There’s no such thing as a free lunch. So, when it comes to giving away money, anyone who thinks that a Universal Basic Income is going to help anyone and in particular our farmers, either has an agenda they aren’t sharing, or they don’t have any real understanding of the true cost of making UBI work.
UBI is certainly well intended. A lot of research and thinking has gone into the trials and projects where a localised equivalent of a guaranteed basic income has been tried.
The problem is UBI is a solution that uses the creation or printing of money to enable it to work.
Money creation or printing is an essential part of the FIAT monetary system that we have today. The same system that is the root cause of all the money related and inflationary problems that we and our farmers are facing.
It is ironic that giving cash handouts to farmers would only build upon the culture of dependency that now exists, where the conditioned over reliance on subsidies and guaranteed contracts have made farmers vulnerable to the greed underpinning big money and profiteering retailers. Corporate interests that are not only taking all the profit that would be available from the food chain if it were accurately priced, but they are also using their market positions to inflate prices even further so that they can continue to take even more, without giving a damn about the impact and consequences for us all.
Minded that every one of us needs food every day in pretty much the same way that we need water and the air that we breathe, it defies sense or logic that British Farmers should be in a situation where they cannot have a secure, financially sound and fair-income-paying business, in return for providing a service which really should be considered a public good.
That farmers cannot survive and there are now organisations suggesting that UBI is the answer makes very clear that the working model or operational platform for British Agriculture is broken.
This reality is all the more alarming given the fact that in a time of growing world crisis, we only grow the equivalent of around 52% of our own food in the U.K.
Regrettably, the farming problem isn’t one that good politicians would be able to fix in isolation. Because the issues farmers are facing are interconnected with many other areas of public policy that are breaking down today. All for no bigger reason than we have now had decades of politicians and the political parties they represent that have become increasingly poor.
If good politicians were representing us all as they should be today, the focus on farming would be to use legislation to immediately end the profiteering, price manipulation and speculation taking place that keeps taking money from the food chain without adding any form of value.
The next step would likely be to provide financial support and other legislation to help farmers transform food production and the pathway to retail to a system which is a contemporary version of what we had historically, where food was produced and consumed locally and in much more original, unprocessed and therefore healthier forms.
However, we don’t have good politicians and when the eagerly anticipated General Election comes, we will not have the option of good politicians to choose from even then.
This leaves farmers with a very difficult choice. To remain at the mercy of poor politicians who say lots but do very little. Or step back from conformity with the current broken system, take the risk of funding change themselves and then taking the lead and working closely with consumers who are the other key stakeholders in the food chain, so that food security, healthy nutritious food, and viable food producing businesses supplying every one of our local communities are brought back.
There is nothing in life that everyone shares the same need for, whilst having such individual, specific or idiosyncratic approaches to, as food and what we eat.
Minded that to be healthy, we should all have access to at least 2 nutritious meals per day, it is amazing that so many of us think so little about the food that we eat. Where it comes from. What it consists of. And whether the food we are eating is actually benefiting or harming us, despite the fact that eating continues to be a socially shared activity, and what we put in our mouths is just as important as the air that we breathe.
The lack of interest or ‘taking food for granted’ of those who aren’t really thinking about the food that they eat, regrettably makes the issues that surround food and how it can be used to further the interests of those who are aware of that disconnect, very easy to exploit.
In times like those we are experiencing and with the very uncertain future that we currently have, this means we are quite literally in a situation where food cannot only be used to control us. Food can also be used as a way to hurt us both physically and emotionally, whilst Food Security and access to the supply of food is and can continue to become less safe, as it is progressively taken away from us as consumers and from the people who grow and produce it.
Food Complacency
On the face of it, too many of us are happy to accept the idea that if we have eaten and therefore, we are not hungry, it doesn’t matter what we actually eat.
Take that one step forward again. Many have an increasingly restricted choice about what they eat, because the priority of what they eat isn’t based on a decision between what might be on offer. It is based solely upon what the person or family can afford.
Whilst there are many who would happily debate the questions of whether food is a fundamental right or whether food is a public good, the fact is that we are only in a position where we can even have such a debate or that it is possible for these questions to exist, because there are other cultural, legal, ethical and many other manmade ‘rights’ that place some of us in a position where we can control what anyone or indeed any living thing on the planet can have access to.
