminster chin-strokers. Nobody in this crew spends their days communing with the local robins, “stuffing our mouths with berries and chortling with happiness”.

Yet the timing of The Serviceberry’s publication for a UK audience — it coincided with the flat-capped populists descending on the capital — is providential, because it so perfectly illuminates the polarised interests scrabbling over the political and actual environment. Though far from natural bedfellows at first glance, Wall Kimmerer and the British farmers are both launching wails of discontent against metropolitan fops in their steel-and-glass palaces. For our bumbling botanist’s part, she proposes the scaling-up of the Native American custom of potlatches, or gifting ceremonies (in which serviceberries, the fruit of the shadbush tree, are often exchanged) so that rather than hoarding resources we instead store them “in the belly of my brother”. The enemy of the essay is faceless, multinational oil conglomerates. The farmers represent our own, homegrown rural mythology — that of the ruddy-cheeked countryman — protecting not only a livelihood but a part of our heritage against a spiteful, hopelessly urban Labour government who knows only the politics of envy. In each case, the countryside is upheld as the place of reality and common sense; the city is the locus of decadence, greed and misguidance.

Unlike Clarkson’s furious legion of farmers, and Wall Kimmerer herself with her “fingers stained with berry juice”, Wall Kimmerer’s celebrity fans seem to have more in common with those faceless urban elites. These include little-known smallholders Emma Watson, Natalie Portman and the Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert. But the crucial thing about The Serviceberry is that its readers are not expected to own, or have ever seen, a trowel. This essay is an invitation to fantasise, not to farm. All the swooning around Wall Kimmerer’s last book, Braiding Sweetgrass, was generated by city dreamers whose fingernails were more likely to bear a glossy coat of Chanel vernis than a grubby tint of local soil. The writer herself is highly likeable, and clearly knows her onions — but it’s worth questioning the point of all this when her readers are probably slinging her hardbacks into their baskets at Wholefoods before zooming off back to Putney in their gas-guzzling 4x4s. Perhaps I’m being uncharitable, but “organic living” has become more of an aesthetic than a commitment and one wonders, particularly given the lack of solid policy in this essay, whether its peace-and-love-soaked vagueness is so very marketable because it is unchallenging to the actual realities of readers. These fans are willing to take their brood pumpkin-picking at a farm shop, and might even trade in their gas boiler for a heat pump, but there are limits. What they really want is to feel good about it.

Wall Kimmerer’s writing is interesting and in places, inviting. Her presence in the essay is that of an exasperated botanist who, faced with conundrums in economic theory — not her natural domain, by her own admission — marches off to pick berries instead. There is some, perhaps unintended, comedy in this. Wall Kimmerer spends much of her time lecturing, and half of the effort of these encounters seems to go into shoehorning in sentimentalism. During one such talk at a “big, prestigious university”, she suggests changing the name of the College of Natural Resources to “the Department of Earthly Gifts”. Okay, we get it Robin.

There is also a sort of sad comedy in the way that Wall Kimmerer’s concept of a global economy run on generosity and love is always undone by the thorny reality that some people are, in the end, just a bit too selfish for that to ever work. She describes a free farm stand where extra produce is left out for anyone to take. In the end, someone takes the stand itself. Wall Kimmerer acknowledges that “cheaters who violate the trust” are a sticking point in the “gift economy” model — but insists that “collective action, trust, and cooperation” can prevent this from happening as an alternative to state intervention. Now, I’ve never been to rural Syracuse, New York, where this author lives in peace with neighbours, swapping “zukes” (courgettes, to you and me) and “asking the plants for their guidance”. But living in London for a few years, and reading signs of escalating decline in the way people behave out on the street — spitting, pissing, littering, harassing, mugging — has gradually chipped away at my teenaged belief in the essential goodness of people. If you leave your bike unlocked, it will go. If it’s a Friday or Saturday night, people will leave half-full beer bottles dribbling over seats on the Tube for TfL workers to scrub in the morning. And if you leave lovely vegetables out for people to take for free, some selfish fucker will nick the stand.

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Governments and the courts are meant to restrain these antisocial instincts; we cannot rely on the generosity of strangers in the way Wall Kimmerer insists we should — the great proposition of The Serviceberry. Now, I suspect that most readers also feel this way; but both this and Braiding Sweetgrass are not intended as genuine manuals for social change. If we look at Wall Kimmerer’s readership, they — unlike her, whom I respect for genuinely believing, however naively, in a better society — are not arsed about hauling the CEO of ExxonMobil in front of the Supreme Court. They are here for a holiday from the depressing doom-cycles of real life; as Havana hitmaker Camila Cabello writes in the blurb of an accompanying press release, the only real aim is to be vaguely reassured that “when we heal the Earth, we heal ourselves”. All of this, like many of Wall Kimmerer’s readers, is well-meaning and occasionally charming — but pointless.

Wall Kimmerer is writing at a time of climate collapse — and she is, I reckon, broadly right about aggressive growth agendas being responsible for the plundering of natural resources, and new approaches being needed. But the problem is that hers could never work. And so, given my doubts about The Serviceberry’s meaningfulness, it’s hard to swallow the at-times spiteful way she refers to her philosophy’s enemies — conventional, selfish, stupid capitalists. Teaching us the meaning of “calyx”, she adds: “In case you were craving a delicious new word, the way some people crave money.” Oh yeah, those other people and their idiotic desire for boring old, completely useless money — something she elsewhere refers to as mere “pieces of green paper”. Well, my wealth is my words. I am rich in other ways. Not in friends, though, because people are sick of me calling them fascist pigs for having bank accounts.

The biggest thing Wall Kimmerer and the farmers of Whitehall have in common is not a passion for the natural world but a passionate hatred of thoughtless city folk. “They’re all thieves, stealing our future, while we pass around the zucchini,” she writes. There is something so patronisingly adolescent about this image — posited, with a straight face, as a vision of what has gone wrong in environmental policy, and I have no doubt that this line will be repeated not only around the dinner tables of Beverly Hills by slow-living celebrities, but in the nightmare blunt rotations of grimy hostels in South-East Asia. Clearly, it will not make it to the boardrooms of oil giants, nor the conference halls of COP. But Wall Kimmerer and her readers already know this. Other than being deliciously smug, what purpose does The Serviceberry truly serve?

Donald Trump is no Napoleon, but he has captured the spirit of our age: America’s soul riding forth on X. It is hard to open any social media app today — pace Bluesky— and not be struck by the sense that something has shifted in the zeitgeist. The Right is winning and it’s becoming cool. A new epoch has begun. Where NFL players once took the knee, now they are doing the “Trump dance”, while UFC fighters bow to their great Caesar as he strides in the modern, fighting colosseums of today. Animal spirits have been released into the popular culture that are as powerful as they are unpredictable.

But what about those of us living outside America? There is no obvious British Joe Rogan or British Elon Musk today — the Horace and Crassus of our age. Perhaps that is because these men are just as powerful here as they are in the States. In fact, just as we have entered something of an economic depression these past 15 years, so too are we stuck in a cultural and ideological rut. To look at Britain today is to be struck by an overwhelming sense of quaint, platitudinous predictability: more poor Vienna than booming Austin. There is no British Musk because there is no British Silicon Valley; and there is no British Rogan, because there is almost no popular, home grown counter-cultural energy — not yet at least.

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But down at the farmers’ protest an intriguing presence strides into view: Jeremy Clarkson. “Why are you here Mr Clarkson?” the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire demanded as he joined those protesting the Government’s decision to impose inheritance tax on family farms worth over £1 million. “Well, I’m here to support farmers,” he replied, without obvious hostility. Derbyshire, though, persisted. “This is not about you and your farm and the fact that you bought a farm to avoid inheritance tax?”

As Derbyshire pointed out, Clarkson had written as much in The Sunday Times. “Classic BBC,” Clarkson replied, with seemingly genuine exasperation. “You people.”

Clarkson then proceeded to deliver a message of clean popular fury more in tune with the spirit of the day than anything I have heard out of Westminster in years — not since Take Back Control anyway. “Okay, let’s start from the beginning,” Clarkson began. “I wanted to shoot… which came with the benefit of not paying inheritance tax. Now I do. But people like me will put it in a trust and as long as I live for seven years that’s fine. But why should all these people do that?”

It was hard not to hear the distant sounds of the great populist panjandrum across the water in those remarks. “A lot of you don’t understand why Trump was so popular,” Dave Chapelle explained on Saturday Night Live. “The reason he’s loved is because people in Ohio had never seen someone like him. He’s what I call an honest liar. That first debate, I’d never seen anything like it, I’d never seen a white, male billionaire screaming at the top of his lungs: This whole system is rigged.”

Chapelle is referring to the scene when Hillary Clinton accused Trump of using a loophole to avoid paying taxes. Asked by the moderator whether this was true, Trump replied that of course it was. “I absolutely used it and so did Warren Buffet and George Soros and many of the other people that Hillary is getting money from,” he went on before delivering the killer line: “She complains that Donald Trump is taking advantage of the tax code, so why didn’t you change it when you were senator? The reason is because all your friends take the same advantage that I do.” The fact that Clarkson was attracted to buying a farm because it came with the benefit of avoiding inheritance tax will also, I suspect, be of little interest to most people in Britain who do not like this government. The fact that he said he bought a farm to go shooting and avoid inheritance tax will, in fact, be seen as welcome honesty.

Just as Trump hit on a central truth with his admission of tax avoidance — an honest lie as Chapelle put it — Clarkson alighted on a number of burning questions in British politics today which do not neatly map onto our traditional political system. When he asked why farmers should pay inheritance tax, Derbyshire replied with the obvious counter that if not farmers, then how else will the government fund public services? “I tell you,” Clarkson answered, pointing up at the government offices surrounding him. “Walk into any of the offices around here and if you don’t understand their job, fire them.” In other words: don’t tax; cut.

And here, not only do we have a British expression of the Trump zeitgeist, but a British incantation of the Musk agenda. The power of Musk’s prospective Department of Government Efficiency is that even in defeat, it opens up the prospect of something new in Western politics, much as Thatcher changed the nature of British politics even as she abandoned some core tenets of her agenda.

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Clarkson, though, represents something more interesting — and more distinctly British — than mere government efficiency. To watch even a few episodes of his hit show Clarkson’s Farm is to immediately realise that while it contains much of the energy of Top Gear, at heart it carries a far more profound message than the populist caricature he usually does little to disavow. Essentially, Clarkson’s Farm tells us that farming must be protected in a collective national endeavour because it provides our life source: food. It is elemental: an expression of an old, almost forgotten Toryism — not free-trade but protectionist, national, territorial and utterly opposed to centralising notions of uniformity.

The programme overlaps with other expressions of Toryism too: inheritance, obviously, but also questions of conservation and an instinctive opposition to a distant, bureaucratic state. Occasionally, as a viewer, you are suddenly struck by the sensation that Clarkson is quietly delivering a sermon on rural life, smuggled into your living room under the guise of an entertaining countryside farce, a Tractor Top Gear.

Clarkson pulled the same trick on the podium at the march, complaining not just about Starmer’s “infernal government” and the BBC being its mouthpiece, but also about the ordinary consumer who will buy imported chickens to save money. “Yeah, you can, but it’s so full of chlorine, it tastes like a swimming pool with a beak.”

Farming, Clarkson reminds us, remains a great touchstone issue of Brexit, shaping its eventual form. Liz Truss, remember, is held in open disdain by farmers — not for the insanity of her “mini budget”, but for the content of her free trade deals with New Zealand and Australia.

In Robert Blake’s biography of Disraeli, he captures the old Tory icon’s politics as that of “genuine hatred of centralisation, bureaucracy and every manifestation of the Benthamite state”. This, Disraeli believed, was what Gladstone represented. “[Disraeli] felt the sort of reverence that Burke had had for the many independent corporations and institutions which, however odd and anomalous, however contrary to the abstract symmetry, to what Burke called the ‘geometrical theories’, were the true bulwarks of English liberty,” Burke wrote. This, I think, remains the essence of the Tory instinct, still alive even as the party veers off towards libertarianism or social democracy.

“In a progressive country change is constant,” Disraeli once warned. “The great question is not whether you should resist change which is inevitable, but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws, and the traditions of a people, or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract principles.” To Disraeli, the former was a “national system” and the latter a “philosophic system”.

Clarkson represents the national system; Starmer and Reeves the philosophical one. If I were Starmer, I would be worried that this is the wrong side to be on today, especially in this era of Trump. Clarkson’s politics, it seems to me, are like T.E. Utley’s self-professed brand of Toryism: “at once traditionalist and populist, which holds sway in every public bar in the kingdom and is almost entirely denied parliamentary expression by the Establishment”. Just because Clarkson’s politics do not map onto the prejudices of the two main parties today — being neither pro-European nor pro-global free trade — does not invalidate them, but rather, potentially, elevates them.

Clarkson, like Trump, is not a new phenomenon in any sense. He is old, rich, famous and good on TV. He has been expressing the same kind of thoughts for as long as I have been alive. And yet he has become new by remaining still. And that is why this Labour government shouldn’t mock his appearance at yesterday’s farmers’ protest. “I don’t think farmers will go on strike,” Clarkson said. “I think farmers can do better than that. And I’ve got some ideas.”

This should give Keir Starmer pause. Rather than ignoring this protest as another squeal of special interests from the old Britain he intends to put out of its misery, he should take seriously the prospect that it is actually a first expression of the new Britain coming into being: not riding on a horse, but a tractor.  Starmer needs to do everything he can to ensure Clarkson’s ideas do not involve the words: “Reform UK”, “Start Up Party” or worst of all “the Tories”.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Overwhelmingly these brickbats are reserved for my agricultural colleagues; and no one lobs a brick at a yokel harder than George Monbiot, the archbishop of farmer-bashing. He reserves his most ardent damnations for livestock farmers, claiming for instance that “sheep farming in the UK has caused more ecological destruction than the entire built environment”. That being said, he is quite prepared to be a generalist in his hyperbole, intoning in his elitist tome Regenesis that, “farming is the number one threat to the planet”.

The hedge, too, is a blackthorn stick with which the anti-agri brigade beat our farmers. Every autumn, Twitter is flooded with photos of hedgerows that have been subjected to a hard cut by man and machine. Hashtags such as #Hedgewrecks are de rigueur; worse still, there is poetry. The fact that a farmer will face hefty fines, and lose subsidies, if he permits hedgerows to encroach a public right of way is ignored in the rush to make a self-righteous whinge.

This farmer-hate is curious. We all eat their produce. True, farmers aren’t altruistic angels: it is a career choice like any other. But the environmentalists, journalists and clicktivists who attack them completely misunderstand how the beloved landscapes of the English countryside are actually shaped. It is the actions of farmers, over many millennia, that are overwhelmingly responsible for, albeit inadvertently, creating much of the most familiar features. And there is no better evidence of this than the English hedgerow.

I’d like to think we hedgers are looked upon kindly because of the ancient beauty and intricacy of our craft. But perhaps it was hedgelaying’s appearance on Clarkson’s Farm that gave us a popularity boost. On reflection, however, I think England is so fond of us not for our actual work, but our workplace: the hedgerow itself. It is a bucolic archetype of English arcadia. Where woods are otherworldly and forests haunting, the hedgerow is homely: a place of blackberry picking and yellowhammers singing.

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But there would be no hedges without farmers. As early as 2500BC, proto-farmers were planting lines of thorny shrub species such as blackthorn, and then managing them by cutting and laying, all in order to create a semi-permanent livestock barrier. Then, as now, the hedge was in no way natural. Left to its own devices, a hedge will, after 30 years or so, morph into a straggly line of whippy trees, becoming a significantly poorer habitat than in its original man-made form. Today, the hedgerow is celebrated for the ecological role it plays, providing habitats for a huge range of wild animals: birds, mammals, and invertebrates. But they are not themselves wild. And the management interventions required to maintain these habitats are all entirely born of farming. It was mere happenstance that the hedge, man-managed to be sufficiently thick to retain a bullock or prevent a lamb from making a bid for freedom, also ideally suited the nesting linnet, bullfinch or whitethroat.

Hedges are functional, first and foremost. They have, therefore, been a permanently fluctuating feature of our rural landscape, reflecting the vagaries of the economy, population growth, and perpetual innovation in farming practice. The hedgerow expands when agriculture is flourishing; after the passing of the Enclosure Act in 1773, thousands of miles of new hedge were planted. However, come any agricultural downturn, such as the one that followed the defeat of Napoleon, our hedges dwindle, left to become gappy ruins. Many were grubbed out after the Second World War — though this was not agrarian devilment but the diktat of the Attlee government’s Ministry of Food, desperate to eke maximum production from farmland to feed a hungry post-war nation.

At the moment, our hedgerows are emerging from one of their cyclical periods of decline. A mapping project at the start of the year revealed that there are currently 390,000 km of English farmland hedges — enough to “wrap 10 times around the earth”. Yet the scientists involved were at pains to claim this huge figure is insufficient, saying that we have “lost approximately half of our hedgerows since the Forties”. Obviously, that statement is a guess, since we haven’t measured our hedges until now. But Hedgelink, the Tree Council and the National Farmers’ Union are all in agreement that we need more to improve biodiversity.

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The Government is on board: last year it announced that farmers must plant 45,000 miles of new hedgerows by 2050. But it is vital that existing hedgerows are well managed. Defra’s support for this is one of the few bits of the post-Brexit “Environmental Land Management” policy generally deemed fit for purpose. The grants available for laying, coppicing, gapping up or planting new hedges are sufficiently generous and accessible — in fact, 90% of my work is funded by them. So there are few excuses for landowners not to better manage their hedgerows or add more.

