English Pastoral by James Rebanks (cat reading book .txt) 📗

vast quantities of commodities being produced by the super-efficient new farming that dominated in North America, which was spreading rapidly around the world. Europe tried, often ineffectually, to stop or slow these processes with greater regulation and protectionism – they had an alternative version of farming, with different rules on things like animal welfare and antibiotic use, but over time many of the same problems emerged. The new farming undermined the old farming systems by undercutting them. Prices no longer reflected local or seasonal farming realities. In real terms, our sheep were now half or less of the price they had been a few decades earlier. Giant ships full of frozen sheep meat now arrived in British ports from New Zealand whenever the price threatened to rise, and drove the price down again.

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A little Welshman with a moustache who worked for the government came to see us once a year. He encouraged us to do more and more to claim government grants to ‘improve’ our farm by making the fields bigger, draining the bogs, and generally making it all more ‘productive’.

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I would sometimes be sent to work on some of the biggest farms in our area and saw what the new farming looked like up close: giant weedless fields, huge machines and enormous buildings. The farms I had known growing up had been slightly ramshackle because they slowly added new buildings to the old. The effect was a bit like a hermit crab, shedding a series of outgrown shells. In the 1950s farm buildings in our area had broken out of the old laws of 22-foot spans (the span possible with local trees for beams). They grew with each decade and now a few miles away the farmers were building monster sheds and giant industrial complexes made of huge steel beams and concrete panels, with spans of 80-foot plus, and 250-foot long or more. Soon there were farms that looked and worked as efficiently as factories. A pig farm we knew, down in the Eden valley, bulldozed away the lovely old sandstone barns and stables with their beautiful arches, leaving heaps of rubble and just a stone pad to build the new sheds on. My father thought this was an act of mindless vandalism, symptomatic of the new farming in which nothing old was respected. But to the new way of thinking these old buildings were just in the way.

Ten years earlier I had played with the ginger-haired boy who lived in the cottage on that farm. It had 5,000 pigs. We roamed through the sheds past the farrowing crates, with sows grunting and jangling the chains. We lifted the dusty lids of the pig pens and gawped at the squealing piglets under the orange heat lamps. The ammonia from the pig slurry made our eyes weep. Mice were everywhere. We were told to ‘piss off’ by a man with a fag in his mouth, who was the ‘pigman’. By the 1990s that farm had close to 120,000 pigs and sold more than 5,000 to a supermarket every week. The farmer had a fleet of trucks – for hauling pig feed in and transporting pigs out to abattoirs. Looking back, he didn’t really have much choice. The new farming effectively devalued a pig to a fraction of its historical value and shrank the profit margin on any individual pig to such a tiny amount that only vast industrial corporations could afford to produce them – no modest-sized farm could compete and survive. My father had once kept fourteen sows that produced about 100 fattened pigs a year for sale, but on our farm, as on thousands of others, small-scale pig-farming was given up, replaced by a handful of industrial-scale pig units elsewhere. The same happened with chickens, as they too were easy to industrialize and could be fed on the cheapest grain. And through it all we just adapted and bent to the will of the world.

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I am not sure exactly when things that originally seemed like a good idea began to feel like a step too far. I can’t pretend I had any great wisdom. All I can remember are brief moments when I first saw my dad’s doubts grow, or when my own faith in the future began to falter.

For years I had been aware of the ugliness and the strain. We had said goodbye to skilled farm workers, been squashed down by farmgate prices, and scaled up our livestock beyond what I would once have thought possible. We knew farmers that couldn’t hold it all together and were drowning in work, and debt and chaos. It was becoming impossible to ignore the farms falling into squalor.

The economics books I read were all about how things changed for the better; they didn’t say much about the losers, the misery, and people hanging on for years, sometimes decades, because they knew nothing else. Our community was fracturing and breaking.

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The only trace of the cow that was left was a few hoof and leg prints on the crust of the slurry pit, and then a dirty churned area where she had fallen through.

We had trekked across the fields on the trail of some of our cattle that had escaped from a field we rented a few miles from home. They were two-year-old heifers, skittish and fat, with curly red coats. They had pushed through an old hedge and wandered across some rough ground, through a second hedge, across a big field, and then had found their way into one of the big new dairy farms. We got most of them back safe, mended the hedge and then came back to see what had happened to the lost one. Dad soon worked it out. She had run into the farm’s slurry pit, and after trying to gallop across the deceptively firm surface had fallen into the deeper part and sunk down into the darkness. Dad was frustrated and angry, because the lagoon wasn’t fenced properly and was clearly dangerous. He seemed