At The Field's Edge E-Book

Richard Hawking

• Herausgeber: Robert Hale Non Fiction
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 370

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Adrian Bell was farming and writing during a period when the English countryside underwent its most significant transformation for hundreds of years. His work, spanning sixty years from 1920 to 1980, not only documents this agricultural revolution, but also warns of the effects it will have both for the environment and for society. As these consequences dominate the English countryside today, Bell's views have relevance and importance to its future management. At the Field's Edge appraises Bell's prescient but still timely observations about the ecology, economy and culture of the British countryside, and introduces his beautifully crafted prose to a new generation of readers. Though he has been largely neglected until now, Bell's voice is one we should listen to, not least because he is one of our greatest writers about farming and rural life. If we pause at the field's edge with him for a moment, we get a lesson not only in aesthetic appreciation, but also a message about what is disappearing from the countryside.

Leseprobe

AT THE

FIELD’S EDGE

ADRIAN BELL AND THE

ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE

For

Bob and Elizabeth Rose Hawking

AT THE

FIELD’S EDGE

ADRIAN BELL AND THE

ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE

Richard Hawking

First published in 2019 by

Robert Hale, an imprint of

The Crowood Press Ltd,

Ramsbury, Marlborough

Wiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2019

© Richard Hawking 2019

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7198 2906 2

Ebook ISBN 978 0 7198 2907 9

The right of Richard Hawking to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All artwork by Harry Becker

   CONTENTS   

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction: At the Field’s Edge

1   Rural England and Agricultural Change

2   People, Land and Landscape: A Rural Trilogy

3   A Declining Tradition: The Drift from the Land

4   A Countryside Worth Fighting For

5   A Plea for a Return to Husbandry

6   The Quiet Revolution: The Capitalization of the Countryside

7   A Growing Separation: The Country and the City

8   The Altered Rhythm of the Land

Conclusion: The Nature of Materials

Epilogue

Bibliography

Index

   FOREWORD   

I AM, PERHAPS, AN UNLIKELY person to write the foreword of this book. I have no significant literary or academic achievements to my name, and before Richard approached me with his draft of the book you’re about to read, I was entirely ignorant of the work of Adrian Bell. I am, though, a second generation farmer on one of the few small mixed family farms left in Britain. We grow vegetables, run sheep through our pastures, harvest apples from our orchards, and coppice firewood from our copse and hedgerows. As you can imagine, I never thought I would be writing a foreword for a literary work, but as I read At the Field’s Edge I found in Bell’s work a voice that articulated so many of my own experiences and reflections that I thought perhaps I may have something of value to add as someone attempting to live and work the land in a way in which, I hope, Bell would have approved of.

The past century has seen the most extensive and extreme transformation of agriculture since the first handful of grasses and wild animals were domesticated to our service some 12,000 years ago. The use of petrochemicals, heavy machinery and more subtle technologies such as genome editing have allowed us to push back against the boundaries that ecosystems had enforced upon farmers for millennia. Fuelled by a period of unprecedented economic growth, and the centralization of markets by corporations, the past century has seen the great majority of small, diverse farms fall by the wayside to make way for the new breed of subsidized industrial megafarms capable of producing enormous quantities of product for the commodity markets. Bell was there at the birth of industrial agriculture in Britain and saw it grow through its infancy into its coming of age as the meadows and mixed grain and vegetable farms – which had fed the population of Britain for countless generations – were ploughed in and consolidated into vast monocultures. Bell saw that these ‘advances’ set a dangerous and precarious precedent for future generations and instinctively understood that these practices were undermining the ecological processes that make all life on earth possible.

However, it’s not Bell’s logic that has stuck with me most forcefully, but it is his deep, poetic and heartfelt reflections of living in the British countryside. For we are lucky in the extreme to have been gifted a land of such stunning beauty and rich abundance. In my travels across various continents, I have never found a land that feels remotely as soft and generous as the British countryside. It is remarkable that, even in the face of such rampant industrialization, we retain so much of the character imbued into the landscape by the lives of innumerable landworkers. There is, though, a danger of looking at pre-industrial agriculture through the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia, and it’s very important to realise that industrial agriculture has often only exacerbated pre-existing problems in agricultural practices. Many of the world’s soils and habitats had already been severely degraded by tillage and overgrazing long before the rumble of tractors was ever heard in the fields.

