Reality Cheques 23and water pollution are transferred away from farmers, and so not paid by those
producing the food nor included in the price of the products sold. Until recently,
though, we have lacked the methods to put a price on these side effects.
When we conceive of agriculture as more than simply a food factory, indeed as
a multifunctional activity with many side effects, then this idea that farmers do
only one thing must change. Of course, it was not always like this. It is modern
agriculture that has brought a narrow view of farming, and it has led us to crisis.
The rural environment in industrialized countries suffers, the food we eat is as
likely to do as much harm as good, and we still think food is cheap. The following
words were written more than 50 years ago, just before the advent of modern
industrialized farming.
Why is there so much controversy about Britain’s agricultural policy, and why are farm-
ers so disturbed about the future?... After the last war, the people of these islands were
anxious to establish food production on a secure basis, yet, in spite of public good will,
the farming industry has been through a period of insecurity and chaotic conditions.These are the opening words to a national enquiry that could have been written
about a contemporary crisis. Yet they are by Lord Astor, written in 1945 to intro-
duce the Astor and Rowntree review of agriculture. This enquiry was critical of the
replacement of mixed methods with standardized farming. They said, ‘to farm
properly you have got to maintain soil fertility; to maintain soil fertility you need
a mixed farming system’. They believed that farming would only succeed if it
maintained the health of the whole system, beginning in particular with the main-
tenance of soil fertility: ‘obviously it is not only sound business practice but plain
common sense to take steps to maintain the health and fertility of soil’.^2
But in the enquiry, some witnesses disagreed, and called for a ‘specialised and
mechanised farming’, though interestingly, the farming establishment at the time
largely supported the idea of mixed farming. But in the end, the desire for public
subsidies to encourage increases in food production took precedence, and these
were more easily applied to simplified systems than mixed ones. The 1947 Agricul-
ture Act was the outcome, a giant leap forward for modern, simplified agriculture,
and a large step away from farming that valued nature’s assets for farming. Sir
George Stapledon, a British scientist knighted for his research on grasslands, was
another perceptive scientist well ahead of his time. He too was against monocul-
tures and in favour of diversity, arguing in 1941 that ‘senseless systems of monoc-
ulture designed to produce food and other crops at the cheapest possible cost have
rendered waste literally millions of acres of once fertile or potentially fertile
country’.^3 In his final years, just a decade after the 1947 Act, he said:
today technology has begun to run riot and amazingly enough perhaps nowhere more
so than on the most productive farms... Man is putting all his money on narrow spe-
cialisation and on the newly dawned age of technology has backed a wild horse which
given its head is bound to get out of control.