You can. But what ails British farming runs much deeper than a catalog of diseases, however terrible. FMD, BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), last summer’s outbreak of swine fever–they are the headline-grabbing new signs of a longstanding problem. Over the past five years farm income in Britain has fallen by nearly 75 percent; last year alone it fell by a quarter. In the past two years about a third of Britain’s 150,000 full-time farmers have quit. The future for those remaining is not bright: the average age of a British farmer is 57. “Farming will never be the same,” says Keith Thompson, 40, a dairy farmer in Cheshire. He and his wife no longer take milk in their tea; they need to sell it, and every drop counts. “My eldest boy asked me if there’ll be a future in farming for him,” says Thompson. “He said he didn’t want to live the life my wife and I [do]… With four kids, the state could look after us better than I can.”
Everybody has a favorite villain. Farmers blame BSE and other diseases, a strong pound that hurts exports, hikes in the price of fuel and fertilizer and the “anti-countryside” policies of Tony Blair’s “townie” government, whose heartland is urban Britain. Environmentalists blame “factory farming” for creating conditions that breed food-safety scares and for operating on the assumption that “the chemical industry has made nature irrelevant,” as agriculture writer Graham Harvey puts it. Blairite politicians blame nearly two decades of Conservative Party pro-farmer deregulation during the ’80s and ’90s, which they say gutted hygiene rules. Economists, taking a cooler view, blame the realities of the marketplace in an increasingly borderless world, where demand’s proximity to supply no longer dictates the farm-to-market transaction.
As a result, the domestic agriculture industry has shrunk dramatically. Between 1951 and 1991 the number of farmers in England and Wales declined from 327,000 to 178,000. The number today is below 100,000. In the 19th century, as much as a quarter of the work force was in farming; today the figure is approaching 1 percent. All of British agriculture represents just 1.3 percent of GDP–a little smaller than the packaged-sandwich industry. And total farm income in Britain in 2000, estimated to be £1.88 billion, would have been deep into negative figures had it not been for £2.87 billion in European Union subsidies.
Many farmers have to do a lot more than farm to make ends meet. Clive Swan, 37, a cattle farmer in north Wales, rents out parking space to a trucker, keeps chickens and grows potatoes to retail in a school parking lot; his wife, Gayle, sells eggs and potatoes to moms dropping off their kids. “I’ve no problem telling you that we’ve qualified for [government assistance],” says Swan. “For the last six months our income has been nil.”
The British farm industry is now so small that the FMD crisis didn’t even register on the London Stock Exchange last week. Continental Europe took notice, fearful that livestock imported from Britain before a ban on shipping them was imposed on Feb. 23 might be infected. With an election looming, possibly in May, the Blair government took notice, too, scrambling to contain the disease and coming up with £168 million to compensate farmers for their losses.
The prime minister was acknowledging something larger: however much farming has shrunk, it still has a mythic place in British life. As urban as modern Britain is, farming in particular and the countryside in general enjoy iconic status. The enduring sentimental appeal of those who work the land and, in doing so, keep it green and pleasant is evident not just in the paeans of poets to “this blessed plot,” but also in popular culture. Last week Prince Charles (himself an organic farmer) joined in celebrating the 50th anniversary of the world’s longest-running radio drama, “The Archers,” which chronicles farm life in a fictitious village. Every week the hugely successful BBC soap draws 4.5 million listeners absorbed with the lives of its characters. Britain’s endangered farmers could be forgiven for wishing that, for once, life would imitate art.