Meanwhile, the questions that we should be asking but are not is whether it is right and proper within any part of Food Production and the supply chains around food, that any parts of it can or should be privately owned, and where they are, what those interests should allow them to do to food and how we access it.
The absence of ethics in profit-driven Food Production and Supply
Food is a basic requirement for life that we all share. Yet the processes, issues of ownership and what food can be used to achieve for anyone with the power to do so, have now become all that food is really about.
The entire food supply now revolves a global system that quickly moved way beyond improved methods for feeding larger numbers of people and became all about the money that can be made by those who are in control instead.
The creation of large food chains, where so little can be seen has meant that the real truths that have increasingly underpinned all parts of food production for so long can easily be hidden.
When so much of the food chain processes has been hidden and maximised for the profit that it can provide to vested interests, the next step for those who are driven by greed is to then manipulate and change the content of food so that every bit of profit that it contains from every ingredient that can be added, can then be exploited and profited from just the same.
Food in its most basic or natural forms is the healthiest for all of us that it is possible for it to be
Whilst basic processes such as milling, pasteurisation, cheesemaking, baking, hanging, smoking and all those things that are ancestors have been doing to store, preserve and create meals from basic, natural ingredients have done for centuries, it stands to reason that adding anything to food that isn’t readily available to us in some natural or hand-processed way, isn’t going to help anyone who eats it, because our digestion is designed to work naturally with foods that we eat in natural forms.
It’s an equation that doesn’t require us to understand science for us to make sense of. Because it really is common sense that we all eat food in its most basic or unadulterated forms.
The Taste Trap
Before reaching any conclusions, it’s also important to understand the role that sugar and salt, and more recently, anything that appears to improve the taste or feeling that we have from eating food that contains it has had, and the genuine take-away that we should be having from it.
It is thought that sugar was first recognised for its sweet properties around 8000 years ago. However, sugar didn’t come to Western attention until the time of The Crusades in the 11th century, and even then was a luxury until at least the 16th century when the first industrialised sugar processing began.
Although it ultimately comes from natural source, Sugar must be processed to be used in the way that we use it as a food ingredient and in the refined forms that we add it to drinks like coffee and tea.
Sugar in its modified or rather in its changed form is highly addictive. And if you understand the role that excess sugar plays in health-related conditions such as diabetes and obesity, it is also much easier to see the relationship that exists between eating any kind of food or ingredient that doesn’t resemble its original or natural form, and the impact that it can have on the human body.
The body is effectively tricked by unnatural ingredients and responds in what often end up being very destructive ways when those harmful ingredients are consumed regularly or in quantities that are simply too much for the very clever system that our bodies have to deal with.
In these modified forms, these artificial ingredients are no better than being a poison that becomes more and more dangerous in its cumulative forms.
In respect of the ingredients that are added to foods to enhance the taste and hide many other ingredients within processed foods and the UPFs that we wouldn’t otherwise consider eating, the line in the Savage Garden hit song ‘Affirmation’ – “junk food tastes so good, because it’s bad for you” is absolutely correct.
We are being conned into eating foods that we shouldn’t, so that those who make and sell them can continue to make a profit – with the true cost always being at the expense of our own health and wellbeing.
Whether we like it or not; whether we believe we have a choice of what we eat or not, as a nation, the UK is addicted to foods that are actually harming and, in some respects, killing us.
The people who are pushing us in this direction and want us to become even more reliant on manufactured food, rather than the fresh food that can only come from a local garden, field or farm, are very happy to exploit that addiction so that they can keep benefitting. Whilst the whole process is doing each of us and the whole of the UK more and more harm.
The Ethics of Food are about Taste all the same
The odd thing about taste is that it manifests as both a physical sensation and also in the way that we think. That’s how addictions generally work, after all.
So, when anyone becomes obsessed by a particular way of eating, because of the way that they think, the rules of addiction – and the need to force others to join us in that same addiction so that they can share that particular form of guilt, inevitably also play out, no matter how clever or compelling their arguments might be.
