In Defence of Our Good Farmers

Farmers are under attack again by some environmentalists and it is grossly unfair

Photo by Laurie Byrne on Unsplash

“In my lifetime, meeting any farmer who has any empathy for nature whatsoever has been a dramatic and exciting oddity. You [James Rebanks] are the exception, not the rule. So while I sympathise that the new schemes are not generous enough, and far from ideal, I also feel angry that nearly all farmers have spent the last half century expunging nature from our landscapes without a care in the world.”¹

These were the words of Ben Goldsmith, an environmentalist and financier with strong connections to the current Conservative Government (and Boris Johnson in particular). They come in light of statistics of precipitous declines in farmland birds and insects that are irrefutable and worsening² (although the comment from Ben originated from a discussion about the legacy of the disgraced politician Boris Johnson - who Ben claimed had done much for the environment in his time as Prime Minister of the UK - a highly dubious claim). The claims of Mr Goldsmith echo those coming from increasingly vocal ecomodernist and celebrity environmentalist circles - “farmers are to blame!”.

The reaction from the farming community was swift and aghast. Such a sweeping generalisation ignores the plethora of nature-conscious farmers up and down the country, farmers who are delighted by the sight of a barn owl in the cool evening light, and who have made (at great personal expense) significant nature-friendly improvements to their farms. But, detractors like Mr Goldsmith point to the graphs of steep declines in farmland biodiversity post-1970, statistics that are hard to ignore and give weight to Mr Goldsmith’s claims. Surely it is the custodians of the land who bear the brunt of the responsibility for these declines? This decimation of wildlife has happened on their [the farmers] watch and is the result of them reneging on their stewardship responsibilities. The logic seems sound. But is it fair?

In times not too long ago, I would have said a hearty “Yes!”. During my Conservation and Environment Bachelor's degree, it was the standard opinion among students (myself included) that farmers were the bad guys - reckless destroyers of the environment, only caring about productivity and clueless as to the names of wildflowers and farmland birds. Such a view of farmers as the ‘villains’ in the environment is common currency among ecomodernists, with decries of sheep-wrecked landscapes, rivers laden with nitrates, cows causing global warming, and insectless skies coming from their ranks. There is some merit to these claims; it would be disingenuous to deny so. Some landscapes are “sheep-wrecked”, the stocking density being too high. Pesticides have contributed to insect declines (although so too have mowing regimes, urbanisation, transportation trends, and climate change) and many farmers have liberally used fertilisers with deleterious effects on our rivers when the fertilisers run off into them. There are many “bad egg” farmers - as the deep scars on our landscapes testify.

But are ‘the many bad eggs’ in the majority? I would now argue a strong “No”. The ‘Good Farmer’ is a much more common species than the ecomodernists would have us believe and ‘A Farm Free Future’ would not be the eco-friendly utopia they dream of. Farmers have a key role to play in the stewardship of nature in this country³ and many are already doing above and beyond their fair share, even if the likes of Mr Goldsmith fail to notice them.

It could be much worse. One only has to look ‘across the Pond’ to see some truly monstrous farms both to the north and south of the greater American continent. The 18,000 dairy cow factory farm that went up in flames and the Midwestern fields whose overly tilled loose soils caused the multicar pileup a few months ago are two stark examples. We simply do not have tragedies of this scale in the UK, and any farmer who tries to farm in such destructive ways would most likely be hounded out and shunned by their peers. But, in America too, the charge of farmers as universal ecological villains would be unfair. From American fields have arisen two of the best farmers of the modern era, Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson. UK farmers could learn much from the example of these two men, and their philosophies and practices need to make much greater inroads in the UK agriculture scene.

Back though to the UK and returning to the question “Is it fair?”. To answer this fully, one needs to consider the economic standing of UK farmers. Their economic (in)security would give most of us (if we were in a likewise position) a severe mental breakdown. Many farmers barely break even and have to work unsociable hours to keep food on their own tables. Furthermore, in the UK, farmers often hold their farms in insecure tenancy agreements which could see farmers turfed off their lands - lands they have invested sweat and blood into - at short notice. These injustices contribute to the high rates of suicide observed among farmers - a great travesty that brings shame to our country.

