Terence Blacker: Middle-class sentimentality, Lord Haskins?

It is relatively rare that one is given the chance, within hours of reading a weighty pronouncement by a national figure, to see the private reality behind the public words, but it happened to me this week. Lord Haskins, the millionaire Labour peer who heads up a government commission that will be looking at the future of rural communities, revealed that our farmers have been "mollycoddled for too long". A few hours later, by coincidence, I met one of the very people to whom he was referring.

Admittedly Michael, a pig farmer in Suffolk, was not looking particularly mollycoddled at the time. He was standing among the deserted outbuildings which, until recently, had been the lively, squealing focus of his family business. The pigs have gone. The few items of farm machinery that have not had to be destroyed under the government's Pig Industry Restructuring Scheme are about to be sold off – as are his land and the house in which his family has lived for 45 years.

All of which will doubtless seem exactly as it should be to Lord Haskins. "I would expect the number of farmers to be halved in 20 years," he announced breezily. "Farms will get bigger, and that's a good thing," he added with the confidence of one who, in addition to being the chairman of Northern Foods, owns 800 acres in Yorkshire. Large farms were not only more profitable than small ones, but – a bit of a surprise here – often more environmentally friendly.

Michael's farm has grown smaller over the years. When the arable crops farmed by his father no longer produced a competitive yield, he sold some land and moved into pigs. Difficult times followed. New, strict welfare regulations were introduced, but the supermarkets opted for cheap imports over the more humanely-produced British pork.

The government's view was that the market should decide on such matters – and it did. When a delegation of farmers visited a leading supermarket to ask for less crippling margins, they were told that the chain needed to make the 20 per cent mark-up it publicly declared, plus another 20 per cent which it kept quiet about.

In spite of these problems, Michael's farm survived until the outbreak of classical swine fever last year. If his animals had been infected, he would have been compensated, but they were not. He was unable to sell or move them. They bred, grew fat. A thousand pigs were crammed into a yard where 250 were normally kept, and many died in the appalling, over-crowded conditions. When the government offered to help what were known as "outgoers" from the industry, Michael decided his farming days were over.

All this, presumably, will be music to the ears of Lord Haskins. Agriculture "must strive to be more competitive and more productive," he says. At the same time he was in favour of "environmental support schemes which farmers will have to earn". An ardent supporter of GM crops, he has sneered at organic farming as being, in his unwittingly accurate phrase, "for the birds".

In the on-message gospel according to Lord Haskins, big is good. Productivity is great and – no conflict here, apparently – the environment is terribly important.

What misconceived codswallop it all is. To see the effect on the landscape of this creed of size and profit, one only has to compare the desolate, featureless prairies to which agribusiness has reduced so much of East Anglia to the fields and hedgerows around Michael's farm.

Doubtless, the eminent peer will dismiss such thoughts as middle-class sentimentality. When the land is bought up and rendered appropriately competitive by some Haskins-like super-farmer, it will be regarded by those who matter as a small but important blow against that enemy of fiscally correct New Labour thinking, the mollycoddled farmer.

terblacker@aol.com