When people are at peace with their eating habits or indeed anything else that defines them as the person or the individual that they are, they will not experience any need to force their own approach into the lives of anyone else, no matter what the habits of those other people are, or indeed, what it might be that they eat.
It really shouldn’t matter what anyone else eats. The only thing that we should all be concerned with is that each and every one of us has access to natural, healthy and fresh food in an adequate quantity from which we can then exercise any health-related, ethical or other form of choice that doesn’t impact upon the choices of anyone else.
The Food Hangover is just one way we know that the food we eat isn’t good for us
Whilst few who drink alcohol would relate their drinking habits to being an addiction at any level, it is unlikely that anyone who has ever had more than a few sips and done so on a regular basis, hasn’t had a hangover at some point afterwards. Before they find themselves back in a place where they feel physically the same as they did previously.
Headaches, sickness, insomnia, feeling ‘groggy or lethargic’ or generally not feeling anything like ourselves, are typical post-alcohol reactions that we class as hangovers – because we have been drinking ethanol, which is a poison.
When we have been eating foods that are processed and are filled with many additives and manufactured ingredients, the results for any of us taking note, can be similar if not exactly the same.
Food that is natural or in forms that we can recognise in their original form when we eat them very rarely make us feel unwell. Unless we eat too much of them, or they haven’t been prepared in a way that removes any bacteria or anything else that can harm our bodies in some way.
The direction of UK Farming and Food Production is all about a greed-driven reliance upon manufactured food
It is at this point that it is time to recognise just how important the problem that UK Farmers are facing really is, for us all.
There isn’t some great conspiracy at work in the way that conspiracy theorists are increasingly presenting it.
However, there are people who for one reason or another have gained significant power and responsibility over the lives of others. They see it as being imperative that the whole world is changed so that everyone behaves in ways that they have decided that the world can sustain, which at the same time will coincidentally ensure that those same elites can continue making obscene profits, being quite literally ‘baked in’.
Everyone making money out of the masses eating manipulated ingredients that will cause increasing levels of health problems and in all probability lead to early deaths, isn’t worried about the nutritional value of the food that people eat.
The most important thing to all of them is ensuring that the masses can never make the argument that they are going hungry. In that way, no matter how bad the food may be for anyone, if its tasty and available, the elites will always remain in control.
Today, UK Farmers still have choices over what they grow and how they grow it. Even though many are tied into contracts that are ultimately controlled by a very small number of companies who control the food supply and whose longer-term profit-making interests will benefit if independent Farmers go out of business, so that they can control even more of the food supply.
Those with roles that are there to help, don’t help anyone at all
The useful idiots that we now have in government and running policy and services across the public sector don’t help matters at all.
Whilst very few can accept this truth at first glance, the reality is that decades of farm and food production related subsidies have only served to move more and more of the power that our Farmers and Food Producers once had towards the big companies that incentivise and control politicians.
Meanwhile, Agriculture has become more and more dependent upon the political lead. Whilst local infrastructure and everything that supports local and independent food production has been progressively destroyed, either legislatively or in direct physical form.
If we can accept this – and that’s by no means an easy thing to do, we can also then accept that UK Farming and Food Production needs to go in the completely opposite direction, embracing much more traditional methods of food production and returning Farms, Farming and Food Production so that they are providing everyone with the basic, natural, healthy, nutritious and fresh forms of foods that we all actually need.
For us all to have and benefit from this, means that Agriculture and growing food must be right at the heart of our communities once more.
Mindful eating
The battle to save natural food production in the UK (and in other areas of the world too), only exists today, because so many of us take for granted the lives that we have and the continued access to food and everything else that makes life seem so easy. All without being conscious of the real cost to us, or without recognising that we do have a choice.
Greedy profiteering companies only produce foods that can harm us on the scale that they do so, because we keep on buying and eating them, without ever giving any thought to anything that these companies and the people behind them are doing.
If we all began looking at the ingredients of foods and take note of where the food or where the ingredients actually come from, we would very quickly see the difference between ‘natural’ food that we can recognise because it usually resembles its original form, and everything else which doesn’t look like or resemble anything that we could recognise in nature.
This is a very quick and effective way of being able to tell if eating or drinking anything, is likely to end up harming us in some way.