The trouble is, there are not enough people to do the job. While there is a glut of ecologists happy to charge farmers for advice on their hedgerows — the same cannot be said for those who actually do the hard graft. Just as the NFU believes there is a need for 49% more agricultural workers, the Chartered Institute of Foresters estimates a 70% shortfall in the arboricultural workforce. While ecology graduates struggle to find jobs — complaining that supply outweighs demand — not enough people want to get their hands dirty. I understand why young people might shun farming: you’ll only get slagged off by Team Monbiot. Yet the same cannot be said for a life spent in the hedgerows and coppice woods. The public loves us. And surely life as a hedger is the perfect alternative for those keen ecologists waiting forlornly for a role that never materialises?

If we are ever to maintain, let alone expand, our hedgerows, we need to invest in the practice, not just the theory. Universities clearly would never condescend to teach anything other than concept, and specialist land-based colleges have declined by 80% in the past four decades. Those still running offer little more than a few days’ practical instruction in hedgerow management.  I wonder: is this because modern society, which claims to care so passionately for the environment, has become too urbane, or urban, for young people to contemplate a career spent working on the land?

If so, this is a pity. A hedgelayer today is no mere billhook-wielding rustic. Our modern role requires brains as well as experience: it is a question of highly skilled brawn. The fact that few seem interested in rising to the challenge is an existential threat to the craft of hedgelaying. But this concern pales into insignificance compared to the threat to the hedge itself — and the myriad wildlife that calls them home. Like the blackberry bushes and the yellowhammers, these arteries of the land need guardians.

Almost a decade after his book was published, the latter view seems to have become embedded in our institutions, encouraged by the excesses of progressive sociology. The recent Wildlife and Countryside Link report submitted to MPs suggested that “racist colonial legacies continue to frame nature in the UK as a ‘white space’”. “Colonialism has driven the exploitation and erasure of the rights and knowledge of indigenous people, and the assertion of white, Western values and knowledge at the expense of other values and knowledges.” For this sort of unsympathetic account, the people of the countryside are not valuable members of a national community, but imposters and enemies whose very presence harms others.

Now, British farmers’ anger is starting to boil over, joining their counterparts from within the EU who have been in open revolt for months over low prices, cheap imports and environmental regulations. Britain’s farmers are traditionally more quiescent, but have been mounting their first public protests in recent weeks: including choking traffic at the port of Dover and 3,000 turning up at the Welsh Government building in Cardiff to get their voices heard. Meanwhile,  there are increasing signs that the Conservatives, the traditional party of the countryside, is losing traction in rural areas. A recent Survation poll concluded that 51 of the 100 most rural constituencies are set to switch to Labour at the next election, while a poll last year found only 36% of voters in rural seats agreed that the Tories “understand and respect rural communities and their way of life”.

Into this fractious atmosphere comes a timely Green Paper from the Social Democratic Party, the old SDP that just about survived the Eighties and has had a mini-revival lately under the leadership of William Clouston. Entitled Farms Fields & Food, its core theme is that, as Clouston puts it: “Cheap food is very expensive.” We may welcome it in the supermarket, but we pay for it in other ways: through suffering farm animals and poor public health, through degraded fields, rivers and wildlife. And through farmers giving up, their children leaving the family business rather than soldiering on. Margins are too small, the paperwork too gruelling, the lack of respect galling. And now, to top it off, they are facing organised gangs roaming the countryside and stealing their equipment, something to which they have no response; the police likewise.

The resulting reality is grim. One in five farms in England closed down between 2005 and 2015, with one in three of them classified as smaller farms. If trends continue, British family farms could virtually die out in the next 30 years — and with them the rural communities they support and the landscape they have created.

The story, as the report notes, is a familiar one from across British society: “Free trade and open labour markets have deterred investment in training and innovation, increased our reliance on over-extended global supply chains, forced food producers to prioritise yield over sustainability, and sold swathes of our countryside into foreign ownership.” As in the cities, the ground has started to erode under the feet from those whose families have lived there for generations. Others are moving in with other interests and priorities, more money and little familiarity with traditional ways of life.

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The SDP proposes a host of semi-radical, statist measures to address the situation. It wants Charter Co-operatives and Regional Marketing Boards to give more heft to small-scale producers. It wants an independent regulatory body for supermarkets to prevent the practices that often leave farmers stranded with suddenly unwanted produce. It wants a Royal Commission into conserving the British countryside. It wants affordable housing to be reserved for farm workers. And it wants to ban stuff: the routine use of antibiotics; junk food advertisements on TV and online; and imports of food and drink not produced to the UK’s environmental and animal welfare standards.

This is all quite a contrast to the establishment parties; perhaps playing that classic role of a smaller party in pushing the boat out on an issue, making it easier for others to jump in later. Amid the increasing alarm in country areas, Rishi Sunak came out with a new grant scheme and food security index recently, but this looks like more dancing to the tune of polls and headlines, a desperate move to mollify yet another group of restless natives.

For ultimately, the Conservative Party’s attitude to the land and farming is really subservient to their wider economic assumptions and the interest groups that feed into them, notably in finance and property development, sectors that are very much global in scale and urban in origin. They treat the land of Britain as “UK plc” or Atlantic Zone Production Unit No. 325: a place to be managed not for the sake of the people who live on it but as a business whose purpose is to maximise returns for shareholders. Today’s Tories understand land primarily as an economic resource open to market forces. If it does not pay economically, then it should be sold to someone who can make a better fist of it, perhaps by building houses for the growing population rather than trying to feed them. Competition, trading and development will solve problems naturally over time according to this perspective.

But this account is detached from any specific valuation of farmers and their work, of the origins of food and of rural community. It regards land as a tradeable asset with no wider meaning. And its most immediate, visible costs are defrayed onto places and people who are relatively few in number and/or have relatively little lobbying power: such as those family farmers and working-class consumers seeking the cheapest food. If the approach means further large slugs of farmland being taken out of farming use, then so be it. Global Britain will fill in the shortfall with cheaper imports as a result of post-Brexit trade deals. This is part of a wider story of neoliberalism that we might call the Glazerisation of Britain, by which the country’s territory serves like Manchester United has for the Glazer family of Florida: as a distant resource to be tapped for income, without reference to its meaning and significance for those who live and breathe it.

Contrasted with this, the SDP’s Green Paper is a refreshing reminder of the reality on the ground. It refers to, for instance, how “population density has increased by over 15% since 2000 and is predicted to keep rising”. Quite simply, as many progressive campaigners have warned us in recent years, Britain is a small rainy island drifting in the Atlantic Ocean: our space is strictly limited. The population of England alone increased by 6.5% between 2011 and 2021 to an estimated 56,536,000, giving the country a population density of 434 per square km. Only tiny Malta and the flat Netherlands have a larger density in Europe.

Yet our rulers, think tanks and indeed those same campaigners treat the territory as if it is boundless. We need more workers, more houses, more energy production and transmission, more water reservoirs, more roads and railways and schools and hospitals and GP surgeries. We need more factories and distribution centres, more technology centres and the rest. And we also need more trees and better protection of wildlife.

All these require space. Yet in a small and already crowded piece of land, they are competing with each other. And so choices must be made. But how?

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At the moment, they are made through an incoherent combination of market, local and national decision-making, with plans signed off in isolation. But leaving land use to the market and the current patchwork of isolated state interventions means certain types of life and community dying off. There is only so much love to go around. And the same goes for land. To give more weight to the interests and opinions of farmers and rural communities means reducing that of others who currently have more prominence.

To justify such a re-allocation will require some serious politics, but also some serious strategic thinking. We need to decide what our limited land is for and take the steps needed to apportion it rather than rushing headlong to meet one set of needs, like housing a rapidly growing population, without thinking about energy, water and food provision. We need a full-scale land strategy, a major piece of work to lay out what our priorities are and how to meet them. “Joined-up government” is a bit of a joke term in Westminster, but it really is time for some of it now.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we’ll get it. Although Labour is sizing up the curtains in No. 10, the recent protests by farmers against its administration in Wales suggest a relative lack of understanding and interest in the party for rural concerns. Indeed, Labour seems even more detached than the Tories from the interests and rhythms of the countryside. If rural voters want to be heard, it seems they will have to continue their revolt — and might want to abandon the establishment parties altogether.

I still remember her magnificent tail vanishing into a tangle of leaves. Or at least, I think I do. It’s all slightly hazy. But I don’t believe she was just a large badger, as one incredulous friend suggested. Though as a Londoner, my idea of a panther (or a badger, for that matter) is probably rather like Carpaccio’s idea of the lion of Saint Jerome. Neither of us had much experience to work with.

Perhaps I was willing it to be true, but no other explanation seemed to fit. And I wasn’t the only one to think so. Only yesterday, a construction worker claimed to have seen another legendary leopard, the Beast of Cumbria, while strolling across a field. The British Big Cats Society, meanwhile, receives reports of between 300 and 500 sightings per year, the vast majority regarding black panthers. But though I was in good company, it was still bewildering for me — a liberal “normie” in every respect — to face such a mystical assault on my Common Sense.

Believers squabble over how big cats ended up roaming the Cotswolds, but most trace the story back to the Sixties. Then, exotic pets were the height of fashion, with Harrods stocking a fine range of big cats, alligators, and even a baby elephant, which Ronald Reagan bought in 1967. But that all changed with the Dangerous Wild Animals Act of 1976, when, at least according to big cat enthusiasts, bohemians secretly released their pets into the wild to dodge the new ownership fees. Some later confessed. And in 1980, a puma was captured in the Scottish Highlands.

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This theory does, admittedly, have one slight flaw: there has never been any conclusive evidence of a big cat colony in Britain. And that’s not for lack of state cooperation. In 1983, 50 of our toughest Royal Marines, aided by a pack of beagles, went hunting for the Beast of Exmoor — but they found not a whisker. Later, in 1994, after a grisly sheep massacre was blamed on the Beast of Bodmin Moor, the then-junior agricultural minister, Nicholas Soames, commissioned a six-month inquiry into the matter. The report concluded that there was “no verifiable evidence for the presence of a ‘big cat’”. More recently, in 2012, a National Trust-commissioned DNA test into a suspicious roe deer carcass, which bore the marks of a ravenous feline, pointed to a lowly fox.

And while there is some talk among Big Cat trackers of state cover-ups and leopard corpses in government freezers, this is limited to an extreme fringe. What is fascinating, in fact, is how this theory has remained largely localised, unpoliticised, and untainted. Unlike UFO sightings, it has not yet cascaded into a sinister global conspiracy, nor has it set the internet aflame with coded talk of malign forces: the World Economic Forum, the Great Reset and the global capitalist elite.

This isn’t because Big Cat theory lacks the right components. If I were to conjure my own conspiracy, I dare say I wouldn’t find it too difficult. I would simply invent a cabal of rogue Rewilders, living in splendid stately homes in the Cotswolds, who had concocted a Plot to release panthers into the wild to wipe out local livestock — and, in the spirit of the Highland Clearances, drive honest farmers from the land. These wicked Rewilders — all Davos Men, of course — would then appropriate the empty farmland, fill it with enormous peat bogs, and live royally off the lavish government Net Zero subsidies that would soon roll in. Given the scarcity of land and livestock, the poor would be herded into packed cities and forced to eat mealworm porridge instead of meat, while the rich would feast on free-roaming venison and frolic in fields of wildflowers.

As with all the best conspiracies, mine would contain an acorn of truth. Many British farmers now fear for their livelihoods, as the Government rolls out a radical post-Brexit farming subsidy scheme that rewards green initiatives such as planting woodland or rewilding. In other words, it pays farmers to cease farming. Indeed, in order to meet the Government’s environmental targets, a quarter of UK farmland will need to be reassigned. All I’d need to do is pour this very real crisis into my potion of venomous half-truths. And there is no shortage of rage to ignite: farmers are already blockading European cities and hurling eggs at the European Parliament. How long until British farmers join the resistance?

My fantastical Plot would perfectly embody Richard Hofstadter’s definition of the “paranoid style”: “a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life”. But as the real Big Cat theory has not yet spiralled in this manner, it seems more like a lost fragment of folklore than a conspiracy.

There is a certain romance in this idea. While British folklore largely died out after the Enlightenment, it still evokes a pre-industrial age before trains, television and 4G stripped the nation of its cultural diversity, belittled its local beliefs, customs and dialects, and forged a Great British Monoculture. Those were the days when Britain’s peripheries weren’t pining to resemble its centre; when people didn’t drink from the same fountain of knowledge, but from their own unwieldy springs. And if hobgoblins were said to wander the forests of one remote county, an outsider would hardly dare to suggest otherwise.

It was a time most tenderly depicted by George Eliot in Silas Marner. She writes that, “to the peasants of old times, the world outside their own direct experience was a region of vagueness and mystery”. And her heart aches for those rare few who are forced to leave their native towns for a “new land where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas — where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have been nourished”. It was as if other realms were ruled by different gods.

This dappled land didn’t just vanish. It was crushed by middle-class Victorians in their quest to rid the nation of uncivilised superstition, and to forever replace the scourge of Magic with Enlightenment Science and Reason. The idea that “primitive” belief systems lingered not just in the colonies, but at home too, haunted the intellectuals of the age — and led to the creation of folklore as a field of study. It ultimately came down to class: the historian Thomas Waters argues that there was a “growing sense that supernatural credulity was a distinctly proletarian trait”. And that middle-class Victorians, having been enfranchised in the 1832 Great Reform Act, were seeking to define themselves through their devotion to reason.

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We can see Big Cat theory, then, as a vestige of this bygone world; a bottled cry against industrialisation. After all, as The Economist’s Jem Bartholomew argues, “the mythical beasts of the British imagination often appear at moments of modernisation”. Early sightings of the Loch Ness Monster, for instance, coincided with an upgrade to the Highlands road network. And after the Second World War, fearsome felines seem to have kept local tabloids in business, from the Beast of Bodmin Moor and the Cougar of Cupar to the Fen Tiger, the Nottingham Lion and the Sydenham Panther. Nowadays, when most British children will never know the song of a turtle dove or the scuffling of a hedgehog, the image of a panther padding over a neurotically well-tended lawn is a bewitching one.

Yet what if we have lost something more than folklore? By eroding local beliefs, ridiculing superstition, and insisting on uniformity of rational thought, we have perhaps made ourselves more, not less, vulnerable to conspiracy. Of course, the paranoid style is as old as time, its long cast of villains assuming many masks: Jesuits, Templars, Freemasons, global Capitalists, Communists. But I can’t help but wonder whether we have created a belief system so rigid and coherent that the slightest doubt can cause it all to crumble.

There once was a time when you could believe in witches, fairies, and hobgoblins, and still have absolute faith in God, Science, and your King. There were many contradictory authorities and infinite ways of seeing. But now, truth has become an all-or-nothing game: if you start to question the “Establishment” in one respect — whether over Covid vaccines, 5G or urban planning — the chances are it won’t be long until you’re drawn into an upside-down, Manichean world of conspiracy. And in this dark wonderland, as Hofstadter describes, there is “no room for mistakes, failures, or ambiguities”; everything is evidence of malicious intent. To the paranoid soul, the flick of a panther’s tail at twilight is enough to cast doubt over the entire system.

He believed that independent yeoman farmers were the only Americans capable of preserving the new nation’s morals and keeping it from “corruption”. Since then, the American family farm has always stood for a way of life — the best way of life, in fact — and it has been venerated almost religiously. A heavy burden indeed.

That the aristocratic Jefferson never once harnessed up a plow and instead relied on slave labour to do all his farming for him was, at one level, a fitting irony. The small family farmer Jefferson conjured was always more myth than reality and became more so over the decades. Along the way, the myth has woven itself into the national DNA. According to a 2018 survey by Gallup, more than a quarter of Americans wish they could live on a farm. Fewer than 1.5% of us actually do.

In fact, farmers tend to be a minority in rural areas. Roughly 25% of America’s population is classed as rural, which means that most rural people are doing something other than farming. They drive long-haul trucks; they are members (or retired) members of the military; they work for local or state government; they work in manufacturing plants which have emerged in farm fields since the Sixties. These folks, however, have not become part of our rural mythos.

Jefferson’s myth of the yeoman farmer was turned into national policy in 1862 when Congress passed the Homestead Act, which offered any American 160 acres of land for free, provided the land was farmed for five years. Between 1862 and 1890 an area larger than Great Britain came under cultivation as white settlers gobbled up land that had been cleared by the U.S. Army of its original inhabitants.

But as they rushed to take advantage of this giveaway, farmers did not behave the way Jefferson rhapsodised that they would. Far from being “independent”, American farmers relied on the Federal government in all sorts of ways, particularly to provide them with water through big dam and irrigation projects in the West. Nor was self-sufficiency their goal. They farmed to make as much money as they could, and from the outset they were tied to national and international commodities markets. By the 1880s, more than 30% of those homestead farmers had mortgaged their land to raise more capital. Far from standing in some virtuous opposition to Big City financiers, farmers helped to pioneer the instruments of modern finance capitalism.

