Category: Economics

Fresh Food is the foundation of a happy, healthy and productive life. So why would anyone think humanity can survive by leaving the basic building blocks of good living behind?

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.

Grow Your Own or ‘Home Growing’
Foods We Can Farm, Catch, Harvest and Grow Locally in and around the UK
Foods We Can Trust: A Blueprint for Food Security and Community Resilience in the UK |Online Text
Local Planning for Food Shortages: A Guide to Local Support and Preparedness | Full Text
Adam’s Food and Farming Portfolio: A Guide to Books, Blogs and Solutions
Fresh Food 25Feb24 PDF_Vers1_23Sep26Download

No Farmers No Food may be a wasted opportunity for UK Farming in its current form. But personal attacks on those leading it are no better than any one of us shooting at our own hand

A few days ago, I wrote and published a blog where I outlined why No Farmers No Food (NFNF) campaign will achieve nothing, whilst it could also end up doing UK Farming and Food Production considerable harm.

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.

If you can measure it, you can control it: Has GDP been the most dehumanising tool that humanity’s so-called leaders have ever created?

Just before Christmas, I published an e-book called ‘One Rule Changes Everything’. Within it, I identified the common theme of all the problems that society faces being built on the reality that the value of money is the benchmark that we use for everything in life and that the cultural selfishness that is now prevalent across mankind has become the greatest obstacle to us moving forward into a much healthier and happier way of living. Not least of all, because to do so would allow us to address all of the problems we have at their root cause.

The fact that we exist within a money-based paradigm today and have lost sight of values and what being human really means isn’t an easy idea for anyone to grapple with. After all, even those who can see and fully appreciate how ‘The System’ works, cannot escape living within it and being touched by the impact of it at each and every turn.

For the whole of humanity to reach this point without even realising it means that there has been a process at work that we have not seen or have been unconscious of.

Because so few are able to recognise that process, it is safe to assume that we have been steadily conditioned, in ways that could have been as simple as each of us accepting changes and leaps in money-related technologies, how we buy things, what products are available to us and what we have to do to get access to them. All without ever taking the time or making the effort to question any of these things and what they mean.

Experience changes our expectations. So, the true impact of technology like the internet has been far more significant than the ease of shopping or borrowing money. It has actually changed our values set, and how we think about our relationship with other human beings too.

But where did this process of unacknowledged change really begin? What were the building blocks that really started to make it that ‘life is all about money’, and nothing else?

The Human Condition

A reality that we all need to face is that a default setting of being human without being self-aware, is that we behave as an individual and as if we are separate to anyone and everything else. Therefore, we consider every interaction that we have in terms of how it will affect us, whether it will ultimately be a benefit or a cost to us.

Few will consciously place themselves in any situation where they believe that the costs of doing so  will outweigh the advantages. Even when they are fully conscious of all the facts and consequences of what they have the choice to do.

This is how selfishness works at its basic level, and there is an argument to be made that it is certainly a healthy way to be, IF you cannot be sure that anyone or everyone else can take a fully altruistic approach to every interaction in life. Which there are many arguments available to suggest that they cannot.

If humankind were able to police itself and ‘keep itself honest’ by being content that everyone should always be aware of the facts before they are expected to make any decision that could have a negative impact upon them in any way, the world would already be a much happier, much healthier, much more equitable and much more human place.

But for some, the basic ingredients of life have and never will be enough.

Ideologies and Hidden Truths

As soon as a process of any kind is invented or introduced to ‘create value’, whether that’s income, efficiency or anything else that can be considered to be advantageous at any level to the end user or to the recipient, without that end user or recipient being aware of the process that’s involved or why it’s really being carried out, the doors are immediately opened up to breaches of trust and for the confidence of anyone without full knowledge of what’s happening to be abused.

Historically, that abuse of trust could be based upon something as simple as the distribution of power and how certain people found themselves in control whilst others did not.

More recently, and particularly into the 20th century, that abuse has been based more upon the accumulation, distribution and creation of money and wealth. Manifested through wealth inequality or the wealth divide, which paints those who have much as being special, when those have less or very little, are most certainly not.

The most frightening thing about the way that ‘The System’ works and how it creates the myth that only those with wealth and power are special, is just how simple the ingredients or technical aspects that allow such stories and lies to exist, really are. So simple, that for anyone questioning how money and finance works for the first time, the simplicity itself makes the truth very hard to believe.

The most effective of all those ingredients is the framework of measurements that put figures against everything that ‘The System’ values, and gives the lie that ownership and direction of those measurements is what constitutes the real power over everything, therefore surrendering our control, because it’s what we believe.

GDP: The Tool of Measurement for a corrupt, self-serving and dehumanising ideal

It’s easy to think that the problems facing the Country have been caused by and are the sole responsibility of  whoever is in government at the time. Attributing blame in that way plays no small part of the way that our broken political system actually works and its why so many of us believe that the choices of political parties that we are given will result in change, whenever the next General Election comes.