Changing the way we eat is how we keep our freedom to be who we are
The harsh truth that we all need to face:
The control of food is power and the power behind food is a way that those dependent on someone else’s food supply be controlled.
Whilst the UK Farming and Food Producing communities now have a massive fight on their hands to regain control of their own destiny – not least of all within that community, the fact remains that we can all help change the direction of UK (and World) Food Production by changing the way that we approach the food that we eat.
By doing so, we will ultimately help ourselves.
The smallest steps are the biggest when it comes to change of this kind. And if we all start to do what we can to reject processed foods and UPFs wherever and in any way that we find them or that they come into our lives, the impact that we can collectively have upon the food chain and the way that food is produced would become meaningful in no time at all.
Changing the eating habits that we have is not easy for anyone. Not least of all, because our habits are the truth we have chosen to believe.
However, the truths that we believe about food today are not truths that we can call or should be prepared to accept as our own.
Good, healthy, nutritious, locally produced fresh food IS a public good and we all deserve to be able to access enough of it every day and at prices that we can all easily afford.
We can only make this possible if each and every one of us exercises what still remains of our freedom of choice to change the world for the better, one choice at a time.
To do so meant mentioning the founder, James Melville. I don’t know James personally, but because of my ongoing interest in politics and the true depth of the problems that the U.K. is facing, I have been aware of him since he first appeared as a growing voice in what I’ll call the anti-lockdown ‘movement’ that appeared in the summer of 2020 following the first lockdowns.
Whilst I have discussed my reasoning that NFNF will not be able to achieve anything more than the range of existing organisations that are already working on the issues UK farming faces or have tried to do so before, it is also important to recognise what this new campaign is doing differently: NFNF has reached a much wider audience and has captured the imagination of people in ways that many of the existing lobbyist organisations supporting UK Farming have not done, so far.
The impact of NFNF is down to marketing and online campaigning. Or rather, making the best of the communication mediums that are currently available to anyone or any organisation that wants to change anything in the public realm, and isn’t already in a position where they have a platform where they could have the same effect just by opening their mouths.
The people who could do that – who arguably should already be doing that on behalf of UK Agriculture, are the people who are already in power. The people who we have elected and the people with roles in the establishment, who aren’t getting the things that they should be right. Because they are putting what’s important to them or what’s important to the people who are important to them, first.
Having the exposure that James has generated repeatedly since he emerged online, or being one of those people with public responsibility who isn’t using it as they should be, all adds up to the same outcome, IF there is no understanding or appreciation of the cause of the problems beyond an obsession with their effects, along with an appreciation of how everything in government, politics and the establishment really works today. Which genuinely isn’t anything like what most of us expect – even some of those within it.
Appearing to have a platform, with growing support and ‘breakthrough’ messages that give the immediate belief that those behind it can achieve things, will bring many different people and interests out of the woodwork who want to use that exposure for themselves. Usually because they aren’t getting the level of success with their own approaches, that they can see that new platform has.
It’s this visually-derived focus that brings groups like Together, climate deniers, right-wingers, anti-Brexiteers, and all sorts of different people with badges those who disagree with their priorities have given them, who identify with the issues that UK Farmers face tom banners like NFNF.
They see a vehicle that could be the answer to whatever problem they see as the priority, believing that their ‘fix’ will be the one that fixes everything for everyone else too.
The biggest obstacle to a successful outcome or resolution to all the common issues that Farmers share, is what we are now seeing unfolding in the disagreements about NFNF.
Different groups and individuals are attacking each other or piling in on individuals who have said something they don’t like about their take on what NFNF are going to do, and using links, affiliations and everything but the issues around what will actually work, when the point is being missed that in its current form, with the current mentality and the current lack of genuine engagement of a kind that social media simply cannot give, there will be nothing meaningful that NFNF can achieve.
The truth is that there is a massive range of people with different skills, experiences and talents that need to be involved in any movement that is going to succeed in delivering change for UK Farmers and Food Producers, where so many have already failed or been bought off with meaningless compromises before.
