Show some taste, back British farmers
THERE is now a ‘national day’ for almost everything. If you were hoping to celebrate National Chip Day, you have a long wait. You’ve just missed it. It was September 4. And if the idea of autumn and winter is already getting you down, put a mark on the calendar for March 21 – it’s National Flower Day, at the start of spring.
But while many of these recently invented days are little more than marketing ploys, today has more significance than most here in the rural Westcountry. September 15 is ‘Back British Farming Day’ or, more precisely, in these days of social media promotion, where everything needs a hashtag and to be written as one word, #BackBritishFarmingDay.
I’ve a feeling our grandparents and great-grandparents would have scratched their heads at the idea that anyone actually needed to be persuaded to back British farming. It would be like supporting breathing, or speaking up for walking. (Although, these days, there is a whole walking month – it’s in May).
Farming, until relatively recently, was properly seen as the life support system for us all. Growing food, rearing livestock and looking after the landscape were as crucial as breathing. Telling people to ‘back them’ would have seemed at best unnecessary and, at worst, insulting. How times have changed.
While the majority do indeed still back British farming, attempts to undermine the work of the farmer are not hard to find. The environmental movement, in many ways a creditable and necessary focus for the importance of bringing balance to the management of the land, has spawned some extreme ideas around the countryside and food production.
When nationally known writers and broadcasters have access to the mass media to promote the idea that farming sheep is destroying the uplands and eating imported soya is better for the planet than home-reared beef, there is a need for some kick-back.
‘Back British Farming Day’ is in its sixth year. Farmers and their representatives were a little slow off the mark to counter the slick keyboard warriors who would do down their hard work, and there was ground to make up half a decade ago. But progress has been swift. And it helps to have a good story to tell.
The environmental impact of farming – livestock farming included – is nothing for British agriculture to be embarrassed about, while efficiency, often cited as the cause of so many environmental problems, is actually making things better, not worse.
Some on the fringes of the anti-farming movement argue that traditional agriculture is dying and that in a few years we will all be eating products made from fermented microbes. Aside from most people’s reaction to something brewed from bacterial sludge being put on their plates (yuk!), the truth is that farming is already moving in tune with nature, through regenerative processes that use fewer chemicals and put back as much as they take from the soil.
My first proper night out since the start of the pandemic came last week when I attended the launch party, at Darts Farm, near Exeter, for the Taste East Devon Food Festival 2021.
There can be few finer marriages between beautiful wildlife-friendly landscapes and the production of fine food and drink than East Devon. From cider to beef, vegetables to fish, this district, like so many across the South West, can vie with the best in Europe for its countryside and its gastronomy.
The extremists who have set out to undermine farming and those who grow our food see only one way to restore nature, with a slavish adherence to rewilding, confining food production to laboratories and destroying rural communities in the process. East Devon’s Food Festival – and thousands like it up and down the country – show that people still want to eat proper food with a story tied to a cared-for farmed environment where there is room for wildlife too. Back British Farming? You bet we do.
The environmental movement has spawned some extreme ideas about farming