Jill Rees: Welcome Press

In the 1970s word started getting out that Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, really  wanted to be a farmer. At the time this seemed to be one of those youthful dreams, hadn’t John Lennon said he wished he was a fisherman? However Charles had huge tracts of land - he owns Devon and Cornwall, two of Britain’s largest counties! His personal palace is at Highgrove, and there he developed over the years a farm which is entirely organic: it doesn’t use any chemical fertilisers or pesticides. He is a great gardener, and became notorious in the 1980s for talking to his plants. This earned him the reputation of being a bit of a loony.

Britain, like everywhere, used to be self-sufficient in foodstuffs, importing only the occasional oranges and bananas from the Spain and the West Indies. The farms were quite small and run by single families who did mixed farming, growing their own animal feed, recycling manure as fertiliser, and keeping a selection of cows, pigs and chickens. After the Second World War, strict rationing had been imposed. Many farms were being worked by women as the men had gone to war.  There was a great drive to end rationing as quickly as possible, which went alongside the desire to look after and care for its citizens, especially children. Farmers were encouraged to use modern developments in farming, such as chemical fertilisers, to increase their yields. Hedges were dug up, and the fields enlarged. The Milk Marketing Board was set up to subsidise farmers to produce lots of milk, which was given free to all families with babies and small children. Schoolchildren were given free milk as well as largely subsidised school dinners. Farmers were the heroes of the post-war period.

During the sixties, when farm subsidies were at their peak, it rained a light drizzle almost constantly in the UK. When I look back on my childhood, it seems to be always raining, and when I checked the records this turned out to be true. Fields could be made larger and chemicals used seemingly with impunity. In the mid seventies, the climate returned to a pattern of warm dry summers, and, without the hedges, the topsoil began to blow off. The heavy machinery which was becoming more popular to work these large fields, and the over use of chemicals, began to impoverish the quality of the soil. Farm subsidies were halted, and as the monopolies of the supermarkets began to squeeze prices and farmers were encouraged to take out debts to buy more machines and products, many of the traditional small farmers went under, being bought out by farming companies from the South East. Farmers became poorly paid hired hands, and farmers’ sons left the land for well-paid jobs in the cities. During the eighties, the small mixed farm became almost extinct, and the use of chemicals increased to make up for poor husbandry and poorer soil quality.

Prince Charles became quite beleaguered at this time with his marriage falling apart, and Diana’s increasing popularity and trendiness made him look a fool. When he is beleaguered, he seems to become more verbose, and he began to give lectures on organic farming. Men who loved working on the land and were reluctant to give up the life, turned to small organic farms. It was extremely difficult to get licensed, as the poisons take several years to work their way through the soil, and large buffer zones are needed to protect seedlings from spraying by other farmers nearby, some of whom were by now using airplanes to spread the chemicals over large areas. Organic produce didn’t sell in the conventional outlets, such as supermarkets, and Farmers’ Markets hadn’t yet become commonplace. Farmers sold their produce in hippy shops, health food stores, or on a stall outside the farm. They were almost universally mocked.

In the 1990s however, things began to change. Successive outbreaks of disease among livestock, beginning with the scandal of lead in dairy cattle feed finding its way into the milk, led to large drops in profit and culminated in the mass burning, in 2000, of vast numbers of cattle who may have been in contact with BSE.  Great clouds of black smoke covered the whole of the British Isles, with the abysmal stench of burning flesh accompanying it. It seemed cattle had long been fed on feed from Argentina, among others, which had, as part of its constituents, the remains of unwanted animal parts, ground into kibble, which turned out to be infected. Cancers were linked to chemicals in food, and by the time Foot and Mouth arrived with Tony Blair’s government in 1997, the nation’s consumers were suspicious and sick of these agricultural goings on. Farmers were enemy number one, although they quickly deflected the blame onto the large supermarket chains who force down their prices and prevent them from taking proper precautions with their livestock and feed purchases. At the same time, people became aware of the horrors of factory farming, where the animals, especially chickens, are crushed into tiny spaces and often live and die in excruciating pain and stress. The meat is then full of antibiotics because of all the diseases they catch trapped in such small and stuffy cages, and hormones meant to grow big muscles which is the most expensive and therefore profitable part of the animal, but which has many side effects in humans, including rendering men impotent.

Prince Charles meanwhile, had got himself sorted out, found new love, and formed a company called ‘Duchy’ farm products, after the Duchy of Cornwall where many of his organic farms now are. He sells pure organic products, sometimes using traditional wheat and grains, flour, bread, oat biscuits and generally tasty and healthy food. The organic farmers, who had originally been mocked, were now much in demand, especially from the supermarkets. Organic vegetables as well as eggs and meat, are now sold throughout the UK, at reasonable prices. The UK has refused GM crops, largely as a result of people protests, and a healthy more traditional diet is returning at last. Recently, Sainsbury and other large chains have declared that they will not sell battery raised chicken or eggs. Animal welfare is one of the main concerns of the purchasing public, with recent campaigns by TV chefs such as Jaime Oliver, the ‘naked’ chef. Prince Charles and his army of formerly nutty organic farm pioneers are no longer seen as fools, but as the newest heroes of nutritional provision. The rest of the farming and gardening community, meanwhile, are trying to cleanse their soils of chemical damage, which can take 20 years or more.

All that remains in this happy tale of the complex international food chain is for the companies who used to sell bigger and bigger supplies of chemicals to UK farmers to find another outlet for their produce: nations who want to increase their yield and who have not yet become susceptible to the disastrous weaknesses of overuse of chemicals. Countries probably who have rainy seasons followed by long dry spells, which will destroy the land far faster than happened in the temperate UK climate, and who aren’t politically so able to resist GM seeds and the poisoned chalice of infected cow feed. Countries who need to think long and hard about whether to blindly follow a path now discarded by the UK, which has finally realised that this road leads to Hell.

1248 words

© Jill Rees

2008-02-05

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