The parallels between this new campaign and how entry to the current political system works are frightening. Success in one area of business, obtaining a platform or just getting yourself elected doesn’t equip anyone with the understanding that it takes to do anything and certainly not where the realms of public policy interconnect and interacting with a completely broken system are concerned.
We shouldn’t doubt the good intent behind NFNF. But it’s been said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and a large number of rightly angry, desperate and frustrated people are getting carried away by an idea that presents a good story, that in reality will end up a very long way from what it now seems.
We cannot have all the things that we want. That much is clear from the reality that we are all living through.
We need to focus upon the things that we genuinely need.
What we have the power to do is recognise the key things or rather the aims that we have in common. Such as saving U.K. Farming and making sure that everyone in the U.K. has everyday access to good, healthy, natural and farm-grown food.
It’s easy to dismiss workable solutions on the basis that they don’t appear to deliver the solutions that we want. But that’s really the most important point.
If we work together to deliver what’s right for everyone and not just what we want, what we want is likely to be delivered or will become a lot nearer by doing so.
We will then be winning multiple times over. Rather than fighting each other for no good purpose and not delivering anything to help anyone at all.
Like many with a careful eye on the problems our Farmers are facing and the massive issues that currently surround everything with UK food production and the access that everyone has to food, I had a moment of hope when I first saw that simple but effective ‘No Farmers, No Food’ yellow badge and black tractor, on social media just a few weeks ago.
What I saw next or rather what I couldn’t see concerned me. That was the absence of any detail about who was behind this Twitter account that was quickly gaining followers, and most importantly who and what the people behind it are all about.
For anyone who did a basic search on Google around that time, it would have been quickly obvious that no organisation in the U.K. with that name exists. But that there has been a very similar campaign built around No Farms No Food No Future in the USA since at least 2018.
It wasn’t long before a scattering of the people who represent not only farmers, but also different areas of the massive range of issues that are tied up in U.K. agriculture’s problems, began to openly question the populist nature of the account and what were its real intentions.
Regrettably, however well intended, populism can create a lot of buy in from vulnerable people very quickly. But then has a habit of hurting those same people very badly just as soon as it’s clear the hollow words don’t actually work.
It wasn’t long before the ‘founder’ of No Farmers No Food finally outed himself. For those watching the political terrain and current affairs with an eye on social media, it wasn’t any great surprise to see that James Melville was that name.
I only know of James because his posts are almost continuously hitting my timeline. I may have even briefly followed him when he first appeared there some months after the first lockdown in 2020. When dissent against lockdowns, social distancing and all the madness suddenly became popular to talk and publish about ‘out loud’.
To be very fair, James is clearly a very talented marketing specialist. He knows how to rack up followers, likes and a lot of popularity online.
But follows, likes and hundreds of thousands of people nodding their heads in agreement as they sit down to have a poo, a successful political campaign with real tangible, life-changing outcomes does not alone make!
Everyone is capable of change and as George Bernard Shaw once said, ‘Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.’
So, the growing promises and popularity of the No Farmers No Food ‘campaign’ certainly hadn’t been a subject I’ve wanted to tackle directly by name, before there was any documented outline of what they intend to do and what really underpins their cause.
Last night, No Farmers No Food released a document that not only outlined what they see themselves about and what they see their value as being. It also leaned heavily on the words and feeling of farmers of different kinds who are desperately looking for change across the U.K. (A copy of the NFNF Press Release from 19 February 2024 can be found at the bottom)
There’s nothing wrong with anything that has been said. Other than the fact that Farmers and those that support them are even having to say it.
However, just because there is strength of feeling and so many within the industry and within the communities that surround it who are looking for solutions and someone who is going to instigate change, it doesn’t mean that the first few people with a visible loud haler and some words that everyone thinking about these issues can relate to, will be any different to anything or anyone who has come before.
This is where the real danger of what looks and sounds like something new and different presents. I’m afraid to say that I have not read anything in the release that I haven’t seen attempted or even being worked on by existing organisations, right now, or even before.
Farmers don’t need another group or organisation, that has a louder voice and gets more follows, but doesn’t get anything done. Even though good marketing plans and clever words will make it look like they have or that they can.
Regrettably, clever words, clever marketing and clever narratives are everything that’s already wrong with how the establishment, the respective UK governments and the politicians within them operate.
