Transition Derby

Who will grow our food?

Ans: My friendly neighborhood agribusinessman will grow my food on a plantation the size of Wyoming using nearly enslaved eastern european folks who are deported minutes after harvest. Or maybe there will be robots involved somewhere. Ans: Farmers, of course. You know, those dumb people in smocks that we tolerate because they give us dinner. Where will they come from? In-breeding by village idiots mainly... Ans: Food grows? You mean in the ground? With DIRT on it? And bugs? Ewwww. The above answers may be parody, but only slightly. It is safe to say that very few people in the UK have given any serious consideration to the question of how their food will be grown in the future. And yet, even if we weren't facing Peak Oil and climate change and enormous social inequity, we'd be facing an agricultural crisis - one that is purely demographic. A looming issue that is being mainly ignored is that the average of farmers in the UK is near 60 and few young people want to take up agriculture as a career. Why should they when farmers are at best ignored and at worst reviled? We still rely on farmers to feed us whatever we think of current agricultural practices and however we see the countryside. It is no use looking to mythical scientific fixes to magic food out of nowhere. Neither will all the urban food growing projects feed the population. As farmers retire skills are lost and our ability to feed ourselves is diminished. Farming has undergone enormous changes in the last 70 years. Food was politicised after the shortages of the 1940s and successive governments wanted to show that things were better under the post-war regimes. That meant continuing the modernisation which started with increasing mechanisation and the greater use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. The result was the move to modern factory farming. With increasing urbanisation the vast majority of people have little or no contact with farms or farmers apart from a day out in ‘the country’. People have lost track of where food comes from and who grows it. The role of farmer as food producer has also been obscured by the seemingly endless supplies on over stocked supermarket shelves. What we need is the maximum utilisation of the land we have and the farmers to produce the food. Farming needs to be taken seriously and the job made more attractive, that is, we have to value farmers as crucial to our wellbeing. In an election year farming and food security should be central issues in any political manifesto.