What Politicians (from any side), The Media and all the public figures sprawled across social media don’t tell us, as they whinge and make out they are the only ones who really understand the injustice and pain that everyone faces, is that everything collapsing around us today has come from an accumulative effect of policy after policy and decision after decision, that has been taken by multiple generations  of politicians – from all sides, pretty much since just after the end of the Second World War.

Built on an economic idea or theory called Neoliberalism, there has been push after push to deregulate everything that was once regulated by government – on our behalf in some way, and for trust in the markets to be allowed to work beneficially on behalf of everyone and for the idea of ‘Free Markets’ to be embraced in its place.

Regulations that were once there to restrict , encourage and maintain certain behaviours of those private or commercial interests with the power to affect others lives have been steadily removed. Measurements relating to productivity, output and ‘growth’ have been inserted in their place, with little or no attention being paid to the way that the driving interests have increasingly used civil and corporate law to create their own system of checks and balances, regulated or enforced by expensive lawyers across what should still be an open or ‘free space’.

Every bit of the economy, or rather every product made, grown, produced, transported and every service carried out is measured by the financial value of each and every transaction that follows it through supply chains.

Meanwhile, this system of measuring everything in terms of the outputs generated has perverted just about every part of the public sphere. So that measurement, rather than the experience of  the end user, has become what everything in business, not-for-profits and worst of all, the public sector is all about.

Measurement drives behaviour because behaviour is driven by measurement

What few have realised is that measurement offers or rather appears to offer something concrete outside of ourselves that just knowing we have done the right thing or done the best job that we could do does not.

The ability to measure, record and document also gives poor leaders, who do not trust the people who they lead, the opportunity to control those people and to increase the ways that they do so. Right up to the point where politicians and the establishment believe it right to police the way that other people think.

Yes, it seems hard to believe. But GDP and the Neoliberal obsession with measurement to ensure performance, productivity and therefore growth has actually influenced and conditioned workplace behaviours and service to the public is not what public service is now actually about.

Removing value from real life

Measurement of everything that can be measured has created and encouraged a process where people have increasingly forgotten to trust each other. In turn, ‘experts’ and ‘professionals’ rely on figures that can be illustrated, and more often than not manipulated in whatever form they can then be laid out and presented on a page.

Real life and human interaction cannot be measured in any kind of quantitative form.

We have unwittingly and therefore foolishly allowed an economic system, derived not for the benefit of the people, but so the selfish could become even more selfish, to use measurement to blame us for the flaws in ‘The System’  the few manage and the mistakes they keep making. Bringing us ever nearer to a situation where we, the guilty masses can only be saved by surrendering the few freedoms that we have left, so that we can be saved from ourselves from this ever more greedy few.

Growth

For those needing evidence or a way to understand that we are today welcoming in a form of totalitarianism that once across the threshold of daily life will then be very quickly imposed, you only need listen out to the obsession that so many of the politicians and media bods we are forced to listen to by the ‘credible’ mainstream media has with growing the economy and specifically the word ‘growth’.

In whatever context it comes at us, the fact is that the ‘growth’ people made credible by their position and platform talk about, always relates to growth of GDP or ‘Gross Domestic Product’.

GDP is the Neoliberal ethos of continually growing the amount of money in circulation, so that public debt and all the other damage that the proponents of this twisted ideology create that keeps hurting us, can be covered up and hidden from view. Until the time that it is impossible to hide it from view any more.

Our politicians, many of whom are either too greedy, too stupid or too ignorant to understand how the mechanics of ‘The System’ they are supposed to be there to legislate upon even works, only know and understand what their advisers and the people who control them tell them.

This is likely to be something along the lines that politicians can only keep spending money for as long as everything they do with the power we gave them keeps on allowing big money, big business and big everything else to grow, through a process that is steadily breaking us all.

If it cannot be measured, it doesn’t exist

The harm that having lunatics in control who have placed a financial or monetary value on so many aspects of human life, is that is has genuinely affected the way that every one of us thinks.

It has progressed to the point where the unhuman aspects of ‘The System’ we are being led under has now corrupted just about every part of life.

The fact is that deep down, we all know that the work we do, the food we grow, the products we make, the services that we provide are all about providing the things that each and every one of us need for life. And that’s what many of us still unconsciously think.

However, the hard reality we face is that a life based on values – which is where every function we carry out is about people, communities and the world we live in, is no longer what life is really about.

Life has been changed, manipulated, reformed and redirected so that money, wealth and influence is all that matters.

Anything that cannot be measured has no financial value to those who want to measure and control it.

So it becomes worthless. Because what anything is worth is what everything is now all about.

One Rule Changes Everything | Full Text
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Sustainable Agriculture is part of the pathway to UK Food Security. But it wont work well for anyone until it works for everyone in the same way

My focus on Agri politics and the mass of issues that surround UK Food Security, Sustainable Agriculture and the growing problem of Food Poverty in the UK has made the past few months and my time at the Royal Agricultural University highly beneficial. Especially as I have began to look further and further outside my own social and professional circles to see if the troubling patterns that I already recognised, were evident in the same way elsewhere.