No organisation or groups of organisations are going to win friends by putting out adverts about the margins that farmers receive that might mention profit, but leave the scanning reader with the impression that after selling a kilogram of apples to a supermarket, the grower actually only receives 3p, when the pack price on the shelf is over £2.
This kind of approach is no different to scoring an own-goal. Not because the detail is technically wrong. But because mirroring the actions of those who are already blind will achieve absolutely nothing, whilst it also shows the same kind of sleight of hand or manipulation used by politicians that many members of the public are now desperate to move away from.
Strong, effective marketing from people with the skills and ability like James, have massive power to help and to create the change that is now necessary, IF Farming across the UK is to be saved from a destructive fate that many suspect, but very few really see. However, marketing is only a small part of that formula, because there’s a lot more than simple but effective messaging that needs to be achieved.
What the people heading popular campaigns say and what they represent isn’t the pathway to change itself. Even if they appear to be able to open lots of doors.
Yes, It’s nice to know that there are all sorts of people from all backgrounds and industries who are able to hear stories and compelling lines that they can all identify with when they are unhappy about a world that is giving everyone plenty to be unhappy about.
But where’s the purpose?
Where are the solutions that actually work?
Where is the real recognition that the problems aren’t about the subjects themselves, but rather how politics, the political system and the establishment itself works?
The only way to win against politicians who are incompetent, self-interested and only listening to advisers and so-called experts (with their own agendas), because when it comes to their real responsibilities they are massively out of their depth, is to play the political game even better than they and the people who support them can.
That doesn’t begin with any kind of strategy that relies on the politicians, their advisors or the establishment being the ones who are going to change.
Whilst it continues to be in some kind of ascendency, No Farmers No Food could very quickly win what appear to be concessions from the Sunak government and from whatever will follow. But the realities that underpin that and the direction that this entire political class are committed to taking UK Food Production will soon again begin to show – after Farmers and everyone who supports them will have been misled again into wasting what is now becoming invaluable time.
The reason that the many organisations that include big names such as the NFU and Food, Farming and Countryside Commission – who are covering so much of the ground that the wish list published yesterday mentioned already, aren’t achieving the results we all know they should be, is they are either too big, too London-centric, or like so many of us still believe that there is some kind of gentlemanly set of rules at work within the establishment that guarantee that as long as you do things the right way, the right things will end up being done in return for you.
Sadly, those days are long gone.
The power that farmers have to change much more than the destiny of farming itself, isn’t something that anyone can waste time waiting for permission to use.
Everyone is looking for solutions and answers from people who really don’t care about UK Farming.
People who are certain that they are right and farmers are wrong, because they genuinely believe that food will never be a problem, as it will always be available from elsewhere.
Please don’t continue to make the same mistakes. Boxing clever is the only way UK Farming can now succeed.
The one thing that everyone linked to U.K. Agriculture and Food Production will agree on is that the industry is in crisis. But what the crisis is, what caused it, what will fix it and what approach or what thinking must be prioritised to do so are very different things.
The stakes could not be higher. Farming is quickly becoming unviable for growing numbers of farmers. The land they vacate is coming out of production and not being passed to the next generation or anyone fighting to find their way in. Retailers are exhaustively abusing their relationships with farmers and growers, and the establishment remains blithely confident that the U.K. will never be short of supplies.
Because countries as far away as Australia and New Zealand will always be there to step into the gap and meet every shortfall.
All of this whilst the latest figures suggest that the amount of food that the U.K. produces for its own use only reaches around 52-54%.
That the food we all eat just seems to keep on coming gives the lie to what the real food crisis is. And the fragility of our food supply is hiding in plain sight.
The complexity of the issues involved regrettably mean it is increasingly easy for anyone within the industry who is worried about the future, to be looking for a banner or message to get behind. One that relates enough to their own experience and makes sense of whatever they believe everyone else going through the same experience needs to do.
Unfortunately, messages that can become such a point of focus are therefore very dangerous. They deceive people into believing in a shared purpose that isn’t necessarily there.
This means that time, energy and perhaps even risks or gambles are taken on political vehicles or strands of unanchored activism that sound as if they will deliver results and perhaps even become the next big thing.
