How Ambridge could join the revolution

GOING ORGANIC

Farmers as a breed are not given to deep introspection. They're the doers of our society rather than the thinkers, which is both their weakness and their strength. Saddle them with a system that in the eyes of most of the country has failed and they'll defend it to the bitter end.

The problem is that the average farmer has almost no conception of the earth's natural bounty. The land will deliver nothing without a good deal of coaxing from the products of Du Pont and AgrEvo. So to grow a decent cereal crop you need to start with a modern, high-yielding variety from the likes of Zeneca Seeds. Apply an autumn herbicide plus a couple of sizeable dressings of nitrogen fertiliser from Hydro Agri. Add a growth regulator or two for good measure, and nurture through the season with three or four fungicide sprays from Bayer. Finally, harvest with a 350hp, high-capacity combine from Claas.

It's not that the modern farmer employs such technical aids to enhance a natural process. In his eyes they are the process; as indispensable as soil, rain and sunshine.

If there remains somewhere an inherited memory of a time before agrochemicals, it's darkened by images of rural decay; of collapsed barns and gates hanging off hinges, of wheat fields choked up with weeds. Along came ICI to save the world from all that.

The reality was somewhat different. The author H J Massingham, an astute commentator on rural Britain in the 1930s and 40s, warned often that the industrialisation of agriculture would lead to disaster. In his book The Wisdom of the Fields he writes of a wartime meeting with a couple who farmed a tiny smallholding.

On a little over four acres of steeply sloping land Mr Rowe and his wife grew enough food to feed a small hamlet, all without the aid of chemicals. Their crops included strawberries - 120 lb in 1944 - potatoes, orchard fruits, plus a greater diversity of vegetables than many a grower "with 400 acres of fat and level land".

In addition they grew enough grass, fodder crops and flowers to support a pony, 130 chickens including 30 pullets, goats, six ewes and a lamb, a breeding sow with a litter of eight and 30 hives of bees. Massingham comments that their crops were of "superlative quality" and their animals in perfect health.

Husbandry such as this would feed a hundred million people when the "crazy edifice of super-industrialism" came tumbling down, he wrote.

At the end of the war there were a quarter of a million small farmers like the Rowes, each with less than 50 acres. Virtually without subsidies they had survived the depression of the 20s and 30s. Without chemical aids they had fed the nation during time of war. They were by any reckoning a national treasure.

Unfortunately the politicians, who have never understood such things, decided there was no place for a peasant culture in postwar Britain. So they introduced the disastrous subsidy system that swelled dividends to shareholders in pesticide companies and forced the true custodians of the land out of business.

And here we are with an agriculture that costs us billions, a countryside stripped of its wildlife, a poisoned soil and a network of contaminated watercourses. Now they tell us our food isn't safe to eat. Something has gone horribly wrong.

In our hearts we remain a peasant people. The grandsons and granddaughters of the Rowes and their like are still out there. The land is not yet quite exhausted. It's time to start rebuilding our rural heritage.

We need to dismantle the subsidies, free up the land and get farmers producing for people again, not for the calamitous Intervention store. And we must begin taxing the polluters and the destroyers of habitat.

Given clear price signals farmers will respond readily enough. For all their innate conservatism they are rapid adopters of new methods, or in this case, new old methods.