We are undoubtedly on the cusp of yet another revolution in agriculture. Farmers the world over are seeing through the supposed silver bullets presented by agritech and agrochemical companies, and finding solutions within ecosystems. Graziers are bringing health and diversity back to the world’s pastures and grasslands by mimicking the predator/prey relationships that drive grassland fertility. Growers and arable farmers are using new understandings of soil biology to reduce tillage and holistically improve soil fertility without the use of synthetic chemicals. Farmers of all disciplines are finding innovative ways of reintroducing trees into our agricultural landscapes. Building on the legacies of visionaries like Bell, this new breed of farmers are combining new technologies and the latest scientific insights with time-honoured farming practices to create solutions which work for them whilst simultaneously sequestering atmospheric carbon and providing vital habitat for wildlife. It’s here at the field’s edge, where worlds meet, we find life at its most vibrant and elemental.

Jake Eldridge

Oxton Organics,

Worcestershire,

December 2018

   ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS   

FIRSTLY I WOULD LIKE to thank John Ford, the President of the Adrian Bell Society, for his wonderful commitment to keeping the writing of Bell alive, and for supporting me in my own interests in Adrian Bell. The work that John and his colleagues have done over the years to ensure that the Adrian Bell Society continues to promote and share their love of Bell’s writing should not be underestimated.

I would also like to offer my gratitude to Ann Gander, whose biography of Adrian Bell – Adrian Bell: The Voice of the Countryside – proved to be an invaluable resource. I am much indebted to all her research and writing, which I have used for the benefit of this book. My thanks also to Adrian’s grandson, Richard Kamm, and to Rosemary Dixon of the Eastern Daily Press who kindly provided the photographs within, as well as to The Crowood Press. Thanks also to Nicholas Holloway, and to the owners of the Harry Becker pictures for their support in allowing his paintings to once again complement the work of Adrian Bell.

My sincere appreciation to the Bell Family, especially Adrian’s children Martin, Anthea and Sylvia, for allowing me access to Adrian Bell’s notebooks and archives, and for the openness with which they have regarded my proposal for At the Field’s Edge. I sincerely hope that in this exploration I have done some justice to your father’s wonderful writing. And thank you to Alexander Stilwell for his foresight, perseverance and patience as commissioning editor. His belief and support for this book, together with his own interest in Adrian Bell’s writing, has been invaluable.

On a personal note, thank you to Mal, Phil, Ang, Wayne, Maria, Andrew, Jane, Sarah, Will, Dan, Kirsty and Elisa for their continued interest and encouragement during the writing of this book – it has been very much appreciated. Particular thanks to Rich and James for setting, in their own inimitable ways, examples of what can be achieved through commitment, passion and humour – your belief and support kept me going on cold, grey winter Sundays. And to Simon and Paul, for sharing with me what seems, as time passes, an idyllic childhood. We really were very lucky.

Finally, I would like to thank Melanie. Not only has she spent hours and hours editing, and trying to tease out very well hidden arguments, she also had to endure even more time listening to, and counselling me through my various writing traumas/tantrums. As no doubt most of our friends would readily and wholeheartedly agree, this book would never have been written without her. And unlike the chicken debate, they would be right.

   PREFACE   

MY OWN INTEREST IN farming, rural communities and the countryside stems from my experiences growing up on a small farm in Somerset in the 1970s and 1980s. My father and his father’s farming overlapped Adrian Bell’s years as a farmer from the 1920s to Bell’s death in 1980. With my father’s death in 1998, the agriculture tenancy held for generations by our family came to an end.

At the time of his death I was in my mid-twenties, away at university and without a care in the world. Within two weeks I was scattering the local soil that he once tilled on to his coffin. Within six months the farm was being auctioned. It was early spring, but the cold, misty morning suggested winter. Reluctant cattle were herded from straw-filled sheds into the cold, open pens, and farm machinery from a dark barn was moved on to a damp yard into the vaporous light of morning. For many of the older implements, it was the first time they had seen the light of day for many years. The collection of old and not so old looked rather pathetic when laid out in that way. Removed from a proper context their functionality was lost, and their meaning and past worth dissolved: they were relics of a time past. Having had to deal with my father’s personal belongings, my mother chose to remain indoors throughout the sale, and saw the artefacts of a dedicated farming life pass by her window and away forever.

I was beginning to appreciate that the agricultural tradition that he had spent his life following was dying with him. My mother continued to live in the farmhouse until she died five years ago. The farm buildings and the paddocks surrounding it had long since been sold by the council, and are now an expensive retirement village.

