Farmers facing third revolution

This is the start of the Third Agricultural Revolution.

The first, in the early 18th century, met the need to move from localised food production to a system giving surpluses for the people moving in great numbers to where ironstone, coal and water were powering the industrial revolution.

The second, in 1947, saw the first of a series of Agricultural Acts set a course of unprecedented food production which continued for almost 50 years. The reason was simple. During the Second World War our food security came near to collapse as the enemy sank the food ships coming from the Empire with the cheap food on which we had come to rely.

Farmers and the population at large were called upon to "Dig for Victory" and they did, to great effect. In a way as a reward, a subsidy system was set up which would guarantee the consumer a wholesome and secure supply of cheap food.

The Iron Curtain was in place, supermarkets were a dream in the minds of a few and we were still a nation of shopkeepers, but all that was to change. Eventually the Iron Curtain was drawn back and the emerging superstores found there were cheaper sources of food around the world, disregarding the hygiene and welfare of the home product. The consumer was the main beneficiary of the cheap food policy, not the farmer.

Now reality has at last struck and we enter the Third Agricultural Revolution.

The shopkeeepers have mostly withered under the power of the giant retailers and the family farm could so easily follow. My worry is that the architects of the new policy have failed to understand the implications of what they have put in place.

The 1947 Act set out to reward farmers for making this nation as nearly self-sufficient as possible, but the taxpayer has been massaged into believing farmers were recieving money for old rope and that a better return on tax would come from relying on the cheap food mountains awaiting buyers around the globe. Little is ever said about rising population, or the disregard for the welfare of soil, man and beast, in many other countries.

However the drip, drip of subsidies into the farmhouse is now at an end and the SFP takes over, rewarding farmers for their park-keeping role, and they have to make a very difficult decision - whether to continue to subsidise the taxpayer or to take the money out of the trading side of the business. If they do the latter, they will have to get the difference from the market place which ultimately is you, the consumer, unless the supermarkets forego some of their profits.

It is now in the farmer's gift to wind down his farm so that it looks nice, but the food coming from it is no longer the objective.

When it comes to giving money away, Government is, however, aware of its responsibilities. Farmers can forget sitting down with their feet up or idling on the golf course, for there is to be cross-compliance. This will entail visits by men in suits to inspect management. Such is the complexity of farm land that one will look at the condition of the soil and landscape features, such as walls, hedges, bogs and woods; another will examine the habitat for birds, bees and plants, making sure all the mammals are undisturbed. And of course there is the old chestnut of set aside, taking land out of production. Schemes are already being developed to allow the farmer to pocket the SFP and delegate the park-keeping while he goes off on a world tour or finds alternative employment, depending on the size of his cheque or his wish to continue playing his part in the taxpaying process. This is abhorrent to most farmers, who see the new regime as an attack on their heritage and their capital.

The SFP will not stay at its initial level. Each year money will be siphoned off to pay for other pieces of rural ideology and it is strongly suspected that, in year four, the payment will be reviewed downwards. Like New Zealand, we will then farm without subsidies but we are a highly-populated country that cares for every blade of grass, animal and water course and that is not the case in the thinly-populated acres in the Pacific.

It is a tragedy that a sledgehammer is being used to crack a nut.

Government pushed the land to the maximum from 1939 to about 1980, when it realised it had gone too far. Water quality had fallen; chickens and pigs had become factory products; fields had become ever-larger to counter a labour shortage and farmers had been turned into businessmen, not the husbandmen so essential to the balanced countryside of old.

The trend against agricultural subsidies moved across Europe and the same rules are on offer there, with localised variations, some for and some against the farmers' interests. So the founder-member states will drop their output and in future we will at least have the new member states to supply us from their, on the whole, better soils, cheaper labour and land.

Obviously the promise of an environmentally-improved Britain has now outweighed the need for food from our own fields, but good husbandry created that countryside and to return to nature is to go back to an unmanaged state. Is this what we really want? Or should the architects of the new policies think again before a lot of farming's capital goes? Once gone, it will not return. Is the taxpayer going to be happy paying farmers to keep to the minimum then eventually to resubsidise food as the world runs out?

What is frustrating to find, if you study agricultural changes during this second revolution, is that many changes have been the result of the constant lobbying of small pressure groups. The Ramblers' Association has CROW one, and hopes for CROW two; Compassion in World Farming and its associates have altered the profitability of intensive pig and poultry production and endless environmental interests have collectively had an enormous effect, some good, others not so good.

Isn't it strange that the farming community has failed to bring sense to the table and ensure that the first priority of countryside management is balance, based on sound farming carried out by practical people? I wonder why