“What’s the best old farmer advice… you’ve received?” asked the Ontario farmer Ryan Campbell on Twitter early this March. Clearly, old farmers give good advice—or at least give lots of it—as demonstrated by the more than 150 responses his tweet accumulated within 24 hours. The suggestions ranged from well-known nuggets such as: “if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you always got” to the Norwegian “man trenger å ha is i magen”—meaning “you need to have ice in your stomach,” which apparently means be patient.
My favourite piece of advice offered by several farmers was: “a barn can build you a house, but a house will never build you a barn.” This is a simple encouragement to spend on what brings a return; investing in your farm (the barn) can bring you comfort (a house), not the other way around.
As farming in the UK moves into a more regenerative era, farmers with a passion for wildlife are seeing great results. Nature—from micro-organisms to megafauna—is returning to the farmed ecosystem, and bringing with it cleaner air and water, less flooding and reductions in atmospheric carbon. In the context of our sage farmers’ advice, we’re investing in the barn that is our local ecosystem.
As consumers in the UK, we can be proud of our food heritage, largely because of the high standards driven by the European Union, and more recently our own lawmakers. But lately, there has been a worrying change in the rhetoric on farming that gives a glimpse into the conflicted priorities of our “Get Brexit Done” government, which is desperate to be re-elected and which is hounded by single-issue pressure groups and newspaper hacks.
Just a few years ago, things were quite different. In 2018, Michael Gove assured both the farming community and the wider public that all food imported to the UK would have to conform to the same production standards as our home-grown items. That’s some statement from the man who was at the time head of the Department forEnvironment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).
In the last 12 months, quick trade deals with Antipodean nations have been championed by ministers who demonstrate a staggering lack of awareness not only of UK farming practices, but also the importance of agriculture to rural communities. International trade secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan crowed about the possibility of eating New Zealand lamb in the autumn; surely someone at Defra could have told her that lamb raised in the UK under world-leading welfare standards is available in our supermarkets year-round?
Incidentally, while the trade deals that our ministers have been grandstanding about do include clauses on food safety, the promised requirements to mirror UK welfare standards are mysteriously absent. The New Zealand minister for agriculture, Damien O’Connor, called the UK-New Zealand trade deal a “great” deal for New Zealand’s farmers. While Trevelyan said the deal would “slash red tape,” it was met with almost universal condemnation from farming groups like NFU Cymru, who said “the deal will grant generous tariff-free UK market access for New Zealand’s producers, whilst securing virtually zero reciprocal benefits” for farmers in Wales.
More recently, the war in Ukraine is affecting world fuel and fertiliser prices, arresting supply chains and threatening to drive food prices out of reach of the poorest in society. Meanwhile, our government has been running media campaigns offering £10,000 per hectare to convert farmland to forest, in the name of that now clichéd buzzword “rewilding.” There is great hypocrisy in peddling this slogan while hoping we can import our national demand for calories, as we export the associated carbon footprint across the globe. This government’s greenwashing will never build us a barn. Let’s not be the generation of Brits who bet the farm and lost.