It was shortly after her death, after my brothers and I had finally cleared the farmhouse of at least three generations of belongings, that I first encountered the writing of Adrian Bell – as a farmer’s son, the evocative title Men and the Fields drew me immediately to it. I rarely spoke at any length to my father about his life farming as a young man. However, upon reading Men and the Fields – twenty years after my father’s death – I finally got a sense of the nature of the stories that he may have told me. Like Adrian Bell, my father and grandfather ran small mixed farms, and, like Bell, struggled to see the long-term wisdom of the changes in agricultural practice in the mid-twentieth century.

Thus, the inspiration behind At the Field’s Edge stems from both Bell’s wonderful writing, together with the observations made, and the knowledge that was shared, within rural communities such as the one in which I grew up. One of my most evocative memories is standing at a field’s edge listening to my father talk about the countryside with others who had a deep respect and appreciation not only of its practicality, but also of its beauty. His eyes would roam the familiar green landscape where he truly lived, and where I really got to know him. Bell shares this view, and renders it with sensitivity across fifty years, a time when the English countryside was controlled and changed more than ever before. It is a view that we all need to pay attention to if we are to address some of these changes and reconnect not only to our environment, but also to each other.

   INTRODUCTION: AT THE FIELD’S EDGE   

PAUSING ‘AT THE FIELD’S EDGE’ is a purposeful habit of farmers. It is their opportunity to survey the field and assess its future uses and needs. At the same time, it is also a reflective moment when farmers contemplate their own relationship with, and appreciation for, the land. At the Field’s Edge hopes to take such a practical as well as reflective and appreciative approach. The book pauses to offer the reader unfamiliar with Adrian Bell an introduction to the prose and ideas of this important writer. At the same time, it provides those readers well versed in writers of the countryside with a thoughtful and engaging exploration of Bell’s writing, and his ‘practical’ relevance to contemporary debates about the countryside. In doing so, it will address factors that continue to impact and jeopardize our countryside: the rise of industrial farming and its environmental impact on the countryside; the growing separation of the country and the city; and the disconnection of producer and consumer, and the impact of capitalist consumerism on the countryside. In these considerations, At the Field’s Edge will also examine how these factors have contributed to the decline of rural communities and rural culture, and how they challenge constructions of English identity.

Adrian Bell is the perfect writer to help a largely urban population reconnect with England’s land and the values enshrined in farming life. Born in 1901 in London, Adrian Bell came from an educated, middle-class family and was destined for a career in the city. However, he became disillusioned with his options very quickly, and made the radical decision to become an apprentice farmer, moving to Suffolk in 1920. He wrote his first book, Corduroy, in 1929, and although there were periods of time during the next fifty years when he stopped farming, he continued to write about rural life until his death in 1980. In total he published twenty-five books, most of which were based on his life and work in Suffolk; he also contributed many articles to various magazines and anthologies throughout his life; and from 1950 to 1980 his Countryman’s Notebook was a weekly feature in the Eastern Daily Press, published in Suffolk. In 1930 he also set the first Times crossword – the first to appear in any publication in Britain – and went on to compile over four thousand in a fifty-year period. Bell understood farming and rural life, but he was, first and foremost, an indefatigable and engaging writer.

Suffolk Sky

Image courtesy of Nicholas Holloway Fine Art, Private Collection

Throughout his writing Bell frames and enhances our view of the countryside. If we pause at the field’s edge with him for a moment and reflect on, for example, the wild rose, we get a lesson not only in aesthetic appreciation, but also a message about what is disappearing from the countryside. In Apple Acre (1940), he describes the wild roses that could be found around the edges of his fields. He implies the importance of the relationship between the ‘practical’ field and its wider environment when he writes:

The long days blow the wild roses. They open and are soon bleached white. The buds at the first show are even crimson: points of crimson. Opening cup-shaped, with still the crumple in their petals, they are at their true colour, a flush so delicate you cannot tell where it begins and ends, with the thick saffron ring of pollen round the centres. These differing colours harmonizing because there is life shining out of them, and not merely colours. […] The roses open and bleach and reflect back the light. They focus the beams like lenses; to look at them long is dazzling. By noon the whole bush is flashing with white, wide-open roses. It is their final shape, that of a Maltese cross with one too many arms. A white butterfly comes over the hedge, followed by another. But at another glance I see they are two petals: they have already begun to fall.

Celebrating nature’s ‘harmonizing’ beauty, yet lamenting her inevitable decay and the ‘fall’, this is a writer who looks with honest eyes at the changes he sees happening around him.