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Perhaps more than anything else, however, the family farm industrialised rapidly and dramatically. The Jeffersonian fantasy pitted the pastoral as the opposite of the industrial — but American farmers saw no such distinction. They eagerly purchased the latest industrial devices to make farming easier. The John Deere corporation, maker of all sorts of farm equipment, was founded in 1837, and its last reported revenue statement (2022) topped $52 billion. In 1865, when the Civil War ended, it took 61 hours of labour to produce an acre of wheat; by 1900 that time had dropped to three hours thanks to labour-saving technology. In the Twenties, International Harvester — another vast farm machinery producer — ran an ad campaign around the theme “Every Farm a Factory”.

The industrialisation of farming, made possible by its financialisation, has had two predictable results: farming itself required less and less labour, and farms got bigger and bigger in a quest for efficiencies of scale. As early as 1910, the US Census reported significant population loss from farming areas in the middle of the country, and that exodus of people continued across the 20th century. The 1960 Census, to take another example, reported that of the 1,520 counties in the 18 states that roughly constitute the national midsection, from Mississippi and Louisiana to North Dakota, Montana, and Minnesota, 61% lost population during the previous decade; this figure rose to 92% in the counties of Arkansas.

Industrialisation has also led to the consolidation of farms. The number of farming operations peaked in 1935 at about seven million. Now the figure stands at two million. As a result, the average size of an American farm is 445 acres, roughly twice the size of the average in the UK (215 acres). But even that figure is a bit misleading because of the way farms are counted in the first place. If we look at individual states in the nation’s farm belt, the numbers get much bigger: in Kansas, the average is now 780 acres; Nebraska, 1,000 acres; in Montana, over 2,100 acres. A farmer in part of rural Ohio told me a few years ago that, if you wanted to make a full-time living here, you need at least 2,000 acres. “Get big or get out!” Earl Butz, Secretary of Agriculture under Richard Nixon, liked to tell farmers, and one wonders what Jefferson would have made of him.

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That’s partly why I’m not sure we ought to even use the word “farm” anymore. It’s an old word, which elides as much as it describes. The kind of set-up it describes — with a homestead at its centre, animals raised for family consumption in the barn, crops grown for market — disappeared more than half a century ago at least. As one Illinois farmer described it: “General farming belongs to our past. . .When I was a child, of course we had pigs, and put down the pork in brine for the winter, and of course we had chickens, and cows. . . . Orchards [were] plowed under to make room for more beans. That’s what we grow now, soy beans and corn.” That was in 1957.

Farming, as it is practised in the United States today, is more aptly described as industrial calorie production. To call 1,500 acres of corn, genetically modified to withstand harsh chemical pesticides and intended for a high-fructose corn syrup plant, a “farm” is a bit like calling a highly automated Ford factory a “workshop”.

The distance between the myth of the family farm and the realities of American agriculture explains why we often speak of a farm “crisis” in the United States, and we have done so for over a century. Farmers became charity cases in 1985. Inspired by the Live-Aid rock festival to benefit Ethiopian famine victims, Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp organised Farm Aid to raise money for families losing their farms. The Farm-Aid fundraising project continues to this day, and its website boasts: “Farm Aid has raised more than $78 million to promote a strong and resilient family farm system of agriculture.”

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That distance between myth and reality is also, I believe, at the root of the increasingly conservative, increasingly angry politics found in some (but certainly not all) rural areas. Of course, measured against the pastoral myth, with all of its redeeming and moral power, any reality is bound to come up short. But a sense of disappointment has become acute in economically distressed rural areas and in the small towns that once served as the social and economic centres of agrarian hinterlands. Drive through these places and you’re likely to find nothing but a bar and a pizza shop left on the Main Street, as other shops are put out of business by a ginormous Walmart 10 miles away. Much of rural and small-town America can be seen by those who live there as landscapes of loss. In these places and under those circumstances, who wouldn’t yearn to make America great again?

But as the Farm Aid website suggests, the Jeffersonian myth persists. Many Americans continue to believe that the small-scale “family farm” is at the heart of American agriculture, and even more politicians parrot that rhetoric. This celebration of the family-farm fantasy is one of the few remaining tropes shared by both political parties.

The Farm Bill, a vast, sprawling, and expensive piece of legislation, is up for renewal during this legislative session. Whatever its final details, it will undoubtedly provide an almost bottomless grab-bag of subsidies and other goodies for industrial-scale agricultural producers, as it has for the last 50 years. I’m guessing, however, that the elected officials who will shape the legislation will sing the song of the American family farm yet again, and voters will cheer in genuflection. This is a myth that will not die.

Times are indeed pretty good for Caroline van der Plas. Surrounded by the thousands of blooms that adorn the Royal FloraHolland Trade Fair, the leader of the BoerBurgerBeweging (BBB), the Dutch farmer-citizen party, is here to baptise a new pink rose named in her honour. She’s also here to rally support among the nation’s sympathetic flower-growers before this month’s general election.

“Farmers are fighting hard,” she tells them. “Not just to survive — but also for the environment and for the energy transition. We will keep representing the voice of common sense in the years ahead.”

In the splintered political landscape of the Netherlands, this voice of the countryside has spent the past years thrusting itself into the mainstream. In March, as the Dutch government formulated plans to buy out thousands of “peak polluter” farms, the BBB soldiered on, winning the nation’s regional elections and seizing the biggest share of the Dutch Senate.

Since then, some of her supporters have recently switched to another new party, Pieter Omtzigt’s centre-right New Social Contract, wooed by his growing reputation as a corruption-buster and strong showing in the polls. But the BBB is still set to win up to 11 MPs on November 22, a huge gain on its single seat in the last general election. In the Dutch system of proportional representation, there is a high chance that it will be invited to be part of the next coalition government.

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To do so, however, the BBB will need to shake off its association with the radical Right groups who joined its farmer protests last year. When I put this to Van der Plas, she downplays the risk. “That’s simply not true and I always get a bit cross about it,” she says. “If you look at our voting behaviour and what we do, we are a centre-right party.”

Today, the BBB has expanded from the single issue of farming. Its representatives frequently talk about a “noaberstaat” (a state based on a traditional sense of community), more power for parliament, pro-business policies and an increased social safety net. It also wants to limit asylum to 15,000 migrants a year and impose housing rules for labour migrants. All form the basis of its election manifesto, which party officials refused to have costed by independent economists. “We don’t speak in woolly words,” Van der Plas explains. “We speak the language of the people on the street. And that appeals to a lot of people.”

Her programme certainly appeals to the crowd watching the “Sweet Caroline” rose being christened. “It’s good that she is here,” Arno Heemskerk, an orchid grower from Zevenhuizen says. “There are some who would rather get rid of the farmers and the growers, and we are made out to be big polluters. Of course, we need to do something for the climate, but if there’s one sector that has been busy for years, it is the horticultural sector. We need to make the transition but we need more time to do it.”

One rose grower, who wishes to stay anonymous, suggests that support for the BBB is also motivated by a fear of the Left. He’s particularly concerned about the return of Frans Timmermans, a former European politician who headed up the European Green Deal and now leads a new GreenLeft-Labour coalition. “We are busy seven days a week producing these roses,” he says. “Anyone but Timmermans. We are afraid of him.”

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Steven Van Schilfgaarde, chief executive of Royal FloraHolland, is more optimistic about Van der Plas. “What I see in the BBB is that they want to listen, they have a warm heart for the sector and they understand its economic importance for the Netherlands,” he says.

As the world’s second-largest agricultural exporter, farming has always been a central pillar of Dutch politics. But it also remains a divisive issue. As well as making up some 1.4% of the country’s GDP, it is also responsible for nitrogen-based and phosphate emissions and a major contributor to unlawful levels of damage to protected nature reserves. In response, the BBB does not deny that the farming sector needs to reduce pollution, but instead believes that this must happen more slowly, giving farmers “perspective” on future income rather than just buy-outs to stop.

By doing this, says Bart Koenen, a researcher at Kantar Public, the BBB is attempting to distance itself from its depiction as a radical protest party and brand itself as a voice of common sense. “We have had four [Mark] Rutte governments and the need has grown strongly for a new kind of politics, new faces, a more transparent government,” he says. “It is quite a Left-wing party on social security, access to medical care and affordable transport, and so it’s in a position to speak to a large proportion of the electorate in the cities. But on the other hand, it wants a quota on migration, scoring well with the Dutch public because a lot of people find immigration a big problem that hangs together with a huge housing shortage.”

He points out the BBB’s approach to scrapping nitrogen pollution rules — which currently restrain speeds on motorways and house-building — plays well in solving the country’s lack of an estimated 390,000 homes. “The BBB says that the nitrogen pollution problem isn’t important: we need to build houses.”

In the hope of making this happen, Van der Plas has spoken openly about a potential coalition with Omtzigt’s New Social Contract, which is campaigning primarily around better governance after a series of expensive government scandals over childcare benefits, the Groningen gas wars and unpopular Covid lockdowns. Sarah de Lange, professor of political pluralism at the University of Amsterdam, sees new voices on the centre-right thriving following the total collapse of traditional government parties. “The far-Right in itself is not doing that great, contrary to popular narrative,” she says. “But that is because other parties are doing so well. The core message of the BBB is about the good people in the countryside or provinces who have common sense, against the cosmopolitan elite that is neglecting part of the country. It is agrarian populist with far-Right leanings on some issues [such as immigration].”

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But Van der Plas, a charismatic and straight-talking figure, is working hard to appeal in the cities too. After the flower presentation, a swig of fizz and a mint, she will be whisked off to a photoshoot outside the massive trade fair. Later, she will take off her Doc Martens to have tea in her socks in a caravan with a community of travelling people in Amsterdam.

Joining her out campaigning, Claudia van Zanten, a former councillor for the liberal VVD in Amsterdam and seventh on the BBB candidate list, says it is a party of business that does not just appeal in the countryside. “BBB is a party of the community that is committed to all residents of the Netherlands, farmers and citizens,” she says. “We want a smaller government with fewer civil servants and impossible rules… that pays attention to the human dimension again.” It’s a message, she points out, that did well earlier this year in parts of Amsterdam Municipality such as Weesp. And it appears to have established a stable level of support elsewhere; Van der Plas in particular won public admiration over summer, when she claimed she had no desire to be prime minister, tottering around and abroad “in high heels”.

“I’d never have thought that this would have happened when I was a little girl,” she tells the crowd as she pours pink fizz over a bunch of “Sweet Caroline” blooms intended for her Irish mother. “I am going to tell her: ‘Your daughter has her own rose!’” And when election results are in and coalition negotiations start, she may well find she is coming up roses too.

What images define the British countryside in 2023? Closed pubs; a new estate of boxy, pricey houses; the packed waiting room at the one doctor’s surgery within 20 miles; farmers at kitchen tables reading trolling tweets by vegans and rewilders; polluted rivers; empty beer cans beside bus stops where the bus now longer stops; the red-brick cottage which working people once rented, but which has now been turned into an Airbnb; the Ocado van delivering supplies to the second-homers; and, if you look closely, the shadowy figures breaking into farmyards before roaring off into the night in a Merc Sprinter van.

Crime in the countryside often sounds like a bit of a laugh: too much underage cider with Rosie down The Crown, or ruddy-faced rogues off The Archers rustling a few sheep. But there’s a truth behind the clichés. Livestock theft has always been a problem in the sticks, although it isn’t just rural rascals nicking cows and sheep these days — it’s organised crime. An estimated £2.4 million worth of livestock was stolen in 2021, and this figure is increasing as the cost-of-living crisis bites, with the stolen animals going to back-street butchers. It is believed that the meat is then sold door to door by criminals posing as ethical organic meat suppliers.

Then there is the killing of sheep by pet-illiterate pandemic dog buyers (cost to farmers: £1.5 million in 2021), industrial fly-tipping, trespassing, fuel siphoning, and the nicking of £2.6 million worth of Land Rover Defenders for parts in 2021. There’s the hare coursing, the “liberation” of lambs by vegan activists, and the theft of farm quad bikes, tractors, machinery and technical equipment by roving overseas gangs. Especially sought-after are the pricey Global Positioning Units (GPS) on modern tractors and combine harvesters, which can cost up to £20,000 each.

There has long been a black market in agricultural kit destined for Eastern Europe, but according to the National Rural Crime Unit (NRCU), the main outlet for the burgled goods is now Russia. Western sanctions following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine have left the Russian bread-basket thirsty for stolen farm machinery. The National Farmers Union, the main rural insurer, believes that the cost of GPS theft doubled to more than £500,000 in the first four months of 2023, compared with the same period last year. While gangs have targeted the arable farms of eastern England for several years, they now operate up and down the country; in the last week of May, GPS units were stolen from farms from Wiltshire up to the Scottish Borders. In many instances, the farms were “cased” or surveilled by drones.

The problem is only getting worse. In the decade up to 2021, crime rates rose nearly three times faster in rural towns and villages across England and Wales than in the rest of the country. In the first quarter of 2022 alone, the cost of rural crime rose 40%. And yet, despite all this, the Countryside Alliance Rural Survey for Wales reported in February that 56% of respondents believed that the police were failing to take countryside crime seriously.

All of which hints at the real crime perpetrated on the countryside: it’s been abandoned. For what seems like forever, the shires have belonged to the Conservative Party, but the crime wave and the endless neglect are offering opposition parties sniffs of victory. The Green Party is surging; in the May local elections, the Greens even won Mid Suffolk district council from the Conservatives, taking 24 of the 34 seats and securing their first ever majority-held council in the UK. Overall, the Greens doubled their councillors nationally from 240 to 481. In the Sussex market town of Lewes, the Tories, once the largest party, were wiped off the electoral map.

Even Labour, usually as popular in the countryside as foot-and-mouth disease, feels victory in the air. Responding to the Countryside Alliance’s survey on rural crime, shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said: “These figures show just how concerned people are about crime, including in rural communities across the country.” She went on to make her pitch in true-blue, law-and-order political territory: “Labour is the party of law and order. The next Labour government will deliver a Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee, with 13,000 extra neighbourhood police and PCSOs, and proper action to tackle antisocial behaviour.”

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More coppers in the countryside? That’s exactly what rural communities want to hear. At the Future Countryside Conference last week, Labour peer Peter Mandelson set out his party’s rural stall with some gusto, reminding the audience that, despite lacklustre rural returns in recent years, the Labour Party had historically taken a decidedly pro-countryside approach. The “countryside was, is and will be a great Labour cause”, he said. He also warned the progressive wing of his party against “picking a fight” with rural people and their traditions, before taking aim at the Conservatives’ rural record in government for the past 13 years, declaring that he saw “a Conservative party that has taken rural Britain for granted” and that country people are “feeling let down and angry”.

Mandy, nobody’s fool, is sensitive to rural discontent. He was, as a player in Tony Blair’s government, on the wrong side of the 2002 Liberty and Livelihood march, the biggest rural demonstration ever. But he’s correct to note that this rebellious Us (the country people) vs. Them (the townies) mentality is boiling over once again. I’ve spent the last fortnight travelling around the West Country, including visiting the agricultural Three Counties Show at Malvern, where one young woman farmer said to me: “If the fucking crime is what pronoun to use, then they [city types] need a fucking sense of priorities.” She then went on to list various Tory deficiencies regarding the countryside, from “confusion” on agricultural policies to failure to “deliver anything from Brexit”.

She, like many other farmers, won’t be voting Conservative at the next election. That number has plunged since 2020, according to a December 2022 survey by Farmer’s Weekly. Just 42% said they would vote Conservative in a general election, down from 71% in 2020. The countryside is seeing red. Mandelson is hoping it will vote red. That might happen here and there; more likely, I suspect, is that at the next election, the countryside will stick two fingers up at the lot of them at the next election. 

“When they’re dried and ground into powder, it smells like a mixture of mushroom, soil and macadamia nut,” says Keiran Olivares Whitaker, 39, founder and CEO of Entocycle, the leading British tech company farming these larvae. “And when you taste it, it’s like pork scratchings.”

But you can’t taste Entocycle’s end product yet, because the sale of farmed insects for human consumption isn’t allowed in the UK (though several applications to the Food Standards Agency for black soldier fly protein to be allowed on sale, as a “novel” food, are expected to be approved soon). Instead, it is intended as a high-protein, low-carbon replacement for animal feeds currently based mainly on soya or fish meal, the sourcing of which is causing rampant deforestation and declining seafood populations.

The race to embrace insect farming has never seemed so urgent. According to the World Economic Forum and its post-Covid “Great Reset” initiative, insects are an overlooked source of protein whose consumption will help limit climate change. Last year, the global market for insect protein was worth around $1.5 billion — and, according to “Food Revolution”, a report by Barclays Research, it will grow to $8 billion by 2030.

Certainly, the environmental drivers for insect farming are powerful. Producing insect protein requires one-tenth of the feed, water and land needed for beef production, and it results in only 1% of the greenhouse gas emissions. This is because the food needed to produce all this sustainable insect protein could come largely from waste — the black soldier fly can live off almost anything — and we’ve never wasted more food.

So why not let insects use that waste and bring it back into the food chain? Well, because some scientists and animal welfare groups argue that farming insects could be cruel. And if it is, the sheer numbers of creatures affected by it would be enormous.

According to a paper authored by some of the world’s most prominent biologists and bioethicists published last year and entitled “Can insects feel pain?”, evidence is growing that some insect species (only a tiny fraction has yet been researched) are sentient, to a greater or lesser degree, and so can experience some feelings, including pain. And if they can, the argument goes that they should be brought into line with other farmed animals when it comes to welfare regulations governing the way they are reared and killed. At present, there is none.