Adding fuel to the fire of pressures farmers are under is fierce global competition from east and west and a UK government whose trade deals with global competitors have sacrificed UK farmers on the altar of cheap trade deal wins. The horizons are bleak, a perfect storm of greater completion coupled with climatic instability heralds harder times are fast approaching. With such a forecast, many farmers are asking how they will survive. Retaining or maintaining biodiverse set-asides or wildflower meadows is a luxury that they can no longer afford, and the schemes we put in place for rewarding those who do keep these features are so complex, full of holes, and underfunded that it seems grossly unfair - not to mention hypocritical when the government champions its environmental record by pointing to these flawed schemes.

It is not just future instability that hampers farmers’ efforts to farm in a biodiverse manner. Stability is not something our country has given to our farmers in the past either. Farmers were told after the hardships of rationing during World War Two to grow, grow, grow! and that is what they obediently did. Yes, much ecological destruction was caused by the mechanical and agrochemical revolution of British agriculture post-world War Two⁴, but they farmed intensively and abandoned their traditional (and highly biodiverse methods) because we commanded it. Now we are chiding and lambasting them for the state of the landscape - but they were simply following our orders for the last half a century.

And then we the general public need to look at ourselves. We consumers hold more of the blame for the precarious position of farmers and the pitiful state of biodiversity in our “green and pleasant lands” than we are comfortable with admitting. We are the ones who are demanding cheap food prices, pouring fuel on the fire of the already intense supermarket bidding wars. What is (perhaps purposefully) shielded from our view are the faces of the farmers whose profit margins dwindle as the supermarkets demand ever-lower farm gate prices, to the point where many farmers are producing at a loss (particularly dairy farmers). With little spare cash and little spare time, it is no wonder many farmers try to eke out the last bit of productivity from their lands, often just to keep their heads above water.

Few of us work in jobs that would put the environment before financial viability and almost no one who is self-employed would do so - it would be economic suicide. Yet we somehow expect farmers to put the environment before their own interests and at the same time produce the cheap food that we are demanding. This contradiction and fallacy should be plain and obvious. We have backed farmers into an impossible position and continue to do so. This needs to stop.

---

But above all else, there is a greater reason why Mr Goldsmith’s accusation is grossly unfair. Most farmers, I think you will find, are good stewards of their lands. They love their lands and live closer to nature than all of us. Many of them long to hear cuckoos and turtle doves once again and they get excited when rare butterflies grace their fields. Our farmers are some of the most biodiverse-friendly farmers in the world and many are excellent naturalists. They are some of the heroes of our landscapes - producing good and plentiful nutritious food while working to restore biodiverse habitats on their farms in a policy environment that seems to be working against them. Conservationists and conservation organisations should be working with farmers rather than shouting at them, putting some of the hard-earned money from their charitable donations back into the farmed landscape - which has the potential to be the biggest nature reserve in the UK⁵. Such investment both of expertise and money could help create landscape mosaics of biodiverse and productive farms teaming with yellowhammers, skylarks, green hairstreaks and bumblebees - which is what both conservationists and farmers long to see.

Let us then allow our farmers to farm their fields like nature really matters - it’s what they earnestly desire to do. But what should now be clear is they will need our help. Those of us who are able to afford it (and that is most of us) should support them more directly. Sign up for an organic veg box, order your meat direct from the farm, and have your milk delivered milkman. Any method of purchasing that cuts out the middle man in our food system is worth doing - frequenting your farm shops being a classic example. Beyond this, we need people to press for supermarkets to pay their fairer share, and for governments to support our farmers with Environmental Land Management Schemes which are fair and effective - and most importantly - are designed in cooperation with a wide range of farmers. Without these systemic changes, the injustices farmers face will intensify - to the detriment of themselves and the biodiversity they are trying to steward.

Farmers are more than capable of providing public goods of biodiversity and ecosystem services but in this global volatile and hyper-competitive market they need our financial support in order to do so. When we make sure such support is in place, and when we commit ourselves to ‘buying better’ we can watch and marvel as our ‘green and pleasant lands’ turn ever greener and the dawn chorus becomes ever louder once again.

1. Ben Goldsmith, Twitter. (Bold mine)

2. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/wild-bird-populations-in-the-uk/wild-bird-populations-in-the-uk-1970-to-2021#:~:text=In%202021%20the%20UK%20farmland,farmland%20management%20during%20this%20period.

3. See Jake Fiennes, Land Healer: How Farming Can Save Britain’s Countryside. Bantam.

4. See Richard Hawking’s excellent documentation of these changes in the first chapter of At the Fields Edge: African Bell and the English Countryside. Hale.

5. Jake Fiennes, Land Healer: How Farming can Save Britain’s Countryside. Bantam.