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

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

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

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

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Brexit is a betrayal of Britain's farmers

By James Rebanks

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

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

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

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

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The slow death of French cheese

By John Lichfield

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

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

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

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Tories have to choose between beef and liberty

By Danny Kruger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How coronavirus exposes our fragility

By James Kirkup

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

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

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

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

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By Mary Kenny

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

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

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

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

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

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

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There's no such thing as a green vegan

By Mary Harrington

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

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

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

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

No one was listening.

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By John Lichfield

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

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

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

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

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

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The blight of farm suicides

By John Lewis-Stempel

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

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

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

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

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There's no such thing as factory farming

By Peter Franklin

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

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

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