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“All of the cows, chickens, turkeys, pigs and sheep slaughtered each year amount to about 80 billion animals, whereas there’s already well over a trillion insects being slaughtered every year,” says Dr Andrew Crump, one of the paper’s authors and a lecturer in animal cognition and welfare at the Royal Veterinary College. “There are 300 million beef cows slaughtered every year, but 300 billion mealworms. The numbers are huge, so the issue is that if we get it wrong with welfare, we’re leading to suffering on this absolutely gigantic scale. The problem is that the basic kind of welfare knowledge just isn’t there. With insect farming, we’re basically where we were with conventional farming more than 50 years ago.”

Determining whether an insect feels pain is not as easy as it may sound, because behaviour that might look as if a creature is experiencing it could be put down to a physiological reaction called nociception. The paper on insect pain, published last October in Advances in Insect Physiology, explains: “Nociception does not require pain: hand withdrawal from a hot stove is a nociceptive reflex controlled by neurons relaying signals from the nociceptors in the hand, to the spinal cord, and back again. All this happens before nerve impulses reach the brain (where pain is experienced). Thus, when animals display nociception, this does not necessarily demonstrate that they can feel pain.”

One experiment conducted by Dr Crump and his colleagues found clear evidence that bumblebees can feel pain. (There is no likelihood that bees will be farmed for food other than honey, but that doesn’t make the experiment any the less significant.) Describing the findings, the academics wrote: “We gave bumblebees four feeders: two heated and two unheated. Each feeder dispensed sugar water, which bumblebees love. When every feeder had the same concentration of sugar water, bees avoided the two heated feeders. But when the heated feeders dispensed sweeter sugar water than the unheated feeders, bumblebees often chose the heated feeders. Their love of sugar outweighed their hatred of heat. This suggests bees feel pain, because (like humans) their responses are more than just reflexes.”

They also concluded that flies could experience pain, again because of their reaction to heat. “Hungry flies are less likely to jump away from extreme heat than satiated flies,” they wrote. “Decapitated flies can still jump, but they do not display this difference, demonstrating their brain’s involvement in heat avoidance. Communication between the brain and the responsive body part is also consistent with pain.”

Last year, the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act included the first invertebrates to be given farming protections: decapod crustaceans, including crabs, lobsters and prawns, and cephalopods, including squid and octopuses. Their inclusion came largely as a result of a sentience framework drawn up by a team of researchers led by Dr Jonathan Birch, associate professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics and principal investigator on the university’s Foundations of Animal Sentience project.

The framework has eight criteria ranging from whether an animal has nociceptors and integrative brain regions to whether it can trade off threat of injury against opportunity for reward, or whether it responds to local anaesthetics or analgesics. No single criterion is proof that it can feel pain, but combinations of some of them may suggest that it can. Octopuses satisfied seven out of the eight criteria; squid and cuttlefish satisfied four; crabs five; and lobster three.

The “Can insects feel pain?” paper, of which Dr Birch was a co-author, concluded that flies and cockroaches satisfied six of the criteria, which amounts to “strong evidence” for pain. Other insects met fewer of the criteria, yet the researchers concluded that there was “substantial evidence” they could experience pain. Ants, wasps and bees met four criteria, and crickets, grasshoppers, butterflies and moths met three.

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Perhaps surprisingly, not all environmentally conscious and animal-friendly groups support insect farming, in spite of its many obvious advantages. When I asked People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) what they thought of it, they simply replied that we could get all the protein we needed from plants. Elsewhere, Phil Brooke, Compassion in World Farming’s research and education manager, argues that feeding animals protein from insects makes the food chain less efficient: “Less than 40% of the protein you feed to a chicken ends up in the meat you eat. If you feed a salmon, it’s only 28%. If you feed a pig or a trout, it’s just over 20%. And it can be lower for other species. It’s the simple law of ecology that at each stage in a food chain, you lose energy. So if you’re feeding flies on waste food, we think it would be better to simply feed that waste food directly to animals, like pigs, and miss out a layer.”

Back at Entocycle, tucked away in a railway arch a stone’s throw from London Bridge, I put all of these points to Olivares Whitaker, who has a degree in environmental design and conservation. He seems unfazed: “The phrase ‘plenty more fish in the sea’ is a complete fallacy. The latest data says we have exhausted more than 51% of all fish. We have destroyed the coral reefs, the nurseries of the ocean. By messing up the coral reefs, you mess up the juvenile fish populations, and if you mess up the juvenile fish populations, you mess up all the seabirds, you mess up the seabirds, you mess up the ecosystem.

“Our rainforests are being cut down for large monoculture crops. What most people don’t realise is that 90% of all soy that’s brought to the UK doesn’t go into your soy burger or your soy milk. It goes straight in to feed the cow, straight in to feed the pig, straight in to feed the chicken. And it’s really unhealthy for most animals to be eating this stuff. They’re being force-fed rations which are the lowest cost to the highest value.

“I couldn’t sit back and just watch that, so I began looking at insects. How do insects currently act in the food web? Because the rotting apple falls from the tree, the insect eats the apple, the bird eats the worm, and off we go up the food web. It’s just normal. Every single animal on this planet, including humans, has been eating insects for millions of years.”

While Entocycle used to farm larvae for the pet-food industry, its focus today is on designing insect farms that ensure the greatest ratio of “protein in” to “protein out” – and, yes, to achieve the highest levels of welfare based on the company’s own research. And, so far, this mission is selling well. It has, for instance, recently attracted £4.2 million in funding from US investors and £3.3 million from Innovate UK, a government-backed body that provides money and support to industry. Meanwhile, Olivares Whitaker’s team of 35 engineers, designers, computer specialists and entomologists have contracts to design facilities in the Middle East and the UK that will produce thousands of tonnes of protein each year. And, as a welcome by-product, almost half of each farmed larvae contains excrement that can be used as a rich fertiliser.

“We are now facing a fertiliser crunch,” Olivares Whitaker says. “People don’t realise that the fertiliser industry is screwed since the war in Ukraine, and prices have quadrupled. Here, we have a perfect, organic and sustainable way of producing high-quality fertiliser using black soldier flies feeding on waste.”

But what about welfare concerns, and the claim that farming insects is inefficient? “Waste isn’t perfect,” he says. “You can’t just feed any waste to animals — for example, we saw with cows and BSE what happened when we fed them waste derived from other animals. Farmers need to know exactly what is in the protein they are feeding their animals. You can’t just feed anything to, say, pigs. But black soldier flies could feed off anything and turn it into high-quality protein.”

At present, however, UK rules don’t allow flies to be farmed that have been fed on excrement, but they could be — and the end product would be perfectly safe for animals and even humans. In developing countries with sewage disposal and protein security problems, governments are already looking at the possibilities of farming with insects.

So, what about the welfare side of the argument? I direct Olivares Whitaker to a paper written by Dr Meghan Barrett, another co-author of “Can insects feel pain?”, entitled “Challenges in farmed insect welfare”, in which she argues that farmed black soldier flies are susceptible to five welfare issues: nutritional inadequacies, larval overcrowding and overheating, unmet needs for mating behaviour, starvation, and inhumane slaughter.

But he’s having none of it. “If you get any of those five requirements wrong, your farm simply won’t work. If you starve your flies, they’re not going to breed your next generation of larvae. If you don’t meet their needs for mating behaviour, you’ll have nothing to farm. The welfare of the insects goes hand in hand with how successful and productive your operation will be.”

What if the government legislated to include insects in farming welfare regulations — would the industry comply? “I personally would welcome welfare regulations,” says Olivares Whitaker. “If you didn’t care for every aspect of their needs, your farming system simply wouldn’t work and you’d be out of business.”

I asked the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs if it had any plans to bring insect farming into line with other types of animal farming welfare, but it didn’t reply. Perhaps ministers are concerned that the public isn’t ready for insects to be deserving of concern. That might be true, but it’s hard to argue in a protein-insecure world that Olivares Whitaker is wrong. And one day soon, it won’t just be animals being fed on insects — we’ll be eating them, too.

He spoke for the nation’s 60,000 sheep-keepers. We live in fear. France is currently losing 15,000 livestock per annum to the 140 or so wolf packs that run within these borders. The European grey wolf is a canny apex predator that preys on the easiest, largest lump of protein it can kill for the least expenditure of energy: hello sheep. But also on the menu are goats, cattle, and horses. Earlier this month, wolves killed a red deer — not in the wild, but in someone’s back garden.

Humans are also now threatened by the wolf. In February, Joseph Uto, a town councillor in Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, was checking the local water supply when he was surrounded by five wolves — one of which charged him. Uto, a former soldier, managed to hit the aggressor away. After 30 minutes the pack withdrew. The incident is the first incidence of aggression towards humans since the wolf came back to France in 1992. The wolves seem to be losing their atavistic fear of humans.

The attacks on livestock, and the close encounters with humans, will logically only multiply. The national wolf-pack, which now numbers around 1,000 specimens, is enlarging by between 13% and 20% each year. In its way, the lupine advance across France is magnificent. Hunted to extinction in the Thirties, the wolf returned 30 years ago, when a small number of Canis lupus lupus crossed over the Alps from Italy. Since then, wolves have been seen in over half of metropolitan France’s 96 départements. Wolves spread naturally: annually, the previous year’s cubs depart the main pack to seek territories elsewhere. They have been spotted on the outskirts of Paris, in the environs of Dieppe. They have swum rivers, nipped across autoroutes.

Wolves also spread unnaturally. Their progress across France is state-aided. In 2018, Macron’s centrist government published a 100-page “Wolf Action Plan”, announcing its intention to increase the number of the predators on the mainland to 500 by 2023. The move was intended to increase biodiversity — or at least the modish type of biodiversity propagated by celebrity ecologist, Nicholas Hulot, recruited to Macron’s government to green its credentials. To the surprise of no-one in French agriculture, the target figure was easily doubled by the national wolf pack in that time span.

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After all, the wolf in France has rigorous protection. Like the rest of the EU signatories to the 1979 Berne Convention and the 1992 EU Habitats Directive, France gives the wolf protected species status, meaning that it can only be controlled by “lethal means” in exceptional circumstances. Effectively, a flock has to be under direct attack for a farmer to shoot a wolf justifiably. To assuage farmers, the state agreed a 10% annual cull — undertaken by the “Wolf Brigade” from the Office for Hunting and Wildlife — which manifestly failed. Ministers have now raised the threshold to 19%.

This is unlikely to satisfy France’s shepherds — or, indeed, France’s already dyspeptic tax papers. In the event of a wolf attack, livestock breeders receive compensation for a replacement animal. Paris also grants subsidies for the building of electrified wolf-defences, “reinforced human presence” (assistant shepherds), and the breeding and training of livestock guard dogs — usually Pyrenean Mountain Dogs known locally as “Patou”. By 2020, the French government had already financed 4,258 of livestock guard dogs, and was sloshing out €38 million in anti-wolf measures and compensation. According to INRAE, the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment, the cost of protecting sheep from wolves is “exploding”.

The money is not well-spent. In the French alpine region, an area where wolves have been present for a quarter century, more than 90% of successful attacks take place on farms that have already adopted the recommended means of protection. In a sober, even downright pessimistic report, INRAE concluded that wolves are “probably taking advantage of their legal status as a strictly protected species”. They have learned to circumvent methods of herd protection.

The boom in Patou is also causing trouble: they only look cuddly. Shepherds may need a dozen dogs to protect their flocks, and 105 people reported being bitten by a Pyrenean mountain dog in 2022. Timothée Dufour, a lawyer who counts shepherds among his clients, said there had been a “multiplication of conflicts” linked to dogs, and a notable increase in lawsuits against sheep-farmers.

Meanwhile, the compensation for dead sheep is inadequate, and only covers mortalities. There are indirect impacts of predation: stressed survivors lose weight, miscarry, reduce their milk supply, and sometimes refuse to graze on the places where they experienced a wolf attack for three years. One breeder, who was reimbursed €1,850 by the state, has estimated her losses at €24,000.

The wolf’s most fervent supporters are the rewilders, who see it as a key player in plans for large-scale restoration of the wildwood that covered France in the primordial mist. Theoretically, the wolf will keep down boar and deer numbers. But the world has moved on from the hunter-gatherer Stone Age; sheep farming in France has created grassland landscapes of globally important biodiversity. The Causse in the Aveyron, for instance, is a Unesco heritage site precisely because of the 2,000-year-old relationship between pastoral farming and the environment.

Nor is the return of the wolf simply a problem for France. In Germany the wolf-pack is growing by 38% annually. In the Netherlands, to deter wolves from approaching humans, authorities are experimenting with paintball guns. In Sweden, licences to kill wolves are being issued to local hunters in blatant disregard for the EU’s wolf-protection legislation. Faced with farmer protests, the European Parliament last Autumn voted to downgrade the wolf’s protected status to facilitate more culling. The Commission, however, appears disinclined to take notice. (Although one assumes that Ursula Von der Leyen, the Commission President might at least lend a sympathetic ear: Dolly, her pet pony, was killed by a wolf in September.)

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Either way, the culling of wolves may be counterproductive: according to a 2014 study in the US, if culling is restricted to part of the pack, the remainder break up into several breeding pairs, leading to a higher population and more attacks on livestock in the future. But if selective shooting does not work, and if fences and dogs do not work, then the return of the wolf is now a problem without a solution, short of the animal’s absolute eradication in livestock areas — or the eradication of livestock and their farmers. It’s them or us.

After reading Sud-Ouest’s wolf warning of wolves moving into Charente Maritime, I went to look at my sheep — themselves grazers of biodiverse grassland, rich in fauna such as stone curlew and flora such as pyramid orchids. My shepherd neighbour Jean-Claude passed me on the track, and I asked him his view on the coming of the wolf. He pointed up the hill towards the forest: “We’ll need walls of electric fences everywhere to protect us. It will be like living in a prisoner of war camp.” He has a point. It is starting to feel like a war. And it’s the traditional shepherds, rural communities, and nature itself being taken prisoner.

One of the UK’s poultry producers’ associations reported last autumn that between bird flu and persistently low margins, up to a third of its members either reduced production or closed down altogether. One former egg farm near me now rents storage units; another has been on the market for months, unable to find a buyer. As a result, there aren’t enough eggs to stock the shelves — and supermarkets are importing them from Italy. “So what?” you might ask. This is the market at work. But around this time three years ago, egg politics looked for a moment as though they might be on a different course.

Covid lockdowns scrambled many of the food supply chains we’d grown accustomed to — and as the country reeled, it seemed briefly as though more local networks might begin to re-emerge. (This was the point we first got our birds, albeit less with profit in mind than our own kitchen.) On my street, neighbours with back-garden poultry did a roaring trade.

Early 2020 brought a wider sense, too, that Covid might signal the end for free-trade absolutism more generally, and prompt a return to more bounded and local networks. But three years on, although my street still has several poultry-keepers, most have reverted to buying eggs from the shops. The turn away from free trade, if the Italian egg suppliers are anything to go by, has yet to occur.

Why, then, do we seem unable to imagine any other way of doing things? This seemingly inexorable drift back to the impersonal market epitomises Britain’s approach to food. This system, which we embraced in earnest nearly two centuries ago, maps a belief in the impersonal logic of “the market” onto a terrain whose most important attributes are simply not visible to market logic. And egg politics shows, in microcosm, just how poorly this ideology meshes with food production — to the extent that it now threatens our capacity to produce food at all.

Our trajectory toward the current situation was set out by Karl Polanyi, in the influential 1944 book, The Great Transformation. Humans, Polanyi argues, have always bought, sold, and exchanged things. But for the most part, across time and cultures, the market has been ordered to the needs of social institutions, and regulated accordingly. What’s unique about the modern world, he suggests, is that it works the other way round: our social institutions are ordered to the market.

For Polanyi, it was the enclosure of the commons that set England on this trajectory, by displacing England’s subsistence peasants, and creating the industrial proletariat, who were obliged to work for a wage. Perhaps the last nail in the coffin for that older, landowning order was the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws: tariffs that aimed to protect domestic grain prices from the influence of cheaper foreign imports, and were vigorously opposed by the mercantile class and industrial proletariat.

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It was, in effect, a contest between Britain’s food producers and an emerging population of food consumers. And in 1846, the food producers lost their protection from competition. The change accelerated Britain’s shift from a farming-first to an industrial economy, and set agriculture — once the largest employer in England — on the trajectory it’s followed ever since: dwindling opportunities for youth, relentless demands for efficiency, and with these a bitter tension between land stewardship, and market-driven pressure to lower standards. The historian Robert Ensor writes that after repeal, “the only chance for any young or enterprising person on the countryside was to get out of it”. Many smaller farmers gave up, and emigrated to America.

As populations urbanised, this also pushed Britons to abandon domestic poultry-keeping — or rather, to centralise it. Today, most egg farming (where it survives at all) is highly industrialised, with 48% of British birds in battery cages. Despite more recent regulations banning the cruellest intensive farming practices, bird welfare often suffers. And their waste, though an excellent nutrient for our domestic veg beds, is a major source of river pollution at scale.

Perhaps the gains in efficiency warrant the loss of chicken-keeping culture. But chicken centralisation also illustrates how, when market pressures collide with food production, it’s not so much that costs are driven down. Rather, they’re externalised into areas that don’t appear on the balance sheet, such as animal cruelty, river pollution, distressed producers — or, more subtly, disappearing cultures.