While Bell constantly assessed and described the diurnal changes that he noticed in the countryside about him, he also sought to educate his readers about the larger and long-term picture. Thus in the same work he also notes how:

The concern for the home-grown and the home-made was one of the conditions which gave a tone of emergency to the writing of this book. […] Our emphasis was on organic farming and living. We felt that a balanced life of people in an organic relationship with their home place was important. Compost, of course, was a potent word among us; the utilisation of natural wastes. The basic premise of the Kinship in Husbandry was that man was plundering the earth’s resources at a spendthrift rate and impoverishing posterity. […] Today, food production is becoming more like a branch of big business year by year. (Apple Acre, 1940)

Bell’s Kinship in Husbandry evolved into today’s Soil Association, and the concerns he expresses above are even more pressing in the twenty-first century. At the Field’s Edge shows how Bell was living and writing on the eve of, and during, an agricultural revolution himself, and therefore felt the same urgency as many of us do today. Using his concerns as a focusing lens, this book considers the changing agricultural practices he witnessed, and their effect on our countryside. For example, increasing mechanization, together with the hugely significant 1947 Agriculture Act, which enshrined the subsidy system, led to the decline of small farms and the beginning of agribusinesses. Monoculture and industrialization has transformed not only the look, but the ecology and economy of the land Bell once lived and worked on.

Indeed, in the fifty years since the Agriculture Act, which pushed subsidies for farmers and encouraged production through increasing industrialization of farming, more than 150,000 miles of hedgerows have been lost, flower-rich meadowland has declined by 97 per cent, and the diversity of wildlife – from tree sparrows and corn buntings to butterflies and hedgehogs – has been decimated. But it is not just the environment that has been affected: it has also impacted on those who work and live in rural communities. Bell foresaw the possible effects of this ‘progress’. Consequently, this book tries to show that Bell’s values and vision of husbandry should inform our own relationship with, and future custody of, the countryside.

There are signs that the traditional methods of husbandry advocated by Bell are beginning once again to gain traction. The Campaign to Protect Rural England’s recent publication 2026 Vision for the Countryside notes that ‘the role of farming in helping to deliver a brighter, better future is critical. This vision sets out our aspirations for a farming system which, by 2026, will be helping to create a more vibrant countryside, environmentally, socially and economically.’ Moreover, greater numbers of people have become interested in environmental concerns at a more local level in recent years. An effect of this is a desire from consumers to re-establish a stronger relationship with the countryside. For example, there is a growing availability and popularity of organic produce through box schemes and farm shops, whilst two primarily locally sourced ‘organic’ motorway service stations now exist off the M6 and M5 motorways. You can now buy ‘wonky vegetables’ in supermarkets, with some offering ‘Wonky Selection Boxes’. Moreover, in an article in The Guardian in 2012 entitled ‘London 2012: How Rural Writing Inspired the Olympic Opening Ceremony’, Jamie Andrews highlights that this ‘greening’ of the public conscience influenced the vision of Britain that was presented to billions around the world. Indications of a growing political base are also evident, with, for example, Green Party membership doubling in recent years.

This greening of the public conscience has in part been inspired by an expanding readership for literature about the countryside, with a growing range of publications that explore our relationship with the immediate natural world. Writers such as Robert Macfarlane, Roger Deakin, W. G. Sebald, Jonathan Bate, Tim Dee, Richard Mabey, Madeleine Bunting and Chris Yates follow in the tradition of earlier authors writing about farming and the countryside, including Richard Jefferies, Edward Thomas, H. J. Massingham, W. H. Hudson, John Stewart Collis and Ronald Blythe. Nature writing, often synonymous with rural literature or countryside writing, has finally developed a wider appeal and readership, so that every bookshop has its countryside shelf or, increasingly, its ‘nature table’. Happily it appears that Bell, too, is enjoying a resurgence of interest. This is evident in the republications of Corduroy (2009), Silver Ley (2015) and The Cherry Tree (2017) by Slightly Foxed, and Men and the Fields (2009) and Apple Acre (2012) by Little Toller. Naturally I highly recommend that you pick up some copies.

In his wonderful book Landscape and Englishness, David Matless exemplifies the nature-writing trend, noting that there has been a ‘cultural braiding of the Green’ in the twenty-first century. He cites the popularity of Midsomer Murders (1997 to the present day) and Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem (2009), in addition to the opening ceremony of the London Olympics in 2012 to illustrate how the rural appears to be reflected more significantly in popular culture. He also argues that contemporary and historical constructions of Englishness, and thus English identity, are largely associated with the country, not the city. For example, Matless notes how Paul Fussell and others have argued that ‘many formulations of national identity in the 1914–18 war were based on constructions of Englishness built on visions of rural – not urban – England’. Indeed, Stanley Baldwin – Conservative Prime Minister from 1924–29 and 1935–37, and hugely influential in government in the intervening years – viewed England very much in pastoral terms: ‘To me, England is country, and the country is England. And when I ask myself what I mean by England … England comes to me through my various senses.’ Matless observes that, for Baldwin, England was comprised of ‘corncrakes and scythes, the sight of a plough-team, the smell of wood smoke’. Baldwin’s vision of Englishness – and thus national identity – remains a persuasive one in the twenty-first century.

