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

it. The troubles of this landscape hurt her, because this was her home and the farmers here were her people. Judging these places harshly is easy if the farmers aren’t your family and you don’t see the bags under their eyes and the stress on their shoulders at family parties. She told me this landscape was created in the supermarkets of America – by the cult of cheap food. The people in those shops seemed not to know, or care much, about how unsustainable their food production is. The share of the average American citizen’s income spent on food has declined from about 22 per cent in 1950 to about 6.4 per cent today. But it is worse than that, because the proportion of every dollar spent on food that goes to the farmer has declined massively to around 15 cents and is still declining. The money that people think they are spending on food from farms almost all goes to those who process the food, and to the wholesalers and retailers. The winners are a handful of vast corporations who have politicians and lawmakers of all political parties in their pockets.

The agronomist told me that Iowa is blowing away. For half the year, the wind across the tilled fields slowly steals the topsoil, carrying it away to someplace else, one tiny particle at a time. It doesn’t seem much on any given day, but it is relentless and in places several feet of topsoil have been lost over the past century: an endless and unsustainable waste of the soil that feeds America. The reality can be seen on the dirty brown snowdrifts, the stolen wealth of this land caught, for an icy moment, before being lost.

If this was the future, it was curiously shabby and ugly. It didn’t appear to be very nice for people to live in. Many of these farms, even the prosperous-looking places, were deep in debt. The landscape was an ecological disaster, as sterile as can be, and was responsible for a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where the eroded soil and field chemicals all flowed once it got into the Mississippi river. A lot of the work was done by Mexican immigrants, who had been displaced from their own farms by the American corporations bullying them out of business. And what couldn’t be done by cheap immigrant workers is done by machines, which are now self-navigating, and able to do the work in the field guided by satellites. These farms could impose their will on the land as never before, and increasingly the ‘farmer’ doesn’t even need to be there to do it.

We parked by a ghostly farmstead, dwarfed by the pig confinement sheds and the silver grain silos beside them. Suddenly, out of the trees to our left, a large black muscular shadow turned with each wing beat into a bald eagle, the emblem of the United States. It wheeled overhead and my heart beat in my chest. The agronomist told me that the eagles had returned in recent years. ‘Oh good,’ I said. ‘What do they eat?’ There was an embarrassed silence. ‘Maybe the dead pigs, outside the confinements,’ my host replied. We both fell silent as the eagle flapped away across the fields.

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There are no winners here. The farming businesses who rule these fields have got so big they are entirely reliant on one or two monopolistic buyers who screw them on prices and can bankrupt them at will. The money flows off the land to the banks that finance the debt on which it is all built, to the engineering companies selling the tractors and machinery, the synthetic fertilizer and pesticide corporations, the seed companies and the insurance agents. And yet, judged solely as productive businesses, focusing on efficiency and productivity (and ignoring the fossil fuel inputs and ecological degradation), these new farmers are amazing – the best farmers that have ever lived. In the year 2000 the average American farmer produced twelve times as much per hour as his grandfather did in 1950. And this amazing efficiency means the end for most farmers. In the UK, the number of dairy farmers has more than halved from more than 30,000 in 1995 to about 12,000 today. In turn, the number of dairy cows in Britain has halved in the past twenty years. The amazing productivity of the remaining farmers and super-cows is demonstrated in the simple fact that milk production has remained more or less stable.

Statistics like these have resulted in transformed lives, changed diets and household budgets and completely different ways of life around the world. The share of British household income spent on food and drink has declined from about 35 per cent of the average household budget in the 1950s to about 10 per cent today (though poorer people spend a greater share of their income on food and drink, say 15 per cent). The money we once spent on food has been freed up to spend on housing, leisure activities, consumer goods like cars, mobile phones, clothes, books and computers, or on things like mortgages or rent, and on foreign holidays that few could afford a generation or two ago. The modern world has evolved out of these gains. But how people lived and shopped was at the same time creating immense pressures that originated in fields in which farmers were forced to search for every productivity gain possible. There was a direct link between the availability of cheap food and farmers having to adopt industrial techniques to work their land. And the more industrial it got, the less involved in it most of us became.

Where once your grandmother would buy a chicken from the local butcher or farmer at a market, and could ask them to vouch for how it had been raised, now we buy anonymous meat that is already chopped up, deboned and encased in plastic. The reality of the chicken’s life and death is hidden from us as if we