We’re middle-class chicken hobbyists, not farmers, but even amateur poultry-keeping has left me wondering what else is lost in cultural terms when chickens are centralised, from realism about animal behaviour, to poultry-based metaphors — or seasonal rituals. Absent modern, artificial housing conditions, many hens stop laying over the winter. If your birds are free-range, when they start again in the spring, you have to figure out where they’re hiding their eggs. When I learned this, it left me wondering whether this insight survives for most modern families only in the other egg glut we’re eating our way through: the chocolate one. Modern chocolate was, after all, invented the year after the Corn Laws were repealed. So Britain’s urbanisation began in earnest just as chocolate became a mass-market treat. Did a trace of the older form of “spring egg hunt” —  for real eggs — urbanise, too, in chocolate form, among now-henless households?

The nineteenth-century Tories were ambivalent about such losses: the Corn Law debate split the Tory Party down the middle, and eventually forced Robert Peel’s resignation as Prime Minister. But despite their residual association in the public mind with the interests of landowners, today’s Tory Party seems closer in spirit to the old Whigs: mercantilist to the core, and deeply reluctant to look too closely at how well “markets” manage the complex mesh of social, environmental and economic issues bound up in domestic food production.

When, for example, Johnson struck a “free trade deal” with Australia around two years ago, it was hailed as a benefit of Brexit. At the time, the National Farmers’ Union warned that the proposed deal would be disastrous for British farmers; Johnson shrugged it off with a merrily Whiggish nod to market ideology, declaring: “This is a country that grew successful and prosperous on free trade, on exporting around the world.”

Last year, British farmers warned again that, applied to farming, these free-market policies are “sleepwalking” Britain into a food crisis. In January, shop shelves across the country stood empty. The government shrugged, this time blaming supermarkets for “market failure”. More recently, food tsar Henry Dimbleby quit his post, condemning ministers’s “ultra-free-market ideology” as a threat to Britain’s food security.

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But the ideology seems as tenacious as ever, and our leaders as convinced at ever that where the dictates of the market require that something be dissolved — even if that turns out to be Britain’s capacity to produce eggs at all — then it will be dissolved. We don’t need poultry producers in Britain. The market will provide: we’ll just import eggs.

But this is premised on a belief that nothing can stand in the way of international trade, now or in the future. And even leaving aside energy prices, just based on news headlines over the last 20 years, this strikes me as — to put it mildly — a risky bet. What if we grind domestic food security to nothing in the name of the “free market”, only for the wheels to come off global trade again?

And yet nor am I sure that this is just a matter of ideology-blinded mercantilist leaders. For all proposed solutions to food security — whether free-market ones from the Right, or regulatory or veganism-based ones from the Left — share the same implicit certainty that whatever the solution is, it will still involve centralisation. And yet we could surely make a dent in the nested (sorry) poultry problems of food security, pricing, pollution, welfare, and carbon-intensive supply chains — not to mention improve domestic food waste management — by going the opposite way, toward chicken decentralisation.

Yes, some people live in apartments. But 87% of British homes have a back garden. And regulations on intensive poultry farming permit an insane density of birds — 17 hens per square metre — meaning even a tiny back garden could easily keep a few hens in many times this space, while enabling the recycling of kitchen scraps and supplying the garden with high-quality fertiliser.

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So why aren’t we doing this? I don’t think it’s just that Tories are wicked mercantilists, or that the farmers are almost gone already. The only explanation I can see is simple, and dispiriting: that however excited some got in 2020 about re-localising and de-marketising food production, the vast majority of people just don’t want to.

The fault, in truth, lies with all of us: for market “efficiency” and “convenience” isn’t just about price and choice. It’s also about lack of obligation. As I’ve learned when buying (and, occasionally, selling) eggs among neighbours, the moment you make trade more local — which is to say, more personal — you swiftly become caught in additional layers of obligation, whether to the birds that depend on you for food and safety, or to the neighbours whose subsistence is now (in however tiny a way) more bound up in yours.

And while communitarians often idealise such networks, we’ve grown accustomed to being able to buy eggs without this layer of complexity. No one who views taking the neighbour’s bin round as a huge favour will be keen on re-creating this complexity unless they absolutely have to. Most are still more than happy to look away from the uncounted welfare, ecological and food-security costs of this freedom from obligation. And I suspect it’s this, more than anything, that explains our Titanic-like drift toward the iceberg of food supply disaster.

Changing course would not just mean kicking out the Tories, or fiddling with regulations, embracing synthetic foods, or even re-building forgotten practices in domestic food production. It would mean re-evaluating every basic assumption about how we relate to one another, and why. The food crisis will have to get a great deal more severe — and fresh eggs a great deal more expensive than mass-produced chocolate ones — before many are willing to do that.

Lasch had an affinity for the common man. He made appeals to religion and tradition for moral guidance; he saw the family as a “haven in a heartless world”; he regarded a sense of pride in one’s hometown as essential for the community functioning of Middle America; and he called for a political economy wherein people would be able to access meaningful work that called them to a higher vocation. These visions never came to fruition during his lifetime. But that hasn’t stopped others from attempting to pick up the mantle. Today, his heirs can be found across the world — in the increasing trend towards homesteading and localism.

In The Culture of Narcissism (1979), Lasch argued that American culture had become increasingly addicted to instant gratification, which placed individual desires, unmoored by virtue-based cultural norms, above the flourishing of the common good. Fundamentally, he attributed this cultural rot to the idea of progress, which, he explained in Mass Culture Reconsidered two years later, is couched in the “refusal to acknowledge limits to human powers”, and ultimately “tears people out of familiar contexts and weakens kinship ties, local and regional traditions, and attachments to the soil”.

Over the past few decades, a growing movement of individuals and communities has embraced this idea — choosing to reject the dominant culture of consumerism and “progress” in place of homesteading and localism as functioning alternatives. Most of these people, I have suggested, are driven by a larger, more amorphous sense of risk, which I attribute to the trend of societal decline.

I recently interviewed a number of small-scale home producers in and around Chicago, and most appeared to be driven by a larger, more amorphous sense of risk and societal decline. There, I was as likely to find a rural second amendment libertarian as an urban progressive socialist. In certain cases, their distrust concerned government regulations and labelling schemes; in others, there was a general sense of uncertainty around industrial food production and corporate incentives toward profit-maximisation; still others had become fed up with the entire food system after attempting to resolve persistent health issues. Despite their divergent politics and backstories, they all shared an impetus to turn to home food production to gain some sense of control and self-sufficiency.

Cultural historian Morris Berman calls this Dual Process, or the ways in which people are forced to discover alternatives in the twilight of a waning civilisation. Berman suggests that as societal functioning breaks down — as it did in Ancient Rome — people find other ways to meet their basic needs. It is in this process of meeting those needs that individuals, usually unconsciously, develop parallel institutions that could end up developing into the society that succeeds the collapsing empire.

Homesteading is, in many ways, borne out of this sense of alienation. It involves, at its most basic, taking part in the home production of goods, such as rearing livestock, hunting, fishing, beekeeping and preserving foods. This was the common mode of living for most of human civilisation until the industrial revolution, but it didn’t disappear. Interest in home production returns in waves: as victory gardens during the Second World War; as the back-to-the-land-movement of Sixties and Seventies; and now as a new self-sufficiency movement spurred in part by the pandemic and the sense of disorder that followed the decline of urban life and global supply chain shocks.

Often, the individuals I spoke to felt drained by the meaningless work of “email jobs” and an ever-increasing treadmill of consumerism. Here, they channelled Lasch’s remark in The True and Only Heaven (1991) that “capitalism itself, thanks to its growing dependence on consumerism, promotes an ethic of hedonism and health and thus undermines the ‘traditional values’ of thrift and self-denial”. Through the act of homesteading, however, these individuals have started to flex their atrophied muscles by taking responsibility for their needs. Lasch argued that a distributed universal ownership over the means of production, both through household production as well as “small producers — farmers, artisans, master craftsmen, journeymen” were essential for a functioning republic.

In general, homesteaders seek to reduce their reliance on technology and other external systems that may one day prove unreliable. As a result, many are forced into a daily confrontation with the unfiltered messiness of nature through work with their hands, unmediated by screens or advanced tools. Lasch drew on thinkers such as William Morris in The True and Only Heaven, suggesting there is a fundamental dignity of labour in creative handicrafts, and a certain “pride of workmanship formerly associated with small-scale private ownership”. Juxtaposed with the wage labour of early factory life, or even rote spreadsheet work in a modern office job, the act of production in the home can be immensely satisfying.

Homesteading is by definition driven by an interest in self-consumption, which differentiates it from a commercial small farm. However, some home-scale producers do have budding cottage food businesses selling at farmer’s markets. The Smith Homestead in Mississippi, for example, started out with a small garden over health concerns and access to healthy foods, and now has a small operation selling hand-made soaps, candles, handicrafts and fresh foods locally. It is also quite common for these households to share or barter in informal economic exchanges. In that way, it becomes both an act of self-reliance and a way to make an accessible, meaningful vocation in the crafts of small-scale production in the home.

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It’s hardly surprising, then, that many homesteaders also advocate localism, whose goal is to build resilient and sustainable communities by prioritising local resources and production, and instilling a kind of civic pride of place and belonging. According to Lasch, what he calls “particularism” was an antidote to the progressive idea that we could or should love every citizen of the world in the same way we love the members of our families or communities. He pointed to people such as Willa Cather, who spoke to the particularities of place, attributing “Nebraska’s vigour and prosperity to the presence of Bohemian, Scandinavian, and German immigrants”.

Today, people engaged in homesteading seek a similar sense of belonging, something they feel has been robbed from them by the atomised society of the advanced economies they were born into. Take, for example, the recently published children’s poem “All the Ways You Can Stay“, by Wally Chamberlain, who grew up on a third-generation dairy farm in rural New England. Intended as a remedy to Dr Seuss’s “Oh, The Places You’ll Go!”, which encourages young adults to leave their hometowns for office work in the nearest metropole, Chamberlain offers:

“The barns they all lean, and the field’s overgrown.
Paint peels quicker on a house that’s not home.
It’s hard to see, but indeed is the truth,
That places will fade without memories and youth.
Yes places need people, and this one does too,
And maybe this place, and these people, need you.
Your family, your friends, these hills, and this town,
They’d not be the same, without you around.
So leave if you must, but perhaps not today.
Stop and consider all the ways you can stay.”

What this reveals is that, despite recent pearl clutching that homesteading is adjacent to “white supremacy” or localism is “blood and soil”, many engaged in these activities care not just about prioritising individual action, but also about building communities that champion ecological sustainability and decentralised power structures, including caring about hyper-local politics and informal economies. These people often come together to share knowledge, resources and support, creating networks that prioritise resilience and self-sufficiency. Roxanne Ahern of Happy Holistic Homestead, for instance, hosts a “swap and shop” a couple of times a year with neighbours where everyone exchanges clothes and other gently used items. Again, for Lasch in The True and Only Heaven, there is a power in informal networks developed by the Common Man, which can be the foundation for the “revival of active citizenship”.

Looking towards those experimenting in homesteading and localism, we might therefore gain some insight about the modern world engaging with the not-so-distant past — a time where relying on nature to scratch out a larger force was commonplace. Those who are seeking a fundamentally more meaningful existence, through the rejection of the false promises of technological progress and the embrace of the limits of nature, are showing us the glimmers of a path towards a life that could simultaneously begin to address our spiritual and economic woes.

Lasch spent his career documenting the tragedies and loss in industrial modernity. He wrote of “the decline of craftsmanship, the fragmentation of the community, the loneliness of the modern metropolis, the subordination of spiritual life to the demands of the market” — but never lived to see a fully embodied example of people celebrating “the goodness of life in the face of its limits”. If Berman’s Dual Process theory is correct, and we are firmly in a moment of civilisational decline, we are also in a moment of great promise and opportunity. Almost 30 years after he died, Lasch’s vision could soon become a much-needed reality.

The BBB grew out of the mass demonstrations against the Dutch government’s proposal to cut nitrogen emissions by 50% in the country’s farming sector by 2030 — a target designed to comply with the European Union’s emission-reduction rules. While large farming companies have the means to meet these goals — by using less nitrogen fertiliser and reducing the number of their livestock — smaller, often family-owned farms would be forced to sell or shutter. Indeed, according to a heavily redacted European Commission document, this is precisely the strategy’s goal: “extensifying agriculture, notably through buying out or terminating farms, with the aim of reducing livestock”; this would “first be on a voluntary basis, but mandatory buyout is not excluded if necessary”.

It is no surprise, then, that the plans sparked massive protests by farmers, who see it as a direct attack on their livelihoods, or that the BBB’s slogan — “No Farms, No Food” — clearly resonated with voters. But aside from concerns about the impact of the measure on the country’s food security, and on a centuries-old rural way of life integral to Dutch national identity, the rationale behind this drastic measure is also questionable. Agriculture currently accounts for almost half of the country’s output of carbon dioxide, yet the Netherlands is responsible for less than 0.4% of the world’s emissions. No wonder many Dutch fail to see how such negligible returns justify the complete overhaul of the country’s farming sector, which is already considered one of the most sustainable in the world: over the past two decades, water dependence for key crops has been reduced by as much as 90%, and the use of chemical pesticides in greenhouses has been almost completely eliminated.

Farmers also point out that the consequences of the nitrogen cut would extend well beyond the Netherlands. The country, after all, is Europe’s largest exporter of meat and the second-largest agricultural exporter in the world, just behind the United States — in other words, the plan would cause food exports to collapse at a time when the world is already facing a food and resource shortage. We already know what this might look like. A similar ban on nitrogen fertiliser was conducted in Sri Lanka last year, with disastrous consequences: it caused an artificial food shortage that plunged nearly two million Sri Lankans into poverty, leading to an uprising that toppled the government.

Given the irrational nature of the policy, many protesting farmers believe it can’t simply be blamed on the urbanite “green elites” currently running the Dutch government. They suggest one of the underlying reasons for the move is to squeeze small farmers from the market, allowing them to be bought out by multinational agribusiness giants who recognise the immense value of the country’s land — not only is it highly fertile, but it is also strategically located with easy access to the north Atlantic coast (Rotterdam is the largest port in Europe). They also point out that prime minister Rutte is an Agenda Contributor of the World Economic Forum, which is well known for being corporate-driven, while his finance minister and Minister of Social Affairs and Employment are also tied to the body.

The struggle playing out in the Netherlands would seem to be part of a much bigger game that seeks to “reset” the international food system. Similar measures are currently being introduced or considered in several other European countries, including Belgium, Germany, Ireland and Britain (where the Government is encouraging traditional farmers to leave the industry to free up land for new “sustainable” farmers). As the second-largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, after the energy sector, agriculture has naturally ended up in the crosshairs of Net Zero advocates — that is, virtually all major international and global organisations. The solution, we are told, is “sustainable agriculture” — one of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which form their “Agenda 2030”.

This issue has now been pushed to the top of the global agenda. Last November’s G20 meeting in Bali called for “an accelerated transformation towards sustainable and resilient agriculture and food systems and supply chains” to “ensure that food systems better contribute to adaptation and mitigation to climate change”. Just a few days later, in Egypt, the COP27 annual Green Agenda Climate Summit launched its initiative aimed at promoting “a shift towards sustainable, climate-resilient, healthy diets”. Within a year, its Food and Agriculture Organization aims to launch a “roadmap” for reducing greenhouse emissions in the agricultural sector.

The endgame is hinted at in several other UN documents: reducing nitrogen use and global livestock production, lowering meat consumption, and promoting more “sustainable” sources of protein, such as plant-based or lab-grown products, and even insects. The United Nations Environment Programme, for example, has stated that global meat and dairy consumption must be reduced by 50% by 2050. Other international and multilateral organisation have presented their own plans for transforming the global food system. The EU’s Farm to Fork strategy “aims to accelerate our transition to a sustainable food system”. Meanwhile, the World Bank, in its climate change action plan for 2021-2025, says that 35% of the bank’s total funding during this period will be devoted to transforming agriculture and other key systems to deal with climate change.

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Alongside these intergovernmental and multilateral bodies, a vast network of “stakeholders” is now devoted to the “greening” of agriculture and food production — private foundations, public-private partnerships, NGOs and corporations. Reset the Table, a 2020 Rockefeller Foundation report, called for moving away from a “focus on maximising shareholder returns” to “a more equitable system focused on fair returns and benefits to all stakeholders”. This may sound like a good idea, until one considers that “stakeholder capitalism” is a concept heavily promoted by the World Economic Forum, which represents the interests of the largest and most powerful corporations on the planet.

The Rockefeller Foundation has very close ties to the WEF, which is itself encouraging farmers to embrace “climate-smart” methods in order to make the “transition to net-zero, nature-positive food systems by 2030”. The WEF is also a big believer in the need to drastically reduce cattle farming and meat consumption and switch to “alternative proteins”.

Arguably the most influential public-private organisation specifically “dedicated to transforming our global food system” is the EAT-Lancet Commission, which is largely modelled around the Davos “multistakeholderist” approach. This is based on the premise that global policymaking should be shaped by a wide range of unelected “stakeholders”, such as academic institutions and multinational corporations, working hand-in-glove with governments. This network, cofounded by the Wellcome Trust, consists of UN agencies, world-leading universities, and corporations such as Google and Nestlé. EAT’s founder and president, Gunhild Stordalen, a Norwegian philanthropist who is married to one of the country’s richest men, has described her intention to organise a “Davos for food”.

