Better quality is key to survival of farming

THE farming community are right to react with rage to the advice reportedly given to Government that the farming sector is almost superfluous to our needs. How an advisor could be wrong is astonishing, but needs to be understood.

The debate on the future of food has particular resonance in Devon. We have the potential here, with rich pastures and smaller, more mixed farms, to lead the way to a sustainable future.

This too goes beyond the overpolarised meat-vs-plant argument to a good look at how we might feed ourselves in a world of climate breakdown and increasing localisation. How will we feed ourselves in the future?

Pastures provide meat and dairy as well as the opportunity for crop rotations to provide essential vegetables and grain. It is these climate-resistant, carbon-sinking pastures which hold much of our future, which surely includes moving away from unsustainable uses of chemicals of all sorts back to food which can reasonably be called organic and sustainable: in other words, what for thousands of years would have been called normal. Good soil and pasture are utterly essential.

There is a golden opportunity to develop farming systems resilient to the early phases of climate change while the world moves away from fossil fuels, based on pasture, crop rotation and rewilding of uplands. We also need 160 million new trees just to compensate for the tragic loss from ash die-back, plus billions more to sink some of the carbon we have so carelessly dumped into the ailing atmosphere. The countryside could become a major provider of work once again as well as reversing the decline in all forms of life, starting from life in soil, and including the disappearing insects. No land should be wasted.

Here in Devon, and Cornwall too, farmers have the option of cutting the horrendous costs of fertilisers, pesticides and antibiotics to produce healthy meat and dairy as well as a variety of vegetable and other produce for more local markets.

The advice that farming is not essential needs to be put in its place by looking to mix the best of the past with modern methods. This might reduce yields and, yes, food should cost more, but better-quality food means healthier people and fewer costs to the taxpayer. It can be done. Young people might then see farming as offering a secure and prosperous future.

Perhaps the Covid-19 pandemic might remind us of how delicate, unsustainable – indeed, dangerous – reliance on international trade in food is, and the critical, indispensable importance of quality farming, local farms, shops and shoppers.

Dr Colin Bannon, Crapstone, Devon