It is unsurprising, given how the English countryside is often synonymous with Englishness, that rural literature continues to be a popular topic with a wide readership. Matless notes that it has, in fact, become a minor publishing phenomenon: ‘If Englishness has offered publishers a niche theme for the twenty-first century, nature has become a richer seam.’ Despite the variety of styles and voices of such publications, common to all of them is that nature is conflated with culture and, ultimately, identity politics. As Matless argues: ‘The power of landscape resides in it being simultaneously a site of economic, social, political and aesthetic value’, and a ‘vehicle of social and self-identity, as a site for the claiming of a cultural authority, as a generator of profit, as a space for different types of living’. In other words, the English countryside informs and shapes each and every one of us.

In this context, Adrian Bell’s work is at the nexus of current trends in environmental literature, and he deserves wider recognition. Therefore, At the Field’s Edge offers an in-depth appreciation of Adrian Bell’s writing, and seeks to deepen and extend the discussion of modern writers of environmental literature. However, many of these writers offer very personal meditations, or express imaginative biographical interpretations of specific places. They increasingly blur the lines between non-fiction genres such as biography, environmental literature, ecocriticism, history, travel and memoir. Steven Poole, reflecting rather negatively on the growing popularity of nature writing in The Guardian in 2013, referred to the trend as a ‘solidly bourgeois form of escapism’.

As the following chapters document, Bell is not about such escapism, and reading him is not simply about indulging in a nostalgic vision of a once great but now declining countryside. Bell understood the toil inherent in his relationship with the countryside; his view of it is not an aesthetic one. Although he did appreciate its beauty, he also understood, and aimed to portray in his writing, the value gained in our interaction with the countryside. By exploring Bell’s account of his years of practical experience as a farmer, this book emphasizes the interdependence of producers and consumers, and the impact their growing separation has had, and continues to have, on our countryside.

Likewise, Bell’s writing has a truthfulness borne out of his years working with the land, and he combines that candour with an equally open appreciation and connection with the rural communities he knew all his life, and from which he rarely strayed. He fundamentally understood the land and human nature, and saw and predicted the many problems we have created in our unthinking interactions with the countryside. As such, the contemporary relevance of his ideas, together with the clarity of his poetic prose, will appeal to readers not only of ‘nature writing’, but also to readers with more environmental, social and political concerns. Bell’s writings and ideas have a fundamental relevance to our embedded relationship with our natural environment. A reader of his work begins to appreciate that the values integral to the life he depicts were truer, and its rewards deeper, than anything that economic progress can give us. Indeed, Bell’s ‘old ways’ – non-intensive, mixed method farming – have significant relevance to our evolving stewardship of the countryside today.

Therefore, Bell’s insightful observations during a time of huge changes in farming methods deserve to be re-evaluated: he reflects directly and frequently on the environmental, social and economic impact he sees around him, and fears for the future of communities and the countryside. Consequently, this study is the first to situate and assess Bell’s writing in relation to the significant influences the British countryside was subject to during the mid-twentieth century. Bell witnessed at first hand these changes: rapid mechanization, intensification, and the introduction and widespread use of artificial fertilizers and pesticides. He also foresaw the impact that such changes – the decline of hedgerows, increasing monoculture, the growing separation between the producer and the consumer – would have on the English countryside and our relationship to it.

With such developments in mind, the book is structured around the fundamental theme of Adrian Bell’s work: that of change and its impact on the countryside. Throughout his writing, he observes the change around him, and comments upon the consequences of the technological and scientific developments he sees. At the heart of each chapter are Bell’s observations and reflections on the countryside. These are taken from a wide selection of his non-fiction works, and arranged chronologically in order to map the changing countryside and his response to these changes. Each chapter broadens this appreciation by discussing the contemporary relevance of his views. In doing so, the book explores the relationship between his writing and the past and present environmental, social and economic challenges faced by the countryside. Each chapter presents Bell’s vision of an organic, sustainable and diverse method of farming in which we do not exploit our environment, but instead endeavour to work in harmony with it.