EAT’s work was initially supported by the World Health Organization, but in 2019 the WHO withdrew its endorsement after Gian Lorenzo Cornado, Italy’s ambassador and permanent representative to the UN in Geneva, questioned the scientific basis for the dietary regime being pushed by EAT — which is focused on promoting plant-based foods and excluding meat and other animal-based foods. Cornado argued that “a standard diet for the whole planet” that ignores age, sex, health and eating habits “has no scientific justification at all” and “would mean the destruction of millenary healthy traditional diets which are a full part of the cultural heritage and social harmony in many nations”.

Perhaps more important, said Cornado, is the fact that the dietary regime advised by the commission “is also nutritionally deficient and therefore dangerous to human health” and “would certainly lead to economic depression, especially in developing countries”. He also raised concerns that “the total or nearly total elimination of foods of animal origin” would destroy cattle farming and many other activities related to the production of meat and dairy products. Despite these concerns, raised by a leading member of the world’s top public health body and shared by a network representing 200 million small-scale farmers in 81 countries, EAT continues to play a central role in the global push for the radical transformation of food systems. At the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit, which originated from a partnership between the WEF and the UN Secretary-General, Stordalen was given a leading role.

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George Monbiot's farming fantasies

By John-Lewis Stempel

This complete blurring of the boundaries between the public and the private-corporate spheres in the agricultural and food sectors is also happening in other areas — with Bill Gates standing somewhere in the middle. Alongside healthcare, agriculture is the main focus of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which finances several initiatives whose stated aim is to increase food security and promote sustainable farming, such as Gates Ag One, CGIAR and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. Civil society organisations, however, have accused the Foundation of using its influence to promote multinational corporate interests in the Global South and to push for ineffective (but very profitable) high-tech solutions which have largely failed to increase global food production. Nor are Gates’s “sustainable” agricultural activities limited to developing countries. As well as investing in plant-based protein companies, such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, Gates has been buying huge amounts of farmland in the US, to the point of becoming the biggest private owner of farmland in the country.

The problem with the globalist trend he embodies is obvious: ultimately, small and medium-scale farming is more sustainable than large-scale industrial farming, as it is typically associated with greater biodiversity and the protection of landscape features. Small farms also provide a whole range of other public goods: they help to maintain lively rural and remote areas, preserve regional identities, and offer employment in regions with fewer job opportunities. But most importantly, small farms feed the world. A 2017 study found that the “peasant food web” — the diverse network of small-scale producers disconnected from Big Agriculture — feeds more than half of the world’s population using only 25% of the world’s agricultural resources.

Traditional farming, though, is suffering an unprecedented attack. Small and medium-scale farmers are being subjected to social and economic conditions in which they simply cannot survive. Peasant farms are disappearing at an alarming rate across Europe and other regions, to the benefit of the world’s food oligarchs — and all this is being done in the name of sustainability. At a time when almost a billion people around the world are still affected by hunger, the lesson of the Dutch farmers could not be more urgent, or inspiring. For now, at least, there is still time to resist the Great Food Reset.

So reading the spate of reports regarding its imminent death is like receiving bad news about a friend. It is not even a gentle demise: the Wye is being murdered. It is the totemic case of our national pollution problem as two newspapers launch campaigns to clean up rivers. Fair enough. I learned to swim in the Wye, and fished it for silver minnows; now I would not go into its waters wearing chest-waders. In 2010, the Wye was voted the nation’s favourite river — and celebrated with adjectives including “magical”, “timeless” and “unspoilt”’. In 2020, a thick algal bloom caused by pollution extended along more than 140 of the river’s 155 miles, blocking out sunlight and killing much life below the surface. Now, the Wye’s local cognomen is “shit creek”.

But such was the river’s beauty that following the publication of the Reverend William Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye in 1782, the British tourist industry was born. The long watery southing miles enthused Wordsworth (“Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”) and prompted JMW Turner to get his brushes out several times. It was renowned across the globe for its Atlantic salmon. Kings and prime ministers have fished from its banks of appropriately salmon-pink sandstone. Once, rod catches exceeded 7,000 a year, with the record fish being a 59lb 8oz leviathan — landed by Doreen Davey at Winforton on March 13, 1923. In 2021, only 326 salmon were caught from the Wye, the smallest number since records began.

That was the year the spotlight on the Wye’s parlous ecological state was switched on with Rivercide, a documentary by George Monbiot, which was complemented by his Guardian article, “Britain’s rivers are suffocating to death”. Plaudits to Monbiot for bringing the death of the Wye to public attention. But his forensic environmental investigation immediately hits the banks.

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Why food should be more expensive

By John Lewis-Stempel

Monbiot’s argument, which now dominates the “Why oh Wye” discourse, flows roughly thus: the 20 million chickens intensively farmed in the Wye’s catchment area produce more than 2,500 tonnes of excrement a year, and this mountain of manure is “the most intense and extreme cause” of the Wye’s pollution. It’s the phosphates in the manure. When it is spread on fields, they leach and leak into the river, and promote algal bloom.

Monbiot is not totally wrong. Indisputably, the phosphates in the run-off from intensive poultry units (IPUs in the jargon) are harming the Wye. The Ithon, one of its tributaries in mid-Wales, contains phosphate levels up to 10 times higher than what you’d expect in a healthy upland river, according to an analysis commissioned by Fish Legal, a non-profit organisation of lawyers who fight water polluters. However, when it comes to the question of who is killing the Wye, simply pointing the finger at poultry farmers lets other culprits off the hook. The gallery of rivercide rogues stretches from the Wye’s source on the bleak slopes of Plynlimon to the Severn estuary.

Humans have been killing the Wye for centuries. If you wished to really get to the bottom of whodunnit, you’d begin with the Romans, who introduced the watermill to these isles. Watermills produce pollution — for instance, if used for fulling, the making of woollen cloth — and hamper the spawning of key fish species, including the Wye’s renowned Salmo salar. Salmon in the Wye, and other rivers in the Palaeo-Rhine basin, may have been reduced by as much as 90% between 450AD and 1600AD.

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Oat milk is killing the planet

By John Lewis-Stempel

Then there was overfishing in the 19th century, with 100,000 salmon traps in the Severn and net after net up the Wye to Hay; in 1906, the rod catch of salmon was about 500 fish. Fast forward to the 20th century and acid rain from heavy industry in South Wales was severely impacting the Wye’s headwaters, the quiet brooks where the salmon spawn. Indeed, had The Wye and Usk Foundation not started liming the waters to restore the pH balance in 2003, Wye salmon might well be extinct. The ecosystem of the river has yet to recover from past acid rain.

And there’s the human crap. This year, the Wye has achieved the dubious distinction of appearing at number 14 in the Top of the Poops chart, which ranks England and Wales’s most sewage-polluted rivers. An ITV News analysis of data from Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water, the water company responsible for the areas through which the Wye flows, revealed that in 2020 alone, raw sewage entered the river system for 17.4 million minutes — that’s the equivalent of 33 years. Endlessly blaming the death of the Wye on chicken shit is chicken shit. Environment Agency modelling suggests that raw sewage is the source of 28% of the Wye’s pollution, which is no small matter.

Sewage is also known to cause algal bloom: in 2021, the United Utilities Staveley sewage works, near Windermere, spilled untreated sewage into a nearby stream 80 times for a total of 1,172 hours. The result was a literally sick-making algal bloom on Lake Windermere. But sewage isn’t only to blame. If we are to save the Wye, we may also need to look to the Heavens. Climate change is expected to make algal blooms more common.

So how guilty is the notorious chicken excrement? So extreme is the phosphate runoff from poultry farming that George Monbiot requires us to give up eating chicken to save the Wye. “We do not NEED chicken”, he says, adding: “It’s time conservationists became bolder and spoke out against the world’s greatest cause of ecological destruction: animal farming.” But let’s pluck the Wye’s chicken problem a little. The expansion of IPUs in the Wye’s catchment area over the past five years is clearly a driver in phosphate pollution, but the phosphate overload in local soil is a legacy issue, dating back decades.

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Wheat has corrupted humanity

By John Lewis-Stempel

The most authoritative analysis, “Re-focusing Phosphorus use in the Wye Catchment”, attributes 60-70% of said mineral pollution to agriculture, but is careful to enumerate the various culpable parts of agriculture, not just the IPUs. The major culprits include potato-growing, which, last time I checked, was a vegan-approved crop. Phosphate is an ingredient in the artificial fertilisers widely used in large-scale potato-farming, and excess runs off the fields along with the soil when it rains. It all goes into the river. With not a chicken in sight.

Monbiot’s anti-poultry agenda is a diversion, not an answer. You absolutely can have your chicken and your Wye. Small-scale poultry production, with organic free-range hens scratching around apple orchards, naturally manuring the earth: there is no evidence whatsoever that this model is anything but beneficial to the environment. Having your intensively-farmed, £3.50 chicken from Tesco and having your Wye is another matter. It’s not the chicken, it’s how you farm them.

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Big Veganism is coming for you

By John Lewis-Stempel

The greatest environmental problem for the Wye is not the warming of the planet, acid rain, or excrement, whether human or avian: it is chemically-addicted conventional farming. The phosphates in chicken manure leach into the upper Wye for the same reason that phosphates from artificial fertiliser on potato fields enter the river downstream near Ross: the parlous state of the soil, caused by overuse of pesticides, herbicides, molluscicides, fungicides and compaction from machinery. Some potato-growing farmers I knew — whose liking for herbicides and pesticides always made me think of them as “The Chemical Brothers” — lost tons of topsoil per annum from a single 40-acre field. Into the brook, which ran brown, which joined the Wye, which ran brown. There are fields in Britain losing 47 tons of soil per acre per annum. As Natural England notes, “soil and nutrients washing off agricultural land is the most common reason for our rivers and streams becoming unhealthy”. Good, healthy soil, by contrast, can hold huge amounts of water, and is not saturated with phosphates — or indeed that other chemical killer of fresh water, nitrates — because it has been “husbanded”. That is, farmed properly.

Call me cynical, call me biased, but doesn’t the “It’s all the fault of poultry farmers” argument stink a bit of a vegan agenda? In an age when whole cities are trying to erase meat from school menus, it’s fashionable and easy to blame the livestock farmer, and answer every complex environmental problem with: “Go plant-based!”

But you could close all the IPUs in the Wye catchment area and turn them over to cabbage production for vegans, and you would still have phosphates streaming into the river. It will continue to die unless the area’s agriculture, be it livestock or crop, adopts en masse soil-aware, sustainable and nature-friendly principles. What’s more, you could say the same about almost every river in the country. Meanwhile, quiet flows the Wye towards its grave.

If you are a consumer, with food inflation at 14.6% per annum, you doubtless wish that Jeremy Clarkson would shut up. If you are a farmer, with input inflation running at anything up to 400%, in the case of electricity, you applaud him for articulating a truth usually only whispered behind closed barn doors. Food is too cheap.

In the Fifties, about a third of an average household’s budget went on food; now, it’s about a tenth. What’s the cost of this cheapening? Well, aside from the ruin of the farmed environment by relentless exploitation, food has been devalued: we now throw a third of it away. Moreover, farmers now “work for nothing” — or thereabouts. A report last December revealed that cereal farmers receive, on average, 9p from an 800g loaf with a retail price of £1.14. When the cost of growing and harvest is calculated, the cereal farmer is making a 0.09p profit.

The report analysed other everyday foods, including apples, cheese, beef burgers and carrots. In every case, the farmers or growers received less than 1% of the profit after the deductions of intermediaries and retailers. In some sectors of farming there is merely pure loss. For much of 2022, pig farmers were losing £60 for every animal they offered up to consumers. By Christmas, free-range egg producers were losing nearly 30p on every dozen they supplied.

Welcome, then, to the mad world of British farm economics, where cost of production is skyrocketing but the amount a farmer gets paid for his or her goods is risible. A mad world, where farmers subsist on subsidy — which, over the past few decades, has made up over half of the average farm income — and diversification. Alas, most farmers do not have an Amazon Prime contract, so the usual diversification is a farmhouse B&B — at best a modest and seasonal income stream. When all the numbers were run through Defra’s calculator, it found that the agricultural part of the average British farm business made £5,600 profit in 2022.

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Big Veganism is coming for you

By John Lewis-Stempel

For this £5,600, the British farmer works an average of 65 hours a week. Many in livestock farming work in excess of 100 hours a week, every week, whatever the weather. You can’t take a break or even be ill: the livestock depend on you like kids do. So you end up forking hay to Margot the 550kg heifer, despite your broken ribs. The same Margot accidentally gave you those broken ribs.

Unsurprisingly, given the long, hard hours for the short money, farmers are flocking out of the industry, or cutting back on production. One third of members of the British Free Range Egg Producers Association say they have either reduced their number of hens, paused production, or left poultry farming completely. As for dairy farmers, the nation is running dry. Between 2020 and 2022, the number of dairy farms dropped from 11,900 to 7,880. In 1950, there were 196,000 dairy farms in the UK.

So now you know why so many in British farming think Clarkson is doing more for the industry than three decades of Countryfile ever did. He has told the truth that none of us dared speak, in the middle of this cost-of-living crisis: food prices need to go up. And if you listen very closely at the barn door, you might hear some pertinent rhetorical questions. Why can’t the great British public perhaps spend a bit less on their iPhone or their foreign holiday, and a bit more on their daily bread? But Clarkson is correct: you can’t say things like this to the media. Even if you are a farmer with an Alcatel 1B, who hasn’t had a foreign holiday for years and works for less than the National Minimum Wage. You’d be trolled to death.

Where Clarksonian economics are unfortunately reminiscent of Trussian economics is in the optimistic assumption that any mark-up in the shop price will trickle back to the farmer. Grocery retail in the UK is dominated by supermarkets, which take over 95% of consumer spending on food. That retail is in turn dominated by the “big four” of Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrisons (although discounter Aldi is now perhaps pipping Morrisons to fourth place). These super supermarkets are making super profits, despite inflation and the cost-of-living crisis: Sainsbury’s is expecting £690 million this financial year, while Tesco expects retail-adjusted operating profit in its 2022-23 financial year to be £2.4-2.5 billion.

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Wheat has corrupted humanity

By John Lewis-Stempel

Since the opening of the first supermarket in Britain — a Co-op in Manor Park in 1948 — the supermarket business model of pile high, sell cheap has involved squeezing supplier price until it starts to hurt. That is where the eye-watering profits come from. It is as simple as that. Someone pays for the supermarket “price war”, and it’s almost always the farmer. That benevolent two-for-one offer on punnets of strawberries? Behind the label are thousands of farmers who signed a contract to deliver strawberries without a price being set.

Supermarkets are failing farmers in ways not limited to the paltry remittance. Everybody in farming who has dealt with one — or worse, with the intermediary, the producer organisation — has stories about orders being cancelled without justification or notice, about a cheaper foreign source being found, about the arbitrary rejection of fruit and veg for lacking the correct aesthetic. One arable farmer responding to a Feedback survey on the role supermarkets play in crop waste estimated that 1,750 tonnes of his annual carrot crop are refused by the packhouse, because the carrots are too small, too big, too crooked. Another endless irritation is the supermarket’s restrictive contractual stipulation that packaging is done by companies nominated by them, at twice the cost of the same service on the open market.

Yet another beef is the supermarket’s habit of foisting all risk onto the farmer. If a supermarket over-orders, guess who picks up the bill? When a cauliflower glut occurred in 2017, Geoff Philpott’s buyer dramatically reduced their order, leaving him with 100,000 vegetables to plough back into the Kentish ground. Something like this happens every day in British agriculture. According to a 2017 survey by the Groceries Code Adjudicator — the ombudsman created by Parliament to bring some fairness to the supermarket-supplier relationship — in 20% of cancellations, the farmer receives no compensation from the supermarket.

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Oat milk is killing the planet

By John Lewis-Stempel

Large farm enterprises may be able to weather the vicissitudes of supplying supermarkets, but smaller enterprises fare less well. The Council for the protection of Rural England cites the “inequality of power” between supermarkets and suppliers is blamed for driving small and medium-scale agricultural holdings out of business; the number of farm holdings in England alone fell from 132,400 in 2005 to 104,200 in 2015, according to Defra data, a loss of over a fifth of all farms in just ten years. Cheap food, Prince Charles warned in a Radio 4 essay last year, threatens the survival of the country’s smaller farms — and if they go, it will “break the backbone of Britain’s rural communities”. Small farms preserve the identity of regions, and offer employment in places with few job opportunities. They are part of their community in a way that mega agri-industrial enterprises are not, and never will be. And they also tend to be associated with biodiversity and landscape protection.

Yet the supermarkets insist they are the friends of farmers. Aldi and Lidl are currently love-bombing us, with the chief executive of the latter’s GB branch, Ryan McDonnell, saying last week that the company would be spending £2 billion more than planned on “buying British” in the coming year. Aldi has pledged to spend an extra £3.5 billion a year with UK suppliers by the end of 2025. Alas, British farmers have heard such wooing noises before — in 2022, Asda pledged to buy only British beef for its fresh meat counters, only to drop the commitment last month. And Lidl are encumbered by their record: last year they ranked the worst of any major retailer in the 2022 Groceries Code Adjudicator survey, with less than a third of suppliers saying the company consistently complied with the Groceries Supply Code of Practice — the legislation introduced in 2010 precisely to protect food and suppliers to the 14 major supermarkets.

