Big, Beautiful Farms

I am constantly amazed at the numbers of people who sit at their (say) Toshiba computers on a chair from Ikea or Office Depot wearing Levis and drinking Coke and then rhapsodize about the small farm, the two acres of organic veggies in Westchester County (which for those of you who don’t live in the US is a wealthy commuter area for New York City). There seems to be a huge disconnect. Big and industrial is fine for computers and clothes. It’s supposedly the kiss of death for farms.

I think I know why. In both England and the United States, the family farm, the yeoman farmer have been celebrated in national legend and in certain strains of political thought (Jefferson) as the basis of the nation. Plus cows and corporations seem not to be a natural mix.

Of course, family farms were never as prevalent as the legend suggests. Even in nineteenth century England and the US you had the huge landowners (the Royal family, the aristocracy, the Oxford and Cambridge colleges, the Church of England in England, the plantations in much of the US).

But even if they had existed in the past to imagine that the future of farming lies with small farms is just delusional. Small farmers just can’t achieve the economies of scale that are as important in agriculture as in any other industry or business (and yes, farming is both an industry and a business). My grandfather required 35 men to farm a thousand acres. Now it’s farmed by my cousin (who spends much of his time on paperwork) and one man. That’s 34 men who don’t have to get up before dawn on bitter winter days to wash off the cows’ udders with freezing water before milking them or to stay up all night in the driving rain in lambing season or to work the threshing machine, a terrible job. It produces far more food and at a much lower cost. And yes, the state of the soil is just fine.

So I’m just delighted that BBC2 is doing a series about contemporary farming called Jimmy Doherty’s Farming Heroes. I wanted to post a clip but could not find one. But here’s a quote from Justine Brian’s article on the program on Spiked, a nice irreverent web site that I enjoy.

“Jimmy, and me, marvelled at gargantuan combine harvesters using all sorts of computer wizardry to harvest wheat by the ton, doing in an hour what pre-war machines took 15 men a whole week to do; we thrilled at the 30-ton processing plants that move slowly through huge fields of celery (yuk!) and can get the crop from ground, washed, packed and stacked in supermarket-ready trays in just six minutes; a single greenhouse spanning 26 acres which produces 10 per cent of the UK’s tomato crop, heated using the CO2 emissions from the enormous sugar beet factory a kilometre down the road, which itself is the largest sugar beet processing plant in the world, providing much of the UK’s sugar. Even the producers of premium, free-range turkey – costing three times the price of a bog-standard gobbler – do so on a massive scale, hatching thousands of turkey chicks in huge incubators.”

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