A A plague plague on on these these plastic plastic monstrosities monstrosities

As one small victory is notched up against the march of the polytunnels ( ) They’re bad for our food, our soil . . . and our countryside

THE countryside one of our greatest national treasures, ‘ this green and pleasant land’, as William Blake described it. And I am lucky to live in one of the most unspoilt parts, in the county of Herefordshire on the Welsh border.

Full of gently rolling hills, winding roads, stunning views and historic villages, Herefordshire is undoubtedly a jewel in England’s rural crown.

Long untainted by sprawling urban or industrial development, the county’s landscape is still largely agricultural. Successive generations have worked the land for centuries — indeed, my wife comes from a local farming family.

But in recent years, a new menace has emerged to undermine this rustic idyll. It comes in the form of plastic and metal and is threatening to swallow up vast swathes of our countryside. I am referring to the growing plague of polytunnels which is spreading across Britain.

These unsightly structures, which are essentially long shelters made up of polythene stretched across a series of metal hoops, are increasingly used in the production of summer fruit such as strawberries and raspberries.

Industrial farm owners love polytunnels because they act like giant, snaking greenhouses, allowing fruit to be grown from April to November, instead of just a few months in the summer, while pickers can harvest crops even when it’s raining.

But for many of us living in rural England, the arrival of the polytunnel has been a disaster. Huge in scale and ugly in construction, it not only damages our rural heritage but also represents a perversion of agriculture.

Polytunnels promote the worst kind of artificial, intensive farming, where production is focused entirely on quantity rather than quality. To allow these brutal plastic factories to be imposed on the landscape amounts to a form of vandalism in the name of crude profit.

It has been reported that 5,000 acres of agricultural land in England is covered by these polythene monstrosities.

But this is probably a severe underestimate, judging by my own experience in Herefordshire, where an increasing amount of the county is under a sea of dirty plastic.

In one of my neighbouring villages, Brierley, a massive fruit farm covering more than 300 acres has sprung up, causing widespread local fury and despair.

In addition to row upon row of polytunnels, the Brierley development has involved the construction of shelters for thousands of migrant workers, as well as a large sanitation plant and a leisure centre for the workforce. All of this was erected without any planning permission.

After a long battle by protesters, the county council ordered the leisure centre to be pulled down, though no action has been taken against the polytunnels, on the grounds they are only ‘temporary structures’.

WELL, that has always struck me as absurd. The polythene might occasionally be taken down, but the frames always remain in place. To call polytunnels temporary is like saying a brick- built house is temporary as long as the windows and doors are occasionally removed.

And what is equally irritating are the double standards involved.

While these plastic hangars have gone up unchallenged, local residents have found that even minor alterations to their own homes have been refused by local authorities.

One of my neighbours, a tree surgeon, was told he could not build a shed in his garden, yet the view from that same garden is utterly ruined by a polytunnel. But there is a glimmer of hope.

In a ruling last week, an official inquiry in Surrey has decided that a proposed polytunnel covering 100 acres near Godalming, along with 45 mobile homes for 250 workers, needs full planning permission.

In his judgment, the planning inspector said: ‘I am firmly of the view that those agricultural needs would be far outweighed by the harm to the countryside arising out of the scale and appearance of the polytunnel.’

However, the problem is that the big fruit producers — nicknamed the Berry Barons — are an extremely powerful lobby group, with financial and political muscle.

Already there is talk of an appeal against the Godalming ruling, while the National Farmers’ Union has warned of the threat to agricultural prosperity and jobs if the spread of polytunnels is severely restricted .

So if we are to defeat this plastic menace we must directly challenge the arguments of the producers.

Effectively, what they claim is that British agriculture can survive only by using ever more intensive, high- tech, industrialised methods, geared towards mass production most of the year round.

They say, for instance, that if they did not churn out fruit from April to November, the supermarkets would look overseas for their produce.

But this is a bleak vision, one that in the long term will require the destruction of much of the countryside to meet the demands of these food factories.

It is an outdated philosophy, one that belongs to the Seventies when big was supposed to be beautiful and we ended up with the tower block and British Leyland. I would like to see a very different approach, one that sees agriculture as a way guarding our rural heritage.

Farming should be the protector of our land, not its destroyer. And this can be achieved only if it is geared towards making highquality produce primarily for the local community using less savage, more natural methods.

The English landscape should belong to all of us and that shared future cannot be sacrificed purely for the narrow goal of industrial profit.

Claims from the Berry Barons about boosting local economies are equally unconvincing, since almost all of the pickers are migrants who are so badly paid that they have little to spend in village shops.

Moreover, there is something repulsive about establishing large labour camps for downtrodden workers within the heart of rural England.

Aof

T BRIERLEY, there is a

palpable air of menace

about the polytunnel

farm, with barbed wire

around the workers’ shelters and most of the signs in Russian.

The damage to the environment is just as worrying. Polytunnels require such intensive use of the land, particularly through the over- use of fungicides, that the soil can become sterile after three years.

Instead of growing soft fruit in the earth, they have to be grown in bags laid out on tables instead.

Meanwhile, the delicate balance of the area’s eco- system has been damaged. The disappearance of worms, for instance, from over-worked, chemicalised soil means the loss of food for wild birds.

And what is all this for? Just so we can have strawberries for most of the year, instead of at their natural time in summer.

So, with these plastic food factories, we are hitting not just the landscape and the environment but the very rhythms of nature itself.

The polytunnel is a symbol of the worst of the artificiality of too much of the modern world.

If it is a choice between saving our countryside or having a bowl of tasteless, mass- produced ‘summer fruits’ out of season, I know which one I would go for.