Some call this populism. It’s happening within farming right now, fuelled in no small part by the growing unrest involving farmers across Europe who have even gone as far as laying a meadow along once of the key routes into Paris.
Ploughing roads, fertilising the walls of ministry offices, shutting down travel or even manning the barricades might sound very attractive to people even beyond the farming and food production community itself. But what would be the purpose? What would U.K. farmers be trying to achieve? What would it all be for?
Everyone has a different perspective on the issues; what is happening and what really needs to happen, to get the result and to sort all the problems out.
By rushing to protest, no matter how inspiring the pictures from Europe might seem, the real opportunity could be so easily lost. The growing power of the frustration, impatience and lack of trust of the establishment, retailers and big money, who are collectively causing so much harm and distress, could too easily be lost. Worse still, misdirection of this untapped potential could too easily be used against what’s left of the power the industry has to influence its own future.
Protests without purpose will also always fail. Wasting a lot of time and probably money that few can really afford. However, the real cost of responding to the dog whistles rarely blown by those with skin in the game, will be the future of UK Farming and Food Production itself.
Any form of protest that isn’t really thought out in terms of what it needs to achieve and then fails, will inevitably be seen as a whimsical exercise by people ‘on the extreme’.
There is a high probability that any form of mass protest implemented without thought will be repurposed by the establishment to fit the narrative that UK Agriculture is archaic in its current form and must adhere to new ways of thinking and practices. Systems and ways of working that in the longer term, don’t feature what you and I recognise as Farming in any relevant form.
I wish that I could say that the alternative way to facilitate change is easy, and just as easy to understand.
There are people working within and supporting the industry who in some cases have overseen massively useful work on the future of farming in the UK and what needs to change.
The evidence is there to demonstrate that a whole range of problems genuinely exists.
Some of the work done is incredibly good and well-informed. But even in the case of those working very closely with Government, politicians and industry leaders every day, there is not enough appreciation of just how complex the political-government-establishment-public sector relationship and the interaction between them has become.
Worse still, there is very little focus on how the massively misled expectations of members of the public as well as industry professionals and small business owners can possibly be met, when the realities of the future we face are now undoubtedly facing in a very different way.
There are barriers to progress everywhere, and the lens of best intentions doesn’t see these for the problem that they really are. Yet we have years of disappointments with public policy to confirm that it is so.
The control of food is power.
Once we are able to understand the role of food in every one of its aspects and forms, we then and only then, have a chance to recognise that the whole direction of farming and the current production and output-based focus it has, is constructed of policies that simply make no economic sense. We can see what they are really there for.
UK Agriculture has no power and no say in its future today. This must change.
Over the past 40-50 years, all that power and influence has been slowly and yes, deliberately been drained away to wherever we think the money still is, and then beyond.
The future of farming that works for us all is one that fits with and interacts closely with the benefits of production and supply to the surrounding community fixed firmly in mind.
Its form more closely resembles the kind of farm structures and sizes that older generations will remember well. It builds upon community, true localism and a healthy relationship with social enterprises or not-for-profit cooperatives in every potential form.
However, the narratives we overwhelmingly hear today tell us that progress can only ever go one way.
Yet the progress the establishment is driving us all towards isn’t focused on humans, on health, on being happy. It’s all about money, and the wealth of an ever smaller few.
But as the friction in the markets, the talk of politicians and the cost-of-living crisis keep warning us, the monetary and financial system that we have, has actually had its day.
The real progress that will keep farmers farming and people healthy and fed adequately with what they need, isn’t based on a direction where money and all the forces that drive it can continue to be in the driving seat for very long.
The future of food and food production is about community, locality, smaller or more tradition scale and about people working in and around food production being remunerated properly for doing proper, fulfilling jobs.
Local Farms and the role they will play in providing many of the foods, drinks and goods that will make that possible, are at the heart of the future of Food Production.
Farmers have the power to influence this change of direction in a very practical way. But government and the big money interests riding off the destruction of UK farming aren’t going to pay for it.
It’s time for the industry to take a worthwhile risk on its future.
Otherwise, it won’t be long before there isn’t anything left taking a risk for.
Adam Tugwell 