I have to be blunt and say that nothing I have experienced has given me any comfort. In all honesty, everything that I have seen has made me realise that the UKs Food Security and self-sustainability issues are significantly worse than I’d already concluded, and they are getting worse the whole time.

As you will have already read, Sustainability and Sustainable Agriculture are issues that are important to what I wish to share. However, the English language, the way that we multipurpose words and the obsession with subtext that most of us have, make communicating difficult issues that need to easily be grasped very difficult. Especially when alternative terms and their meanings can be used as a barrier that allow emotional ties to get in the way of progress and constructive dialogue.

There are very important distinctions to be made about Sustainable Farming in the context of what sustainability really is. Given that terms such as Regenerative Agriculture, Conservation Agriculture and Rewilding have been pushing their way into the Rural, Green, Environmental and Agricultural lexicon. As despite what should be very distinctive threads of commonality running throughout all of them, the differences between them and more importantly what everyone believes to be the most important priorities of each of them, are endlessly getting in the way.

Misunderstanding, misinterpreting and misrepresenting key benefits and issues is preventing everyone coming together to build upon shared commonality to identify and implement ways of working for the future that are meaningful and beneficial for everyone involved.

To add to the complication of addressing these issues, there is also a need to focus on methods and thinking that are likely to seem counterintuitive in a way that requires many of the most logical and business minded people that we could meet, to think about a future that looks very different to how it does today. A comfort zone we are resistant to leaving where every system, policy and story we encounter tell us all that the basics of everything that we accept without thinking, are always set to remain the same.

The priority of Farmers today is money. But farms cannot run profitably with profit being the priority anymore

So, this is a statement that will need some more thought. Surely it’s the case that every business is run to make money, isn’t it?

On the face of it, the argument that all businesses exist to make a profit is very sound. However, it is only sound because of the way that the world currently works and how we think, placing money at the heart of everything. Instead of prioritising the real reasons that any business exists, which are the products or the services that they provide to customers (or end users).

We can take this thought further. The real reason for providing those goods or services are to help, support or enable people to live, in whatever way that product or service will help those people to do so.

At risk of stating what should be obvious to everyone but actually isn’t, UK Agriculture, Food Production and UK Farms are about or should be about providing the UK population with a secure, accessible, ongoing supply of healthy, nutritional basic or essential foods. And they should do this collectively on the basis of providing the UK Population with the widest variety that is available to us from being grown, ideally as local to the end user as possible, but at the very least, from somewhere from within the geography of the nation state that we all share.

I don’t know a farmer who isn’t passionate about what they do.

Farming isn’t just a business. Farming is a vocation and lifestyle choice for all those who are genuinely committed to the industry, in what I will suggest is a healthy way.

However, as we have moved further and further away from subsistence farming the scale of risk has grown at the same pace as the commitment to production growth.

It has naturally followed that the power that Farmers and Food Producers in the UK once had, has progressively been surrendered to whoever will guarantee the greatest longevity of income. Even though it has now been arguably many years since such guarantees have also offered anything like what we would likely agree to be viable prices.

One of the reasons that Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon Prime has been such a good champion for UK Farmers is that it has lifted the lid on just how precarious Farming in the UK has now become. Yet few Farmers have the opportunity to do TV work or lean on the marketing power of celebrity to make a new farm shop or a brewery buy-in an instant hit.

The reality is that for many Farmers, it has been the culture of payments and subsidies that have taken over everything in Agriculture, alongside the ‘deals with the devil’ that have been made with traders and supermarkets, that are the only reason that what should be ridiculously successful food producing businesses stay afloat.

It is impossible for Farmers to stand still at a static or subsistence level as it once was, as ‘growth’ and therefore growing ‘turnover’ is the only way that earnings can be kept static.

The alternative for many being either to sell up or go broke.

Farmers, Food Producers and the entire UK Agricultural Industry are vulnerable to whatever the supermarkets, retailers, traders and the establishment demands of them next. Because they have surrendered their power to money, and forgotten how to do what they really do best.

Current thinking and every message that we hear tells us that big and bigger are the only way that things can now go. That ‘growth’ equals progress. Yet none of this is in any way true.

The future of Farming is the return to being a predominantly local, community-focused industry with emphasis on the production of foods and goods that local people need. Not what some want and only they can afford.

I realise that the immediate argument that will come back from many farmers who are thinking about the situation that they are really now in, will be that the infrastructure, support networks and governance (laws, rules and regulations) simply don’t exist to make anything like this work without financial support, and that just this factor alone, before anything like the economies of scale are considered, make any such move one that would be impossible to work.

It certainly looks that way. But without UK Farmers, Food Producers and Agriculturally aligned industries taking back their own power by taking those risks necessary for themselves now, the reality is that within perhaps only a few years, Farming as we recognise it in the UK today, will simply no longer exist.

The need for a collaborative approach to the UK Farming and Food Security Problem
FOOD FROM FARMS GUARANTEED | Full Text
Who controls Our Food controls Our Future (Full Text)