ILLUSTRATIONS BY BEN CHALLENOR
Anyway, this inability to focus
on complex problems is one of
the (many) reasons why I’m
turning out to be a not-so-good
farmer. I simply don’t have the
mental capacity to make rational
decisions when more than one
factor is at hand. Yes, when I’m
hungry I can decide easily to
have a pork pie, but if there’s a
piece of tongue in the fridge as
well? Well, that’s me paralysed
by indecision for an hour.
And in farming right now, it
has gone way beyond pork pies
and tongue. Because of rising
gas prices caused by all sorts of
world events, fertiliser prices
have shot up from about £250
a tonne to three or four times
that. Many farmers are
therefore thinking about using
less on their crops, which will
reduce the yield.
That sounds bad, but they
reckon that because 30 per cent
of the world’s wheat and barley
comes from Russia and
Ukraine, the price of what they
sell for will rise and therefore
compensate for the miserable
quantities that will result from
using less fertiliser.
This “grow less but get more
for it” philosophy may be right,
but what if every farmer on
earth went for the lower-yield
option? There wouldn’t beenough food to go round. And
pretty soon people would be
beating their elderly next door
neighbour over the head with
a baseball bat to get at the
contents of her bread bin.
And murdering the milkman
so they can lick the float in the
hope that a bit of last week’s
load spilt somewhere.
And I have an even bigger
issue to wrestle with. I* bought
my fertiliser early last year
when prices were fairly low.
If I sold it now, I’d make a profit
of maybe £30,000. But then
I’d have none to put on my
crops. How much would this
affect yield up here in the
brashy stratosphere of north
Oxfordshire? And what if the
war ends tomorrow and
everything returns to normal?
If I sell my fertiliser, then I’d
be betting on the war ruining
the harvest in Ukraine. Which
means I’d be sitting here,
praying the conflict and all its
attendant awfulness carries onright through the summer. I’d
be a war profiteer and I couldn’t
do that, so what can I do?
I find myself spending hours
in my grain barn trying to figure
this stuff out but everything
just swims round and round
like I’m stuck in a Federico
Fellini movie where there’s a
priest and a crow and some
clouds and a circus, and I
haven’t a clue what’s going on.
And I can’t concentrate
because someone is playing a
violin backwards.
I’m rooted to the spot,
incapable of making a decision.
Fight or flight? Flee or wee?
Pork pie or tongue? I thought
farming would be mostly
chewing on bits of grass while
leaning on a fence, not this. Not
playing geopolitics. You need
that guy from The Tinder
Swindler to do that. Or a team of
analysts called Brad and Todd,
who offer visitors “a water”. And
I don’t have either. No farmer
does, and that’s something
you should worry about.
Brexit caused staff shortages
at Britain’s already woefullysmall number of abattoirs,
which means that instead of
putting their hogs into the
system, pig farmers are being
forced to kill them and throw
the carcasses away. Soon this
will cause bacon to become
more expensive than swan.
Then you have dairy farmers
whose money is delivered by an
army of snails. The cash flow
situation is now so terrible that
they are having to sell their lady
cows for meat. Which means
that soon milk will become
more dear than champagne.
Then there’s the global youth
movement that has decided
that badgers are lovely, which
means thousands of meat cows
are dying needlessly from
tuberculosis, which means your
burger will soon cost more than
your house.
And now comes this terrible
and stupid war, which is
going to cause bread, pasta
and vegetable oil to become
more expensive than gold,frankincense and myrrh. And
it’s no good saying, “Oh, we will
just get our food from abroad,”
because farmers over there are
in the same boat.
And because we tried that
once before, in the 1930s. Just
before the U-boats came
along and damn near starved
us to death.
The fact is, you can live
without sex. You can live
without box sets and clothes
and cars and holidays and
even houses. But you cannot
live without food. Oh sure,
you might manage a day or
even two, but after three the
hunger will take over and
you’ll do whatever is necessary
to feed yourself. And more
than what’s necessary to feed
your children.
I wonder if our leaders
realise this. Or are their
heads still too full of all that
partygate nonsense to
concentrate properly? n*Obviously by “I” what
I mean is “Cheerful Charlie,
the land agent”I thought farming would be mostly
chewing bits of grass and leaning
on a fence, not playing geopolitics
The Sunday Times Magazine • 51