So Shall We Reap By Colin Tudge

Farming today, and tomorrow

Relax. No sweat. It's all going to be all right. I'm talking, of course, about the future of this planet. The population of the world will soon stop increasing and we will easily be able to feed them all. All we need to do is to listen to what Colin Tudge prescribes in this book, and change the way we farm.

As a farmer who ekes out a living from the shallow soils of Cambridgeshire and the deep coffers of Brussels, I was keen to learn how I must alter my ways. Tudge starts with the sort of meaningless statement that litter the book like dandruff. "The prospects for humanity and the world as a whole," he announces, "are somewhere between glorious and dire." There then follows a brief history of everything including archaeology, philosophy, chemistry, biology, sociology, gastronomy and demography.

To support his position, Tudge sometimes uses the bizarre technique of citing his own previous writings as evidence. His thesis culminates in the prediction that the world's population will level off at about 10 billion souls by the year 2050. The most notable aspect of this Plato-to-Nato survey is its symphony of clichés. Thus, to hit the nail on the head, the labour force has been reduced hand over fist. But if the chips were down, we could produce more food - always providing we don't put all our eggs in one basket. In which case, as night follows day, we might end up sitting on the fence.

Being a mere peasant, I am not competent to judge whether Colin Tudge is right in his assertion that the population will stabilise in 50 years' time. My confidence in his accuracy is, however, not increased when he deals with subjects with which I am familiar. "Arable farmers in England," we are told, "now average eight tonnes of wheat per hectare and the most productive achieve about twice this." This is simply not true. A yield of 16 tonnes of wheat from one hectare would ensure a mention in the Guinness Book of Records.

Tudge's solution to feeding 10 billion humans is what he calls Enlightened Agriculture. To achieve this, new farming policies must be shaped "according to human values of aesthetics and morality (kindness, justice, peace of mind)". After acres of philosophising, he returns to earth and proposes that all British farms should employ a lot more people and that arable farmers like me should keep livestock. This is, of course, a load of bullocks.

Some 60 years ago, my father ran exactly this type of farm. On our 2,000 acres we kept dairy and beef cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry, as well as growing cereals and other arable crops. We employed 80 men and, together with the other five farmers in the village, provided a livelihood for the entire community. Today we have no livestock and employ three men. The village is a dormitory from which the residents depart each morning to work in offices.

Tudge appears to forget why this process occurred in the first place. Those times may today look idyllic - so does a reproduction of Constable's Hay Wain over the mantelpiece - but the fact remains that the one overwhelming ambition of any farm worker during the second half of the 20th century was to get the hell out of agriculture as fast as possible. And they were absolutely right to feel like this. Wages were insulting, hours were long, working conditions were intolerable, holidays were a week at Clacton and housing, often without inside running water, was unspeakable.

Talk to any survivor of this period and they will tell you that their backs are damaged by lifting heavy loads and their lungs clogged by dust. Their successors, who drive huge air-conditioned machines, have strong backs, clean lungs and holidays in Spain.

Tudge sums up his position in a sentence that gives a flavour of the book itself: "Some of the traditional work on farms was and is ghastly: but much even of the hardest labour is satisfying, and people need to work at something, and although the novels of Thomas Hardy and George Eliot depict much strife in traditional English farming communities, they were fine societies too." Come again?

For farmers like me to keep livestock, in spite of the fact that East Anglia is the driest part of England and thus grows very poor grass, is not intelligent. The extra people I should also employ will not only have to be paid a decent wage, but they will have to live in expensive houses that are today occupied by commuters. You don't need a degree in economics to see that the inevitable consequence would be that my costs would go up massively, and so would the price of the food I produce.

Yet in spite of these flights into Disneyland, Tudge has no illusions about some of the wilder shores of farming fantasies. To those who suggest that vegetarianism holds the answer, he observes that half of all cows, pigs, sheep and poultry would have to be slaughtered at birth. Their crime was to be born male; thus their only function would either be to procreate or to produce meat. Likewise he is right and brave to point out that the organic movement is both arbitrary and inconsistent.

So Shall We Reap does have one virtue; it may be sprawling and diffuse but at least it is provocative. For the agricultural industry, famous for its smug self-satisfaction, this is no bad thing. It's just a pity that farmers don't read books.

Oliver Walston is an arable farmer in Cambridgeshire