Introduction Food is vitally important for human subsistence. Moreover, the nature of socio-environmental and politico-economic conditions is particularly intricate in the process of food production. This intricacy begs the question, ‘who is producing what kind of food, for whose benefit, and to whose disadvantage?’ (Moragues-Faus and Marsden, 2017 : 281). This chapter poses the question of whether food production-focused research can also become the lens that helps to open up new lines of inquiry about what is ‘European’ about European white
Feeding Britain while preparing for the ravages of climate change are two key issues – yet there’s no strategy for managing and enhancing that most precious resource: our land. This book explores how the pressures of leaving the EU, recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, and addressing global heating present unparalleled opportunities to re-work the countryside for the benefit of all.
Incorporating personal, inspiring stories of people and places, Peter Hetherington sets out the innovative measures needed for nature’s recovery while protecting our most valuable farmland, encouraging local food production and ‘re-peopling’ remote areas. In the first book to tackle these issues holistically, he argues that we need to re-shape the countryside with an adventurous new agenda at the heart of government.
policy to reflect that farming, food production and addressing the climate emergency by restoring soils, land and landscapes form a single policy area, amid ‘growing evidence that our fragmented approach to land … means we are failing to deal effectively with the conflicts and complexities of the way we use it, and its qualities’.8 Given all the pressures facing our land, it seems remarkable – in the context of today’s light-touch government – that land was last comprehensively examined 77 years ago in a seminal White Paper published by a wartime coalition
[to the countryside]” – and, potentially, to Hardwick. It’s a complaint echoed by others running small rural enterprises with the potential to expand; time and again, they raise the issue as a barrier to growth and, hence, to creating more jobs and, implicitly, to raising domestic food production, albeit modestly. Hardwick, for its part, is on a journey. In a country where 48% of the farmed area is tenanted, either wholly or partly – leaving some, on shorter 41 SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL tenancies, with little security – and where the old aristocracy (to which we can
high-tech enterprise, using the latest gadgetry to boost food production and, he insists, to encourage biodiversity; drones filming and sending the latest information on crop and ground conditions to data analysts; large, self-guided, satellite- linked tractors with multi-screen cabs more like aircraft cockpits either ploughing ultra-precise furrows or assisting machinery harvesting peas (of LAND RENEWED 52 which Dyson is the country’s largest producer) potatoes, spring barley or wheat, for instance. This is mega-farming on a scale which has largely escaped the
-management structures in the Fens are ‘coming to the end of their design life’, and therefore ‘significant investment is needed’, according to the EA.9 This is compounded in an island nation vulnerable to rising sea levels as climate change undermines an already low, and falling, self-sufficiency in food and the vulnerability of the east coast to rising sea levels; by contrast, the Netherlands, arguably more at risk, with considerable land below sea level, has world-beating sea defences. Several issues – aligning food production with nature’s renewal to address the climate
the Bristol-based Sustainable Food Trust (SFT) did appear to reveal a vague meeting of minds between Isabella Tree and Patrick Holden, who heads the SFT.28 In it, Isabella Tree parts company with the leading rewilding advocate, ecologist and writer George Monbiot, apparently disagreeing with his view that gaps in food production caused by rewilding can be met by more intensive farming on huge holdings such as Sir James Dyson’s enterprises in Lincolnshire, “I am not of the George Monbiot frame of mind that we can sort this out in a technological way,” she
happens, close to the Briggses’ organic enterprise near Peterborough – Pamela Dearlove charts the ambitious beginnings of a partly successful scheme to train the jobless, mainly from a depressed north-east of England. By 1939 the LSA had almost 10,000 acres with 1,000 smallholdings and an ‘efficient structure’ to support the families of formerly unemployed men.12 Although wartime brought new opportunities for home-grown food production – for the country was only producing a third of its needs – by LAND RENEWED 34 1945 the focus has shifted; the Ministry of
foundation. Income is LAND RENEWED 128 invested for long-term community benefit and generously supports a string of social ventures for the 33,000 inhabitants, complementing the welfare state.13 Sadly, the subsequent new towns did not retain their assets. They were largely sold off by a Conservative government which also abolished the LSA in England, which once underpinned a network of smallholdings devoted to local food production, sometimes marketed nationally. Communities first The ethos of creating homes, and assets, for the community underpins other bold