George Henderson in his best-selling book The Farming Ladder (1943), maintained that there was only one rule of good husbandry: ‘To leave the land in better heart than it was found.’ With this in mind, I shall discuss how we have fallen far short of this guiding principle. However, by exploring Bell’s relevant views on farming methods, this book presents to the reader ways in which we can recover such a practical and vital vision for our countryside. Pausing at the field’s edge with Bell will hopefully encourage readers, farmers, consumers, and maybe even policy makers, to take a moment to consider the future of the field, and the many interconnected fields and lives that make up the British countryside. His voice, although currently a largely unfamiliar one, has vitally important things to say to all of us about the future of the English countryside.

Horse and Cart

Image courtesy of Nicholas Holloway Fine Art, Private Collection

   1   

RURAL ENGLAND AND AGRICULTURAL CHANGE

TO UNDERSTAND AND APPRECIATE Bell’s place in agricultural history and rural writing, it helps to know a little about the politicization of farming in Britain in the last 200 years. For those who know this history, you may want to skim or skip over the ensuing chapter. This chapter is about historicizing and synthesizing the range of factors that impacted on farming in the last century. It also aims to introduce and/or remind readers of the wealth of important and influential writers and writings about our rural heritage. For example, for those readers who have never encountered the great voices of the past such as H. J. Massingham or John Stewart Collis, or their modern counterparts such as Roland Blythe and Richard Mabey, I hope this chapter proves enlightening.

Bell started farming in 1920, but the roots of the industrial revolution of agriculture that he witnessed throughout the twentieth century can be traced back to the early nineteenth, if not eighteenth century. Indeed, as Bell’s contemporary, the great writer about farming and rural philosopher H. J. Massingham observed, Bell himself forms a line of descent from the William Cobbett tradition of ‘high’ farming. Cobbett (1763–1835), author of, amongst other books, Rural Rides and Cottage Economy, was a great reformer and strong advocate for farming communities, but he was also focused on the health of the land. In Rural Rides (1830) Cobbett was prescient enough to raise early warning signs regarding the dangers of specialism, abstraction and generalizing knowledge, believing that these undermined independence. He argued that such centralized state and industry ideologies would teach ‘submission to the order existing at the hour, which was becoming increasingly urban and industrial’. Instead, Cobbett valued all-roundedness, self-help, versatility and concrete experience. As a result, he fought for the skilled labour of the craftsman, and for the economic freedom that smallholdings could provide individuals and their immediate communities. He fought, in other words, for individualism and independence. He famously resisted enclosure because he saw that agriculture was in danger of being irrevocably changed as the industrial revolution and an increasingly capitalist economy took hold in Victorian Britain.

Like Cobbett, but writing almost one hundred years later, Massingham was deeply concerned about the direction in which agriculture in England was heading. Massingham therefore pointed to Cobbett’s concerns, and argued that such a voice needed to be listened to by a new generation, particularly those who had influence over our countryside. Massingham asserts that ‘to heed [Cobbett’s] vision of England would be to return to ourselves’ – that is, to return to a well managed countryside that supports our sense of individual and collective cultural identity, but also, of course, quite literally supports a healthy population.

As I noted above, Massingham viewed Adrian Bell as a contemporary prophet of the countryside, so it is not surprising to find that Cobbett and Bell share similar philosophies and ideologies in relation to how we should farm the land. For example, both Cobbett and Bell believed in mixed farming. Fundamental to mixed farming is the idea of crop rotation, which not only revitalizes the fertility of the land but also makes it more resistant to pests and disease without the need for chemicals or artificial fertilizers. Such rotation fights infection and helps maintain yields; it also encourages a greater diversity of wildlife in the fields themselves.

Crop rotation has, in fact, taken place since the Middle Ages, because those who work with the land know that it works. Thus when Arthur Young, an eighteenth-century Suffolk farmer, carried out a survey of farming in the Chilterns on behalf of the Board of Agriculture, his reports were full of admiration for the system of crop rotation that he found in Herefordshire. In his report for 1804 he notes that in the first year they sowed turnips, in the second year barley, in the third clover, in the fourth oats, and the fifth wheat. The method of ‘folding’ – moving animals from one area of a field to another in order to fertilize the soil – was also used to ensure soil quality and consistently good yields. In his recent book, Grass-Fed Nation (2016), Graham Harvey, a food and farming journalist and agricultural adviser to the radio programme The Archers, reminds us that this rotational system produces the best grass-fed meat, grass-fed milk, butter and cheese, and pasture-raised poultry and eggs, all of which are ‘near perfect foods for human nutrition’. Science is proving that some old ways are indeed the best.

