The Changing World of Farming in Brexit UK

Matt Lobley, Michael Winter, Rebecca Wheeler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317038795
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The 2016 referendum resulted in a vote for the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Union. This has led to frenzied political debate across the whole spectrum of policy, and agriculture is no exception.

For the first time in a generation, the future of agriculture is unclear and unfettered by the constraints and incrementalism of the Common Agricultural Policy. This book makes an empirical contribution to the Brexit debate, bringing a social dimension to agri-Brexit and sustainable agriculture discourses. Understanding the social in the context of farmers is vital to developing a way forward on food security and agricultural sustainability. Farmers are the recipients of the market and policy signals that link to global uncertainties and challenges. This book is a commitment to understanding farmers as occupiers and managers of land. Chapters in this book explore farmers' own aspirations and knowledge about patterns of land use and production, which underpin discussions around the environment and sustainability.

There is a deficit in understanding what kind of agricultural industry we now have, following years of restructuring and repositioning. This book is an attempt to address that deficit and will appeal to students and researchers exploring agriculture, food politics and rural sociology.

1Introduction

Farmers and Brexit: setting the scene

The referendum in June 2016, which resulted in a vote in favour of the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, has led to frenzied political debate across the whole spectrum of policy – and agriculture is no exception. For the first time in a generation there is a debate on the future of agriculture which is unfettered by the constraints and incrementalism of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Consequently, Brexit has spawned a plethora of reports and campaigns on how policy should be reformed and agriculture re-envisioned in a post-Brexit world. At the time of writing in March 2018, the UK government had just issued a command paper on the future of agriculture alongside an evidence compendium and a summary of stakeholder ideas with a deadline for consultation responses of the 8 May 2018 (Cm 9577, 2018). An Agriculture Bill is expected to be introduced to Parliament before the summer recess. It is clear from even a superficial look at these sources that the old certainties based on CAP-induced compromises between farming and environmental interests have splintered. There are calls to focus policy primarily on the provision of public goods through environmental outcomes (Helm, 2016) and other calls to remove regulatory red tape and free up farming to play its role within an economic growth agenda (NFU, 2016). Others are using the opportunity to turn the spotlight on human health and nutrition (Lang et al., 2017). What is also clear is that this seemingly unending stream of reports does not necessarily reflect a deepening and widening of the evidential base for policy reflection. Brexit debate on agriculture has not, in the main, been characterised by fresh empirical research on the nature of UK agriculture in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Consequently, many of the campaigning reports are based on assumptions about farming and policy that may or may not be rooted in contemporary realities. For example, there is tendency to present farmers as a relatively homogeneous group at best segmented by the traditional categorisations of size, enterprise or tenure. Yet, as we show in Chapter 3 of this book, none of these familiar means of classifying farmers quite works in current circumstances and some oft-used data sources can be misleading. So one of the aims of this book is to make an empirical contribution to the Brexit debate about agriculture. We will say a little more about our data sources in the final section of this opening chapter.

A second observation we make about the great agri-Brexit debate is the low profile given to farmers, qua farmers. The majority of policy proponents are seeking policy measures that will influence farmers and farming to serve wider ends, such as through the provision of public goods (nature conservation, public access to the countryside etc.), or improved diet-related health outcomes. Even those campaigning on behalf of farmers are inclined to emphasise the contribution agriculture can make to UK PLC through exports and economic growth. And yet the provision of both market and public goods requires ‘providers’, in this case people we usually call farmers, although ‘land managers and workers’ might be a better term as not all rural land is necessarily worked or managed by conventionally defined farmers. Who actually owns, runs and works our farmed land is an empirical question. And a rather important one, even if we are concerned only with influencing market and public good outputs from the land – we surely need to know who, where and how to target these new policies. Moreover, we would argue that farmers are intrinsically significant in their own right. Like any other occupational group, farming comprises a wide range of individuals with different needs, behavioural norms, values and so forth. As a group, even in late modernity, they remain culturally distinctive.

