The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
What is it really like to be a farmer?
After Brexit, it’s up to us to decide how to look after Britain’s land – and it’s time we all took an interest
FIELD WORK by Bella Bathurst 240pp, Profile, T £14.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £16.99, ebook £11.38 ÌÌÌÌÌ
“Every time we stop… the sweet morbid reek of those dead sheep comes surging forward, thick enough to seem almost visible. Watching the wing mirrors I see the drivers behind us closing their windows and a man driving the school bus recoil, squinting with displeasure.”
Readers expecting a lyrical evocation of the countryside may be disappointed, but Bella Bathurst’s Field Work is more important than that. It is anthropology not hagiography, a genuine attempt to get under the fingernails of the people who work in land-based industries and understand why they carry on doing what they do, usually for little financial reward, often in great discomfort and in the face of adversity. And it is a distinguished work of journalism by someone who asks the questions that the reader wants asked, sifts the answers perceptively, and is able to keep a professional detachment.
The impact of television and radio on print writing has not always been benign, but in this case, Bathurst uses documentary techniques from other media to good effect in a 360-degree look at the people who work in agriculture and its ancillary industries, from senior civil servants to knackermen. She sets off around Britain to gather interviews and shines light on farming from a number of unexpected angles, so that we end up with a kind of hologram, and it is very revealing.
Bathurst has a photojournalist’s eye for detail. A Whitehall mandarin’s hands are “as tapering and elegant as the hands of Aubrey Beardsley”. Down at the sharp end at 7am at Hereford Livestock Mart: “The women’s hands are thin and stiff, the sort of hands you get from a lifetime of rehanging cold gates or grabbing at the nearest handful of passing sheep, the wedding rings now locked on under knuckles burred by overuse.”
She has a sisterly sympathy for any woman who ends up as a farmer’s wife, and this takes her to interview the founders of the rural dating site, Muddy Matches. Aspirational farming spouses soon have the “black labs and Agas” image dispelled: “Remember that you come second… Worst time to date a farmer is when the milk price drops… don’t even think of planning anything during harvest.” A male member writes, of the website’s newly joined ladies: “I like the Fresh Meat counter.”
Bathurst attends TB testings and witnesses at first hand the stomachchurning anxiety of farmers at the mercy of a merciless disease and an unthinking government that treats their life’s work as inconvenient statistics. She doesn’t shy away from covering the dirtier workplaces. She visits one of Britain’s last small abattoirs at the back of a butcher’s shop, and chats to slaughtermen as they carefully go about their business while the Jeremy Vine show plays in the background.
And she follows a knackerman on his rounds: “There was a giraffe once… couldn’t get it into the back of the tipper… took a lot of folding
I can tell you.” It’s a shame that she doesn’t delve further into the economics of knackering. Farmers, who once were paid for their dead animals, now have to pay to have deadstock removed, partly because a supposedly environmentally conscious world prefers synthetic products to those made from cowhides and sheepskins. Yet a one-ton bull produces 90 litres of biodiesel from its tallow, something that vegans conveniently forget.
Threaded through the book is a narrative about Bert Howell, her landlord, and his Sisyphean efforts to squeeze a living from his Welsh hill farm. Even after subsidy, “their income was £72,000 and their outgoings were £76,000”. Bert is a true countryman, who knows the land “because he’d walked it, ploughed it and watched a thousand days of rain chase over it. He’d cut its thistles, lifted its stones, trimmed its footings and seen droughts lay bare its bones”. And she understands that his oneness with his farm is a trap, as well as a blessing. She sees that farming is made up of family businesses, and is therefore a family saga, with intergenerational tensions and an endless cycle of young bulls asserting their authority over old bulls. One chapter is devoted to a “succession planning” clinic in a
village hall run by the NFU, where families open up to a consultant, who has to play psychiatrist as much as anything else. “You look at agriculture and you see so many people who just look miserable.”
At Bert’s funeral, Bathurst reflects that “the removal of that badgerish presence buttressing the farm against change seemed bewildering”. Hearteningly, we later see that Bert’s son David and his fiancée have met the challenges head on, and diversified the farm into different income streams, which they run alongside other jobs.
Bathurst’s findings are realistic and fair. The industry is changing fast. Traditional family farms are becoming large, efficient agri-businesses or going under and being replaced by hobby farms or niche businesses. The question of subsidies is summarised by the man in Whitehall: “The reason that even the most gung-ho free-market Tory wouldn’t ever remove the subsidies in one go is because they’d have a massive competitive disadvantage overnight, because all their serious global competitors have subsidies as well. So either everyone does it, or no one does it.” This thoughtprovoking book portrays, with uncomfortable accuracy, life on the green bits beyond the 30-mile limits of Britain’s towns. The reader is left with the conclusion that there is very much more to farming than meets the eye. And, as a farmer, one can’t ask for more than that.
‘There was a giraffe once – took a lot of folding, I can tell you,’ says the knackerman