However, as the industrial revolution gathered pace in the mid-nineteenth century, greater numbers of people moved away from the countryside to find work in the cities. As a consequence, cheap labour on farms declined, and with it the care of the land. By the start of World War I, the four- or five-year crop rotation that had been practised since the Middle Ages had declined massively. In its place was a simple crop rotation of grain and fallow (that is, ploughed but not sown). During this time, many farmers struggled to diversify their farming because they were too reliant on receiving a stable price for corn. As a result, the good practices observed by Young in 1804, praised by Cobbett in the nineteenth century, and still partially practised by farmers such as Bell in the twentieth century, went into sharp decline.

In ‘Farming is the Feet of the Nation’ – L. F. Easterbrook’s contribution to Massingham’s The Natural Order (1945), a book to which Bell also contributed, and which will be considered in more detail later – he exemplifies a further decline in agriculture between World Wars I and II: ‘A quarter of a million men fled the land. Farm houses, cottages and buildings fell down and, like the neglected fields, became buried under the weedy vegetation.’ He adds that this was compounded by the great depression of the early 1930s. Farming was in an increasingly unhealthy condition, but so too was the nation’s health. In the 1947 article ‘Agriculture and Planning’, L. D. Stamp, an economic geographer, noted that before World War II, 30 per cent of the population suffered from preventable malnutritional diseases. As a result, the government decided that there needed to be a greater focus on the production and marketing of staple foods such as milk, eggs and meat, which would not only improve the state of farming, but also the health of the population as a whole.

In order to address these interlinked concerns, a raft of agricultural legislation and policy was introduced throughout the 1930s, with one of the earliest and most significant being the Import Duties Act of 1932. This Act established preferential rates for products culled from the British Empire. In addition to this, the depression had demonstrated a greater need for economic planning, as well as the marketing of agriculture in Britain. A plethora of Acts followed throughout the 1930s with the aim of achieving these twin goals. These included the Wheat Act (1932), the Cattle Industry Act (1934), the Milk Act (1934), the Livestock Industry Act (1937), the Bacon Industry Act (1938) and the Agricultural Development Act (1939).

Two of the most significant Acts in this economic planning and marketing of British agriculture were the Marketing Acts of 1931 and 1933, which sought to regulate the supply and demand of the most common branches of agriculture. They gave powers to the state to control the quantity of both imports and home production. By 1939, Marketing Boards for hops, pigs, milk and potatoes had been set up, giving them the power to buy, sell, grade and store the produce. For example, the Hop Marketing Board had the sole right to sell and fix the scale of prices, and issue basic acreage quotas to every grower. Under the Milk Marketing Scheme, all milk belonged to the Board. These Boards also had the power to impose penalties on farmers for breaches of their regulations.

The impending threat of a second world war intensified and cemented this government intervention in agriculture. As a result, the War Agricultural Committee was set up in 1939 to dramatically increase food production, and had unprecedented powers over farmers and their interaction with the land. These powers included being able to turn out farmers from the land they owned, or had long tenancies on, if they did not comply with the Committee’s requests. There was significant resistance amongst some farmers. Quite naturally, they resented being told what they could and couldn’t do with the land they had worked for years. C. H. Gardiner, a rural writer and contemporary of Bell, recalls in his 1945 publication Your Village and Mine, one farmer’s reaction upon being approached by a fellow farmer and the district member of the War Agricultural Committee: ‘You won’t make me do it,’ the local farmer declared. ‘Hitler won’t make me do it. In fact, God Almighty won’t make me plough up that green field.’ ‘Maybe not’, replied the visiting farmer quietly, ‘but the War Agricultural Committee will!’ In the end, they did do it. By the close of the war, the total output of food had increased by a staggering 70 per cent.

The impetus for national self-sufficiency had numerous positive effects. Easterbrook notes that, ‘No sooner did the war compel us to pay farmers fair prices, to give them a semblance of stability and therefore of confidence [… than] there was a resurgence of spirit in the countryside, an uprising of endeavour and enterprise that far exceeded the wildest hopes of the most devoted believer in British agriculture.’ The meddling of politicians revitalized agriculture in England and they were quick to claim the credit. In an official statement by the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, an article entitled ‘Wartime Achievements and Post-War Prospects’ published in 1944, the minister, R. S. Hudson, emphasizes the impact the War Agricultural Committee had on farming. He writes how, ‘During the war the British farmer has been able to count on an assured market for all he has been able to produce.’ However, he continues:

Is it too much to hope that farmers will respond fully to the guarantee of markets and prices with the certainty that these conditions will prevail for at least another four years? […] The measure of the farmers’ response to this opportunity for sustained high production must have a big influence on the nation’s opinion of agriculture as an efficient industry, which can contribute largely to Britain’s economy in peace as well as war.

