Farmers on the frontline
BACK in 2019, Gail Bradbrook, founder of Extinction Rebellion, gave a rousing speech to the somewhat startled delegates attending a Sustainable Food Trust conference, who she promised to convert to rebels. ‘Bring your tractors and stop being so British, make your case to the vegans,’ she urged. Ms Bradbrook exhorted this group of polite, environmentally conscientious farmers to be loudly disruptive on the capital’s streets in order to get the message through that what they do—producing food and nurturing soil through regenerative farming and grassfed livestock—is important.
Although no windows were broken last week, the idea of protesting farmers jamming up central London with 120-plus tractors seemed unlikely on that summer’s day in a Cotswolds barn nearly five years ago. However, since then, the Ukraine war has propelled costs upwards, supermarkets have pushed prices downwards and the consequences of Brexit, some unforeseen or unintended, are coming to light (Agromenes, page 39). Last week, a group of farmers spectacularly thronged the streets around Westminster with their crawling, monstrous machinery, horns blazing in a deafening cacophony and traffic at a standstill.
Many would agree that subsidising farmers to produce food, as happened under the EU Common Agricultural Policy, is the wrong approach. Indeed, swathes of the British farming community voted to escape the perceived red tape via Brexit, believing in a freer trade and a less restrictive attitude to research and development. The unwelcome reality, however, is that British farmers are currently competing with foreign imports that are allowed to bear a Union Flag label and that are not subject to the UK’S higher standards of animal welfare and production; there is also a labour shortage. These disadvantages—akin to sending a football team to the World Cup in chains, according to one spokesperson—were at the core of the demonstration.
On the same day that the tractors rolled into London, Defra announced that the amount of land farmers may enter into the Sustainable Farming Incentive—in which they are paid for wildflower margins, winter bird food and so on—will be restricted to 25%. Some small farms only survive through environmental schemes; other large ones are not seeing a return on their investment into expansion and technology. Neither is ideal in an unsettled world as national self-sufficiency slips below 60% and the debate is becoming polarised.
British farmland is hugely varied in terrain and soil and what can and cannot be grown and reared on it. The system somehow needs the flexibility to allow all forms to flourish in the nation’s best interests.