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Britain betrays its farmers again

By James Rebanks

Farmers tend not to complain to their supermarket or the dreaded middle man, for fear of retribution. Tesco has nearly 30% of the UK pork market, so if you piss them off, finding another outlet is far from easy. “What I’m concerned about is that most farmers and growers are incredibly nervous about speaking up,” Minette Batters, president of the National Farmers’ Union, told the Telegraph last week, when asked about the supermarkets’ hardball practices. “They know that the dangers of having their products delisted are enormous.”

Farmers may not wish to speak up in public, but in the privacy of their own homes, 500 of them filled in a survey for Sustain’s Beyond the Farmgate report. Just 5% preferred to sell to supermarkets. Overwhelmingly, farmers wanted localised selling, via independent retailers, box schemes, and the farm gate. This would put more in their pocket, as well as supporting climate change and nature objectives. For farmers as for consumers, every little helps.

The bull sperm market is bullish thanks to the widespread practice of artificial insemination. More than 75% of all dairy cattle breeding in the UK is done via this consistent method, which allows cows to be impregnated with the juice of a tried and trusted sire. If you can afford one, these sires are an excellent investment. In February 2019, an Angus bull named SAV America 8018 sold for the record-breaking price of $1.51 million due to “superior genetics”. The buyer was Trump advisor Charles W. Herbster, who took the bull to his Virginia stud, North American Breeders Inc., and turned him into a cash cow. SAV America 8018’s straws went for $80 a pop.

Just do the arithmetic. A stud bull will have its semen extracted twice a day, three or four times a week, and deposit, on average, 5-8ml of semen. One British Charolais bull is on record for producing £800,000 worth of semen a month, but the world record for semen production goes to an American Holstein bull Toystory, who in his 13 years at stud produced 2.4 million units (or 2,700lbs) of semen, and sired an estimated 500,000 offspring.

Who was the lucky benefactor? Toystory was owned by the dystopian-sounding Genex Cooperative Inc, itself a component of URUS, the biggest artificial inseminator in the world. (“We inseminate one cow a second around the globe.”) The URUS group have sold over 3.1 million “straws” between them. Britain’s biggest bovine semen producer is Cogent, which began life on the Duke of Westminster’s Eaton Estate in Cheshire, but is now part of Texas-based STGenetics. With more than 100 bulls at stud, Cogent, like URUS, sells worldwide. Bull semen production is increasingly a multinational enterprise, a cross-borders commerce.

And the price of bull sperm is shooting up, not least because it is increasingly modified in the stud lab. (Cogent’s speciality is sexed semen, which enables dairy farmers to generate 90% female calves.) The likely consequence of the increased cost is that semen heists will also likely rise. Already the theft of bull sperm is a global phenomenon, not an incident isolated to Olfen. Perhaps the greatest heist, in monetary terms, occurred in Minnesota, USA, in 2015, when robbers rustled four pints of bull semen worth US $70,000. Such semen thefts are rarely opportunistic, because the ejaculate needs to be conserved carefully, supercooled with liquid nitrogen at -196°C so it doesn’t spoil.

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France, the last bastion of bullfighting

By John Lewis-Stempel

If you think the money involved in bull semen is eye-watering, wait until you hear how the semen is collected in the first place. In the good old days, the bull mounted the cow, and the semen was extracted with a spoon or syringe. (Been there, done that: I am a traditional farmer.) These days, the methods are increasingly unnatural and cruel. The cow is replaced by a “teaser cow” — usually a castrated male, or a wooden dummy. To stimulate the bull, stud farms often employ techniques, such as a ransrectal massage (TRM), which can be very painful for the creature — but not as painful as electroejaculation (EEJ). This technique, in use since 1936, involves inserting a 75-90mm-wide electrified probe directly into the bull’s anus, and sending pulses of between 8 and 16 volts into it. The bull, meanwhile, is restrained in a metal cage known as a “crush”.

No one who has witnessed the process of EEJ could deny that it causes the bulls pain. They bellow (“vocalisation” in the euphemism of theriogenology, the veterinary science of reproduction) and the back legs may give way. Under the skin, there are increases in plasma cortisol, progesterone and heart rate — all signifiers of distress. As one recent scientific volume aimed at the industry, Reproductive Technologies in Animals, put it: “Obviously, EEJ is regarded as a stressful and painful procedure, which may negatively affect animal welfare.”

Obviously. Yet it is standardly practised throughout the world. Only Denmark and the Netherlands seem to ban electroejaculation. To reduce the pain of EEJ, bulls are sometimes given an intrarectal anaesthetic. Sometimes. Most countries allow anybody to operate the EEJ probe, although it widely acknowledged that good technique can minimise pain. In Britain, the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) and the Association of Veterinary Anaesthetists guidelines indicate that the EEJ procedure must be performed by a veterinary surgeon; however, the use of an analgesic is not a specified requirement.

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All this is part of a bleak wider trend. The more agriculture industrialises, the more it seemingly becomes inured to casual cruelty towards farm animals. Our dwindling ethical standards are partly down to agriculture’s removal from the grass roots, and partly down to money. Both extreme poverty and extreme wealth in farming tend to produce harshness towards “dumb beasts”.

The argument for modern methods of collecting bull semen is that the “elite” cows produced will give humanity more beef, more milk. But ends do not justify means, and, anyway, the cruelties of commercial bull semen production are petrol for the flames of veganism. It gives farming in general a bad name. Some of us in agriculture think that the only place for a bull is in the field, servicing the herd naturally. Living a life, in the words of moral philosopher Martha Nussbaum in her recent book, Justice for Animals, that is “characteristic of its kind”. The real crime in the bull semen business? It’s animal welfare.

But 2022 was a perfect (pig) shit storm. Thanks in part to the Ukraine War, the price of wheat — a main ingredient in compound pig feed — hit historic highs. Then there was the 400% hike in energy costs, and before that a post-Brexit shortage of abattoir workers causing a backlog of 200,000 pigs on farms. Some UK farmers were forced to cull their pigs: 40,000 were “euthanised” and dumped in the ground. Currently, producers face a loss of circa £30 per pig sold. Their estimated cumulative losses since autumn 2020 is £600 million, according to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB).

Unsurprisingly, many pig farmers are voting with their wellies, and exiting the industry. The proof is in the contraction of the national herd. According to Defra’s June survey, the total number of pigs in England decreased by 3% to just over 4.1 million animals, a 20-year low. The figure masks a more disturbing fact: the number of breeding animals — the future of the industry — is down by 17%.

You might think, therefore, that the news that the global food company Danish Crown is building a state-of-the-art bacon plant in Rochdale would bring a festive smile to the face of the nation’s pig farmers. After all, if Danish Crown is investing £100 million, and promising to produce more than 900 tonnes of bacon and gammon a week, they must believe that the domestic industry has a viable future? Alas, no. Jais Valeur, chief executive, has admitted that the plant will mainly process… Danish pigs. Not much of a Christmas present for domestic producers.

About 60% of the pork consumed in the UK already comes from other countries, principally in the EU bloc. Imported pork is cheaper, meaning it pushes down the price of home-reared meat. AHDB data shows that, in the first seven months of 2022, pork imports were up by nearly 80,000 tonnes, around 20%, compared with 2021. (And this is only the figure for registered meat imports; Dover Port Health Authority seized 2.5 tonnes of illegal pork products from 22 vehicles in a single weekend in October.) You might feel that imported pork — as much as 25% cheaper than native product — is a good thing in a cost-of-living crisis. After you bring home the bacon, you can get more bacon. And aren’t animal welfare standards higher on EU farms anyway? This is the implication of the RSPCA’s constant claims that animal welfare will be “lost” now we have left the EU.

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Alas, the notion that farm livestock are better off in the EU bloc is a porky pie. Certainly, the Brussels Pig Directive burgeons with imperatives, but animal welfare inside the EU tends to be honoured in the breach rather than the observance. Sow stalls (metal cages) were outlawed in the UK years ago, but the EU still allows it, from the weaning of one litter until the end of the sows’ first four weeks of the next pregnancy. New-born pigs deemed too weak to survive are smashed upon the floor — a lawful killing method according to the EU Slaughter Regulation.

And enforcement of the Pig Directive — which forbids “tail-docking, tooth-clipping and tooth-grinding likely to cause immediate pain and some prolonged pain to pigs” — has become nigh on impossible in EU factory farms. Although tail-docking has been prohibited throughout the EU since 1994, it is routine in all countries in the bloc, with the exception of Finland and Sweden, and depends on the complicity of governments and veterinary services. The European Commission’s own audit found an overwhelming majority of pigs in the EU are tail-docked. France was even called to order by the European Commission in 2020, to no avail: 99% of French pig farms still dock the tails of piglets. It took a French provincial judge, not the Elysée, to even fire a warning shot against the country’s insistence on the practice: in April the criminal court in Moulins fined a pig farm supplying the Herta brand €50,000. The court considered the systematic docking of animals “to be an act of abuse”.

The EU also authorises the feeding of Processed Animal Protein (PAP) to pigs, which may not be to the taste of UK consumers. Indeed, the British government has banned it, since it is though that contaminated meat protein in pig swill started the 2001 Foot-and-Mouth epidemic. These less stringent EU welfare regulations are a direct contributory factor in making EU pig meat cheaper than pork produced here in the UK. But at what cost?

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That’s not to say the EU has never intervened actively in pig farming. In fact, in 2019, it used €7.5 million of taxpayers’ money to finance its “Let’s talk about pork” advertisements promoting the continental industry. The campaign, in response to under-35s decreasing their pork consumption over concerns about animal welfare and the environment, aims “to demystify the various information that has been targeting the sector, by showing the conditions of production in the farms with scrupulous respect for the highest standards of animal welfare”. The ad campaign depicts happy, curly-tailed pigs in conditions that are nothing like the reality on the EU’s thousands of factory farms.

Yet, if porcine welfare is superior on UK farms, it is far from ideal. Last year the Government’s Food Standards Agency found that almost 3,000 pigs arrived at abattoirs with broken limbs, emaciation, lameness and prolapses. Hundreds were dead on arrival. Piglets on RSPCA-backed farms, according to The Independent, were given electric shocks, hit, kicked and thrown as they were loaded onto lorries.

The UK, then, will not escape the wider European trend: a downturn in the pig industry caused by factory farming conditions that consumers no longer accept. Here, 60% of sows and nearly all fattening pigs are kept indoors in concrete or slatted floor pens, and are unable to express their natural rooting behaviour. The UK slaughtered about 11 million pigs in 2021; of these a mere 32,000 were qualified for the organic label, meaning the fullest welfare conditions and a free-range, outdoor life.

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The treatment of pigs is the pig industry’s real problem, not today’s high grain prices, or the long-term reluctance of supermarkets to pay a fair price or even the numberless failed government promises of aid. Although bacon and sausage sales remain buoyant — due to the great Full English Breakfast, the UK has the highest consumption of bacon per capita in Europe, 3kg of the product per annum — pork consumption overall declined 7.5% between 2014-2019. While pig farmers religiously follow wheat prices, and the stats on All Pig Price (APP), the real stat they need to ponder is the rise of veganism.

According to data by digital tree-planting platform Treedom, of 2,000 people surveyed in December, a fifth ditched turkey and pigs in blankets, opting instead for a plant-based Christmas lunch. And the vast majority of vegans, 89%, say they have made the lifestyle switch because “I think the way animals are farmed and killed for food is cruel”. Retailers are starting to respond to demand: to “fulfil the nation’s hunger for vegan food”, Aldi is launching its biggest range of plant-based food for the forthcoming ‘Veganuary’, the annual much-hyped campaign for a “vegan world”. Aldi is wading into a crowded market; last Veganuary more than 1,540 new vegan products and menus were launched.

If the British pig industry does not want to end up in a slaughterhouse of its own making, it needs to end factory farming, improve welfare to organic levels, and put pigs on a main diet of natural forage and crop waste, rather than soy and cereals that contribute to deforestation and loss of wildlife habitats. The result is happy pigs, and a happier farm balance sheet. (Our pigs, by rootling in woodland, orchards, and crop fields following harvest, have found as much as 50% of their food for free.) This sustainable, free-range and ethical system needs to be safeguarded by the introduction of a ban on the import of all products to welfare standards lower than the UK. Anything less will be putting lipstick on a pig.

The Utah-based religious movement — founded in 1830 in New York State — rebranded in 2018, calling for “Mormon” to be abandoned in favour of the official “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”. “It’s a bit of a mouthful,” admits Kevin Johnson, 56, who was raised in the faith in Norwich and now worships in Cambridge. But the focus on “latter days” is strategic: “we’re here now to make a difference in the world”. And for that, the Church needs funds.

On the other side of Cambridgeshire, it is doing God’s work, in the fertile earth of the fens. In the village of Woodwalton, near Huntingdon, it owns thousands of acres. Over the years, it has been variously reported to be the largest foreign purchaser of land in Britain; during a spree in the late Nineties, it spent £30 million on prime farmland in the space of six years. More recently, it came top of Farmers Weekly’s list of “unusual owners of UK farmland”. According to Guy Shrubsole, author of Who Owns England?, the Church is the 78th largest landowner in the country, with 7,716 acres.

Agriculture may seem like a surprising sideline, but it is in keeping with the Church’s history — the pioneers of Mormonism, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, were both sons of farmers — and its central values. There is “an emphasis on self-reliance”, says Anne Thomas, a 27-year-old Latter Day Saint from California who just completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge — “just being prepared for anything”.

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The Church’s control of land is usually indirect. It effectively runs a multinational firm named AgReserves, which was once reported to be America’s largest producer of nuts and is the largest private landowner in Florida — where it is planning a city almost 20 times the size of Manhattan. A subsidiary of the firm, Farmland Reserve UK Ltd, exists in this country as both a registered charity and a limited company, according to documents lodged at Companies House. Its principal activity is arable farming, and it has been reaping the rewards of soaring global cereal prices. It owns land worth almost £54 million and buildings worth almost £17 million.

While their religious activities — which include handing out literature on the street — are highly visible, their business enterprises are not. The church was quick to tell me that while its community members would be happy to be interviewed, “the farmland entity” would not.

It was not always so media-shy. Back in 1999, The Independent was invited into its boardroom on Manor Farm. A printed sign read: “Our business is farmland. Profit motivated: No Excuses.” In the Nineties, it was expanding — into Norfolk, Suffolk and Lincolnshire. Now, it is going into retreat. Accepting that the “scattered nature of some of the parcels of land do lead to some labour and equipment inefficiencies”, the company is consolidating its land holdings “around one major farm centre in Cambridgeshire”.

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But the strategy is still paying dividends — turning some of Britain’s most high-grade land into hard cash. Last year, the company donated £2 million to its Utah sister charity, which spent £1 million on renovations to the two UK temples (in Surrey and Lancashire) and £1 million on vaccinations in Slovakia, Albania and Bulgaria, wheelchairs in Cape Verde, and support for Afghan refugees in Germany.

These donations sound heavenly, but the Church has faced allegations that it is trying to make itself appear more generous than it actually is. Just last month, it was accused of overstating the amount it gives in charity by more than $1 billion. Members are required to “tithe”, or donate, 10% of their income to the Church. But The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the Church then donates less than 1% of what it receives to charity, and stockpiles cash and investments in a $100 billion tax-free fund. In 2020, Roger Clarke, the head of the “Ensign Peak” fund, told The Wall Street Journal that knowledge of it among members might discourage tithing, saying they “never wanted to be in a position where people felt like, you know, they shouldn’t make a contribution”.

“The Mormon church will have you believe that it’s a religion that dabbles in business,” says ex-Mormon Ryan McKnight, who founded MormonLeaks, “but the evidence clearly shows that they are a business dabbling in religion.” A Utah spokesman denied the charge, saying: “The Church of Jesus Christ is not a financial or profit-making institution and uses its resources to carry out its divinely appointed mission.”

No multi-billion-dollar fund, however, can stop people asking difficult questions. And the Church has been having to adapt to head off criticism of the stickier parts of its history. Polygamy was dropped in 1890 (although a man can still be “sealed” to more than one woman in the afterlife). A ban on black men joining the priesthood was not lifted until 1978. (It remains for women of any colour.) And it took until 2014 for the Church to officially admit for the first time that Joseph Smith had up to 40 wives, including a 14-year-old girl.

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Meanwhile, disciples are coming from the most unlikely of places. The Book of Mormon musical — which mercilessly satirises the religion — arrived in the West End in 2013 and began touring the UK in 2019. Church missionaries often proselytise after performances – with some audience members mistaking them for the cast and others even joining the Church after having their interest piqued. It seems a uniquely Latter Day Saint reaction to lampooning. “I think we kind of roll with it,” says Anne Thomas. “Because we are a pretty small population, we want to be on good terms with people that don’t know a lot about the Church. We want to have a positive interaction rather than a defensive one.” As adverts in the show’s programme, funded by the Church, say: “You’ve seen the play… now read the book.”

In the second half of the 20th century, it was not just land that the Church was acquiring, but members — at a rate of knots. Sociologist Rodney Stark forecast in 1984 that what was then Mormonism would become the first new major world religion since Islam. However, today, while growth is strong in Africa, it is having problems elsewhere. In 2011, Elder Marlin Jensen accepted that members in the US were “leaving in droves” in a “period of apostasy”. And the Church has failed to take flight in Britain in recent decades. It grew from 6,500 members in the mid-Sixties, to almost 200,000 in the Nineties (in 1995, The Spectator even predicted that “it may not be long before there are more Mormons going to church in England than Anglicans”). But UK membership now stands at 186,803, a figure that has remained virtually static for more than 20 years. Numbers of new recruits have been falling: in 2017, it baptised 1,494 proselytes. This fell to 1,281 in 2018; 995 in 2019; and 454 in 2020. The Church spent £7.8 million on its missionary programme last year, which resulted in the baptism of 655 converts.