At the same time as he credits the government with establishing a stable market, he questions farmers’ commitment to ‘sustained high production’ (not ‘sustainable’ it should be noted) and ‘efficient industry’. There is no mention of soil or crop health, or indeed of the many farmers, labourers and communities who create and support the ‘industry’ he speaks of.

At the end of World War II, the National Farmers Union (NFU) understandably lobbied for subsidies to remain in place for the main crops that farmers were now set up to produce. However, these subsidies supported the move away from mixed farms to the development of larger farms. In the drive for self-sufficiency and higher production, more and more pasture land – fundamental to mixed farming – was ploughed up and sown with larger, less diverse crops. This proved to be the first significant step in creating the monoculture that dominates our countryside today. As we shall see, there were numerous voices, including Bell’s, who questioned the wisdom of the new, large farm. However, mixed farming was no longer seen as part of the ‘efficient industry’ so valued by the politicians who were taking credit for increased food production and national self-sufficiency. The 1947 Agricultural Act cemented this vision of efficiency and quantity in policy. Supported by the NFU, Harvey notes that this Act and government subsidies created ‘a narrow ideology of intensive farming [that] was accepted almost to the exclusion of all other influences. This ideology maintained food production as the only proper use of land.’

Inevitably, traditional methods of husbandry associated with mixed farming did not receive the support that they needed to survive in this changing agricultural context. Indeed, during the 1950s, Farmer’s Weekly (the most popular publication for working farmers at the time) increased their praise of the progressive farmers who, fuelled by the subsidies enshrined in the 1947 Agricultural Act for specific large-scale crops, were embracing the modern methods of intensive, mechanized farming. Amongst other financial encouragements there were subsidies for incorporating the use of chemical fertilizers, as well as grants to grub out hedges, uproot old orchards and plough up flower meadows. By the 1960s, subsidies effectively and actively discouraged mixed farming methods.

The narrow economic incentive of subsidies, and the broad spread of monocultures, increased as Britain entered the European Union (EU) in 1973. Indeed, EU subsidies further compounded problems. By the 1980s, Graham Harvey notes in his manifesto for mixed farming, Grass-fed Nation, that as a result of EU subsidies, ‘proper crop rotations were impossible to operate. If you wanted to pick up your subsidy you had to give up real mixed farming.’ Richie Tassell, a farmer who grew up in the Northamptonshire countryside, paints a bleak picture of the decline in the 1970s and 1980s in the following statement to Harvey:

The mixed farms started to go down the pan, and agribusiness began to take over. The farmer next door was one of the last to go, he still had cattle and sheep and arable crops in rotation. A week after he sold up to a big pension fund this fleet of bulldozers arrived. […] They stripped the hedgerows, the remaining parkland trees, walnut trees two or three hundred years old: the whole lot was gone in a day. […] The old farmer probably had six full-time staff. You could see them walking across the fields. It all went almost overnight. From then on, everything was done in fleets of big tractors […] it was like a military operation. […] That was the worst of times in terms of habitat destruction, almost the final nail in the coffin of what John Clare [the eighteenth-century rural poet] was writing about. He was there at the beginning of the process, I was there at the end. It was a permanent loss. It’s all gone.

Many farmers, including my father, could have told similar stories. Indeed, I witnessed such ‘bulldozing’ procedures when the local council sold off my grandfather’s and my father’s fields and farms after their deaths. The listed barn was brought down almost overnight, and the fields, trees and hedgerows were levelled, in this case for housing developers rather than monocultures. Writing in 2016, Colin Tudge, a biologist and science writer, states that:

For arable farming in particular, this past half-century has been conceived as a field exercise in industrial chemistry and heavy engineering, geared to the maximization of short-term wealth, at least for a few. All the subtlety, and all the respect for the life of the soil, has been overridden.

The industrialization of agriculture, financed by government and latterly EU subsidies, has changed the landscape, the wildlife and the people of the English countryside more significantly than in any previous time that man has farmed the land. Indeed, in his wide-ranging study of who owns and controls the landscape – Feral – the economist George Monbiot describes how, after moving from London to rural Wales, he was struck by the absence of wildlife and plant variety that was a consequence of industrial agriculture. He writes: ‘The range of flowering plants on the open land was pitiful. Birds of any kind were rare, often only crows. Insects were scarcely to be seen […] It looked like a land in perpetual winter.’