Farming in Britain: The show must go on

When, I wonder, was the last time you went to an agricultural show? Personally, I’ve always preferred the small ones. One traction engine, two pigs and a musty beer belle tent. A brief moment of the retro bucolic and quite enough for me.

My wife, however, who is a Maid Of Kent by up-bringing has always had a fondness for the county show. Her father used to exhibit vintage machinery he’d restored and her childhood was one of sunny summers scampering the stalls and animal sheds spread over many acres. Our own kids did much the same. Ice cream mouths and sticky fingers daubing the Middle Whites. You know the kind of thing. 

Observation over many years, however, reveals that things aren’t what they used to be. A rural elegy as old as Hardy. This, I suspect, is true across the piece. The Royal Show at Stoneleigh in Warwickshire, one-time centre piece of the English season, is no more. (Though the Royal Welsh claims to be the largest of its type in Europe.)

It’s not just that the animal sheds have waxed and waned under various maladies from Mad Cow Disease to Foot and Mouth, it is more that there is a shift in balance. 

A proud white-coated fella, a hand shorter at the shoulder than the prize-winning Hereford he leads, is still a thing. But it is a brief photo-opp before rushing off to the next opportunity to buy. 

One can, of course, still snap up a Claas and nip into the bank trailer to arrange the finance but each year, it seems, the Massey Fergusons get smaller and the stands flogging jacuzzis, up-cycled decking, fudge and t-shirts printed with Native American animal spirits proliferate.  

Agriculture is becoming less and less central, less prestigious, less royal. The Bull, The Wheatsheaf, The Hop Pole and the Cock Horse are closing.  Time gentlemen, please.

Yet it is agriculture’s way to shape shift. In the face of circumstances, it morphs. Soft fruit abounds beneath its polytunnels. There is a vast venison farm nearby. The oast houses and hop fields are now more and more under vines. But they are also under development too. A friend in local government tells me that each year the applications to repurpose land increase as exhausted farmers call it a day and their off-spring look to cash in the easy way. 

Again, one might say  ‘twas ever thus. I once lived in a house well within the bounds of south east London in which the garden held the remnants of an orchard and near which the Friesians of the Express Dairy had grazed within what was then living memory. 

Farming is being driven back to its core lands, to its mountain kingdoms, like the Welsh before the Saxon or the Apache before, ironically, the rancher. And apart from giving the occasional French Bové a round of applause from a distance where we don’t have to deal with dung-based anti-globalist inconvenience, we do nothing. 

The reasons, I think, are manifold but have their recent roots in BSE. Mad cow disease struck hard at two things. Firstly, the prestige agricultural product. The roast beef of old England. Aberdeen Angus. USDA prime. VBF (Viande Bovine Française). The farming sector’s pride and joy.

That Britain suffered disproportionately was true. First from the understandable consumer scare and second from agricultural protectionism. Rural rumour had it that la maladie JCB was as common in France but dealt with via digger and a corner of a foreign field that was forever Daisy. It mattered not. Britain had a lucrative export market and it had to stop.  

Whatever way, it also robbed agriculture of its wholesomeness. No longer was Farmer Giles the apple-cheeked Pa Larkin of sepia-hop-picking memory, he was a pedlar of nightmares, of contamination and of industrialised insanity.

And when that healthy rural glow dimmed, things that had lurked just beyond its light moved in. Vegetarianism and veganism – then, as now, the coming thing for all its adherents claim – environmentalism, militant welfare warriors, eco-extrapolation. And each has taken a hammer to the icon of the Britain’s toy farm childhood sowed and grew in our memory.

It seems to me though that this latest incarnation of agricultural madness is a product entirely of our effete times. So used have we become to plentiful and proportionately cheap food that we have forgotten its value. So far removed from what it takes to produce it from the economies of scale and production to the bloody business of the abattoir, that we imagine it simply is. A constant in our lives bestowed by beneficent gods. 

Unless, of course, a year-round salad habit wilts under bad weather in Spain, expensive gas in Planet Thanet or our mad, mono-port dependence on hostage Dover.

You can see it in the Tik-Tok videos of slack-jawed teenagers demanding “Farming must stop” or the angry tweets petulantly decrying the lack of a particular shape of pasta or the fact that Waitrose has a courgette-shaped hole. Give us all by doing nothing. The mad contradictions that can’t decide whether they like less the factory farms of Denmark or the wide open pampas plains of Argentina.  

You might have thought these brief inconveniences would jog the cultural memory. Nothing frightened Churchill like the U-boats. Ration-era Ten-pound Poms remember their horror as Aussie sailors tipped half-spoiled fruit overboard. 

Not that the amnesia stops at these shores. Over in Holland, plans to expropriate land and slash livestock numbers by 30% have caused a political revolt. Holland, which Nazi Germany tried to starve to death in the HongerWinter of 1944, obliging Allied air forces to drop Swedish supplies to its emaciated western population.

Starvation was ever a weapon of war and we have convinced ourselves, at the comfort of the dining table, that starvation, weapons and war are a thing of the past. Food security an untested hypothesis. 

Meanwhile, Ireland, itself no stranger to famine, is considering a similar cull of its national dairy herd.

This isn’t to dismiss environmental concerns. Those in Holland are certainly acute. A tiny country, farmed with an unparalleled intensity. Examples abound. But, as ever, the notion of balance, of moderation is secondary. Everything is a crusade. Deus le veult. And the deus these days answers to the prayers of many lobbies.

It is suggested that technology will save. Hydroponics, lab-bred meat, AI. Well, mayhap. The future is ever unknowable while there is to agriculture, a certain timelessness. Flood plains are better suited to planting than housing. Two of the three oldest professions – farming and soldiering – go increasingly neglected, the skills they demand increasingly eroded. “Don’t it always seem to go..”

I’m no romantic about agri-business. I’ve seen it close up. But every time a vast tractor swings out in front of me or the fruit pickers’ bus times its run imperfectly and neither will pull over, I’d still rather see them there than not. I’d rather the show had cattle, not crap. I’d rather the show goes on, as the best shows surely must.  

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