But that is only one measure of progress; growth can also come from beyond the grave. The Church claims to have amassed the largest collection of family records in the world and all (living) members are encouraged to “take an Ancestor to the Temple”, a tenet of their faith that makes for perennial headlines. In 1995, in 2012, and again in 2017, the Church had to apologise for posthumously baptising Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

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Is it not curious how carnivorism is subject to endless negative news and analysis, whereas the same rules do not apply to vegan food? As a keeper of livestock in sustainable, ethical, regenerative farming systems, may I say I find it hypocritical to be lectured by those who fly on polluting jets to Egypt, Mexico, Peru and other places I will never see? Has the COP jamboree not discovered Zoom yet? So, for once, let us turn the dinner tables, put vegan food under the knife and fork, and examine its impact on the environment. Where better to start than with tofu?

An ancient, soya-based ingredient in Asian cuisine, tofu came to the West with stoned returning hippies, and was an obscure item in Whole Food shops until the early 21st century, when it started to appear on the shelves of every middle-class supermarket as the meat-free, climate-healing superfood. Suella Braverman’s recent rant about “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati” was not without its truth; tofu is as much a right-on political choice as a potential ingredient in tonight’s family dinner.

Tofu, for those unacquainted with the stuff, is curd made from soybeans that have been soaked in large tanks and churned into a slush, which is then heated, filtered and coagulated into slabs, before being chopped up, packaged, and pasteurised. All these steps require a lot of carbon dioxide-emitting energy.

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The amount of soybeans grown in the UK is negligible (3,000 tons in 2019: our isles are insufficiently warm for the crop), meaning the soybeans imported for any national tofu-maker come with enough travel miles to get them from Japan, say, or the US. The Tofoo Co. might come over all artisanal  — their tofu is made “int Yorkshire”, as they declare on their website — but the raw product is shipped from Canada and Italy.

Then you have the packaging. Tofu is sloppy, wet stuff, invariably sold wrapped in thick plastic you could use as kids’ shoes at the beach. Selflessly, your author, in the interests of “method research”, ate 200g of Bjorg smoked tofu; the plastic packing weighed 10g, actually measurable on analogue kitchen scales.

The Tofoo Co., meanwhile, earnestly informs us: “We don’t pack ours in a ready meal tray in water (the only other way we know tofu can be packed) as we think thermoforming gives a MUCH BETTER, less soggy product, that is ready to eat.” (Amusing, no? They admit tofu is inevtiably soggy, even if you can get less soggy versions.) But “thermoform packaging”, lovely as it sounds, is plastic, and plastic is derived from fossil fuels. The production process involves heating plastic until it is pliable — can you imagine the kilowats of energy required? And extraordinarily, you cannot recycle Tofoo’s wrapping.

Despite all this, if you run “tofu” through the BBC’s climate change food calculator, you will be informed that your “personal consumption” accounts for 12kg to your annual greenhouse gas emissions, on the basis of two servings a week. Two servings of beef come out at a whopping 604 kg per year. A clear win for tofu? Well, no.

The BBC calculator is based on work by Oxford-based environmentalist scientist, Joseph Poore. He who appeared in a promo for the “Go Vegan for Lent” campaign, organised by pressure group Million Dollar Vegan. Poore’s claims to have calculated the universal carbon footprint of an entire food type based on air miles and packaging, as well as production, are nonsensical: it is impossible to do so, given the diversity of packaging and the global nature of distribution. (Were your onions loose and local, or from Spain wrapped in a nylon net?)

Worse, climate change calculators based on crude protein or calories, such as the BBC’s, are flawed in a way that would be amusing if the consequences were not tragic. Tofu has a seemingly respectable 10g of protein per 100g — but not all protein is equal. For humans, soy protein is less digestible than meat protein. In other words, you have to eat proportionately more tofu to get the same protein allowance. Tofu also has significantly less riboflavin, niacin, pantothenic acid, vitamin B6 and vitamin B12 than meat. To make up these deficiencies, tofu-eaters have to either take supplements, or eat additional food — both of which produce greenhouse gases. The Vegan Society, for instance, encourages any breastfeeding meat-free mothers to take supplements of B12, iodine, vitamin D and omega-3, as well as to increase their calcium intake.

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The deficiencies of tofu go beyond its nutritional value. The stuff is tasteless: although venerated by vegans, in classic Asian dishes such as Mapo tofu, the tofu is actually mixed with meat in the hope it will imbibe meat’s tastiness. Tofu is used as filler. Nobody ever said: “I could murder a nice juicy lump of tofu.” The result of this tastelessness is that consumers in the US throw away 30.5% of all tofu purchased; this food waste increases its environmental impact by a whopping 43.9%. The figure for meat thrown away is 20%.

By now you may understand why the Rothamsted Institute’s Dr Graham McAuliffe, an expert on modelling the environmental impacts of food over their lifecycle, has concluded that:

“If you look at tofu, which is processed so there is more energy going into its production, when you correct for the fact that the protein in it is not as digestible compared to the meat-based products, you can see that it could actually have a higher global warming potential than any of the monogastric animals. To get the same amount of protein, tofu is worse.”

On and on goes the list of tofu’s environmental sins. While it is true that most soy grown in Brazil goes to animal feed, some makes its slippery way into the human food chain, and thus into tofu — so add deforestation of the Amazon to that list. If you’re eating it in the UK, tofu from the tree-felled Amazon would cost you double the amount of CO₂ than chicken farmed on these isles.

According to the dear old BBC food calculator, “even the most climate-friendly meat options still produce more greenhouse gases than vegetarian protein sources”. The same lie is broadcast by groupthink governments and the vested interests of the Big Vegan food industry. It’s a lie because you can buy meat from a grass-based, carbon-neutral provider. Indeed, you can buy meat from farmers who, due to sensitive, sustainable pasture management, are sinking more carbon dioxide than their operations emit. You can buy meat wrapped in paper from a butcher, meat which comes from a carbon-neutral factory.

Also, cows produce manure, which feeds insects: an organic, outdoor cow feeds more than 2 million insects a year, dramatically aiding biodiversity as well as the soil. Manure can reduce, or even eliminate, the need for artificial fertiliser, which is responsible for no less than 2.1% of global GHG emissions. Most soy, meanwhile, is chemically drenched. Indeed, the story of contemporary soy production is the biography of agri-business giant Monsanto and its patented, controversial weed-killers.

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Back in the mid-Nineties, Monsanto’s chemists genetically engineered soy to be immune to sprayings from Roundup, a herbicide supplied by… Monsanto. The Roundup Ready soybean could effectively only be grown with applications of the company’s glyphosate weed-killer. However, weeds being weeds proved resistant to Roundup. So in 2015, Monsanto began producing soybean seeds, branded “Roundup Ready Xtend”, engineered to tolerate dosings of both glyphosate and another chemical, dicamba.

Let’s be clear: genetically modified soy, specifically developed to withstand one Earth-polluting chemical, was sprayed, when yield dwindled, with another Earth-polluting chemical. Anything sprayed with both Roundup and dicamba certainly died — including soy not grown from Monsanto-supplied beans. Farmers not using them soon discovered such was the drift from the volatile dicamba that if they were within half a mile of other farmers using it, their crop was impacted.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, there were 3,300 dicamba “incidents” in 2019 alone. Faced with a choice of no crop or Monsanto crop, US soy farmers shifted en masse to being Monsanto clients. The report of the US Center for Food Safety on soy, Monsanto, and the “dicamba debacle” makes for sobering reading:

“Sprayed in large quantities over-the-top of resistant crops in the summertime heat, dicamba vaporised and drifted long distances to cause enormous damage across the landscape… Pesticide expert Andrew Thostenson of North Dakota State University said it was unlike anything that ‘has ever happened in the history of pesticide use in this country’.”

Today, around 94% of the world’s soy is genetically engineered, mostly to be resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup. Alas, as Roundup’s efficacy diminishes, the more it gets sprayed; soybean farmers are currently doubling glyphosate applications per season. Soybeans produced on commercial farms in the USA, Brazil and Argentina accumulate an estimated 2,500–10,000 metric tonnes of glyphosate per year. The adverse effects of glyphosate and dicamba on the environment only begin with the destruction of soil microflora, bee colonies, and aquatic organisms.

Anybody who believes that tofu is a green alternative to meat has no idea how industrialised soybean farming works. Anybody who believes it has a light carbon footprint needs to look again. The soybean is the most environmentally dangerous agricultural crop in the world, and the production of tofu is a drain on our precious resources. The thermoform packets of tofu on the shelf of your local supermarket ought to come served with a warning: this product is harmful to the Earth’s health.

But isn’t “Milk Pour” just a little hard to swallow? Doesn’t it actually stink of First Worldism? A cynic might even suggest that Skylar Sharples and her friends are the dupes of the billion-dollar alt-milk industry. Despite its we-save-the-world advertising, alt-milk is implicated in enough environmental destruction to turn you green, but only with sickness at the hypocrisy.

We all know the problems with dairy. It’s Daisy the cow’s methane burps, and the fact that livestock takes up so much of the globe’s surface. Except that the prime reason for the planetary extent of livestock is that vast tracts of the Earth consist of grass and scrub — food humans cannot eat, but which Daisy and her ilk can turn into nutritious meat and dairy, stuff that humans can chow. Far from being upscale food, as “Milk Pour” would have you believe, dairy — that is cow, sheep, goat, buffalo, donkey, horse milk — is the necessary subsistence food of millions of pastoralist peoples across the world, from Eastern Africa to Mongolia. I cannot wait for Skylar and her activist friends to spread the word to Maasai herders, to chuck away their milk while declaiming a “plant-based future”.

“Milk Pour” might also like to consider, before their next student farce on the shop floor, the UN Environment Programme’s conclusion that “pastoralism is increasingly recognised as one of the most sustainable production systems on the planet and plays a major role in safeguarding ecosystems and biodiversity in natural grasslands and rangelands”. Extolling “plant-based” as a worldwide cure is senseless. It is nothing but Western cultural imperialism, missionary veganism.

“Milk Pour” leaves a very sour political taste in the mouth at home, too. Animal Rebellion says it targets high-end grocers because it doesn’t want to bother people struggling with the cost of living. It seems not to have occurred to them that those people would probably appreciate some of the milk bottles the kids are upending. Milk prices have increased by 50% in the last year. And consider the most basic consequences of the protest. Who clears up the mess? Add contempt for shopworkers to the list of privileges Animal Rebellion need to check. And I say that as a proud former member of the shopworkers’ union, USDAW.

While the media obligingly laps up the Milk Pour stunts, the heads of the alt-milk firms must feel like fat cats who have got all the synthetic cream. The protests are a convenient diversion from the crass environmental profile of their own products, now drunk by one in three Britons, and worth £400 million a year. Take almond milk. Or maybe not, if you value biodiversity — hell, even if you even fancy a drink of water. Industrialised almond agriculture requires five litres of the blue stuff to produce a single nut. A litre of almond milk drink requires 158 litres of water, or 20 times as much as dairy.

Such has been the millennial demand — almond milk is the most popular alt-milk — that California, which produces 80% of the world’s almonds in its arid Central Valley, saw land planted with almond trees grow from 1,958 square kilometres to 6,475 square kilometres over the last 20 years. The result? Drought, desertification, and almond-growers having to grub up their trees due to lack of water.

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It gets worse. Almond growers invariably douse their crop in quantities of glyphosate — known to be lethal to bees. According to Nate Donley, a senior scientist for the Center for Biological Diversity, sending bees to pollinate the California almond industry is “like sending the bees to war. Many don’t come back.” In California, bees are dying in record numbers due to habitat loss and exposure to the pesticides of the industrialised almond industry. Animal Rebellion? When vegans drink almond milk, they are complicit in Animal Extinction.

What about uber-trendy coconut milk? Well, coconut trees only grow in tropical climates. Western demand is causing the exploitation of workers in poorer nations: just ask a small farmer in the Philippines or Indonesia on $2 a day for back-breaking work. And, er, what about the food miles?

Or the destruction of rainforests? It’s not just coconut milk that’s guilty on this front. Large swathes of the Amazon have been burned to make way for soy farms, and the soy goes into alt-milk as well as the cattle feed. But don’t be fooled into thinking the solution is to start growing them closer to home, in the northern hemisphere. Of the soybeans grown in the US, 94% are genetically engineered. According to a study published in Food Chemistry, when sprayed with the ever-popular pesticide RoundUp, genetically engineered soybeans accumulate high levels of glyphosate — which is not just toxic to bees but, says the British Medical Journal, likely carcinogenic.

Still fancy, soya? A study published in the Journal of Applied Animal Nutrition suggests that cow milk is far more sustainable for the planet than “milk alternatives”, especially soya-based ones, and especially if the cows are in UK systems based on grass. According to the lead author, Professor Mike Wilkinson: if you’re a British consumer, “drinking milk from cows in the UK uses 11 times less soya than consuming drinks made directly from soya”.

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But maybe oat milk, most famously purveyed by Swedish company Oatly, is the great white hope of vegan faux dairy? Oats are grown in cooler climes such as the northern US, Canada and Scotland — and are therefore not associated with deforestation in developing countries. Alas, the negative of this would-be guilt-free option is that most oats come from highly industrialised operations in which they are sprayed with none other than Roundup. A study by the Environmental Working Group, an American public health organisation, found glyphosate in 43 of 45 foods it tested containing conventionally grown oats — while the Pesticide Action Network reported in 2019 that 94% of oats tested contained residues of more than one pesticide. Oatly insist that their alt-milk products are glyphosate free.

You would hope so at the price. Oatly Whole Drink costs £2.00 per litre. As they sloshed dairy milk about the floor of Waitrose, complaining about “the cost of living crisis”, Animal Rebellion might have considered real milk rather than quaffing alt-milk? I mean, Waitrose’s top-end Duchy organic dairy milk is 99p a litre — a 50% saving right there. And surely, any halfway-credible protestors against conspicuous consumption would have targeted the cartons of Rude Health Chilled Organic Almond Drink at £2.40 litre? Oh truly, for those of us who believe that sustainable livestock farming is a boon for nature, human health and cutting CO2, vegan alt-milk is the comedy gift that just keeps giving. That Rude Health drink contains 1% almonds and is essentially rice and water. Frankly, it has close to zero nutritional value, and is essentially sugary flavoured water. For £2.40 litre.

And it ain’t doing much for the environment. Early Oatly adverts also suggested that by drinking oat milk instead of dairy you personally can save a whopping 73% of your total greenhouse emissions. No, you cannot. The claim is based on Oatly’s estimate that their milk generates 0.44kg of CO2 per litre compared to dairy milk’s 1.58kg. This figure is based on methane metrics that have been shown to be biased against animal foods, ignore the fact that dairy cows also end up in the human food chain as meat (reducing other CO2 food demands), and do not account for livestock pasture’s carbon sequestration.

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Then you have the overwhelming problem in standard calculations of how much greenhouse gas food emits: the sums are based on gas per food kilos or food calories. Calculations based on food quality, rather than quantity, make for very different answers. As Jayne Buxton notes in her comprehensive survey of vegan food, The Great Plant-Based Con (2022), when the metric used is CO2 per micronutrient content, the footprint of dairy milk is less than a third of that of oat milk.

Alternative milk is not a milk equivalent. Oatly claims in its adverts that its product is “like milk, but made for humans”. Made in a machine, that is. It is weak nutritional stuff. Typically, dairy milk naturally provides protein, calcium, vitamin D, vitamin A, phosphorus, vitamin B 12, riboflavin, potassium, the list goes on; a glass of original oat milk typically has calcium, vitamin D, vitamin A, riboflavin and iron — all, apart from the last, added artificially. Oh, and in the case of Oatly, the “milk” comes with added rape seed oil, phosphates (linked to kidney disease) and sugar. After being called out by Campbell Soup, of all people, Oatly deftly decided to stop marketing its oat milks as containing “no added sugars”, because its convoluted ultra-production process — in that inhuman machine — breaks down oat starch into simple sugars, primarily  maltose. So you get 7g of sugar with a single serving of Oatly Original. Hence US blogger Nat Eliason’s famous assertion that Oatly is “The New Coke”.

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People are getting rich off the faux white stuff. Although Oatly promotes itself as a folksy, right-on, climate-change-busting start-up, it is a $2 billion business, the world’s largest oat milk company. Top investors include that well-known friend of the people Goldman Sachs, and the equity group Blackstone. According to Bloomberg, the CEO of Blackstone, Stephen Schwarzman, donated $3.7 million to Super Pac America First Nation, which supported the reelection of Donald Trump. This is the Trump whose administration took more than 130 separate steps to stop fighting climate change.

Elsewhere, one of Oatly’s most recent commercial initiatives has been to partner with the German petrol station network Aral, to launch the Oatly Barista Edition in approximately 1,250 of Aral’s sites. In other words Oatly, whose Number 1 “Pillar of Action” is “to drive a shift toward more sustainable, low-emission practices”, has done a deal with sellers of… petrol.

That loud sound from the meadow just down the lane? Daisy the cow, natural maker of milk for humans for 6000 years, laughing her hooves off at the stupidity and gullability of humans. I’ve just told her a joke. It’s the one about alt-milk.