While the policy and academic communities may struggle to ‘place’ farmers within their various discourses, there is no such ambivalence within popular culture as evidenced by TV programmes such as Country File and well-selling literary accounts of farming and rural life by writers such as Rebanks (2015). Here, farmers are distinctive and interesting, their survival and well-being to be valued. There is an academic language that offers some potentiality here, which is the notion of sustainability as encompassing economic, environmental and social elements. Our commitment to finding a way of bringing the social into agri-Brexit and sustainable agriculture discourses is one of the chief motivations for writing this book. Later in this chapter we make an attempt to explain the neglect of the social in so much of contemporary discussions of agriculture.

Another key theme of this book is the fitness of purpose of contemporary farming given the radically changing demands it now faces. The quest for sustainable farming that has dominated the policy agenda of developed countries for the past two decades, with its language of multifunctionality and environmental protection, is now confronted by the challenges of food, energy and water security within the context of climate change, as well as the profound policy challenges and uncertainties of Brexit. At no time since the Second World War has agriculture been so central to the foremost policy challenges confronting society. This is true globally for the challenges are global; agricultural commodities are increasingly traded internationally and the food price spikes of 2008 had economic, social and political effects across the world. But it is a grave mistake to assume that any global economic sector loses its spatiality, its particularity, its context. More than most economic activities, agriculture is rooted in locality. As any farmer will confirm, no two farms are the same. Soil, climate, topography, ecology are physical attributes that combine to deliver distinctiveness, and this distinctiveness is reinforced by the social and economic heterogeneity of an industry that encompasses everything from the small semi-subsistence holding to massive agri-business. Moreover, farming and the land have cultural and political resonance contributing to contrasting national and regional identities and understanding. These identities are often deeply conflicted, as exemplified in the response from one commentator to the designation of the Lake District as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Describing the designation as a ‘betrayal of the living world’, Monbiot (2017) regards the new status as antithetical to conservation objectives in its preservation of sheep farming as a cultural practice. He argues that the portrayal of sheep farming in the Lake District as ‘wholly authentic’ and ‘harmonious’ with wildlife is part of a powerful cultural myth that obscures the widespread ecological damage associated with the practice. In Monbiot’s view, public money spent on subsidising sheep farmers would be better spent on ecological restoration. Such debates draw into focus the contested nature of land and the question of how (agri)cultural landscapes are valued alongside preferences for ecological wilderness (and indeed other interests such as carbon storage).

Our contribution to the global issue of sustainable agriculture is to offer particularity. The global is made up of distinctive, particular places and we eschew any approach that loses all-important detail in the pursuit of generality to the detriment of focus and of purpose. So our focus on England, with a bias towards the south-west of England, should require no justification. This book is an attempt to understand some key issues facing agriculture in one part of the world, a particular and specific manifestation of global issues in a local context, and by so doing we hope to stimulate thought on how things are the same or differ in other places.

That our aspirations are in no way narrow or parochial is, hopefully, supported by our intention to bridge gaps and make connections. We seek to do so across a number of levels but three urgent imperatives are of particular importance. First, there is the academic imperative to bridge gaps between disciplines; in this instance to bring the insights of a range of social sciences into connection with environmental and agricultural sciences. Our underlying approach is rooted in three social sciences – human geography, political science, sociology – but our intention is both to learn lessons from other disciplines and to understand the technological and agro-ecological issues that underlie the industry we are interested in. Second, there is the policy imperative to connect sustainability and agricultural production, a concern epitomised in the mantra of ‘sustainable intensification’. Third, we believe there is an ethical imperative to (re)connect farmers, to each other, to the geographical communities in which they live, and to the wider economy and society.

At the heart of our book is a commitment to understanding farmers, as occupiers and managers of land, for it is farmers who are the recipients of the market and policy signals that derive from global uncertainties and challenges. Their behavioural response and indeed their own aspirations and knowledge give rise to patterns of land use and production, the canvas of so many discussions and wider societal ambition around ecosystem services, natural capital and sustainability. In short, social and economic drivers have great bearing on the science of sustainability. And yet there is a deficit of understanding of what kind of agricultural industry we now have, following years of restructuring and repositioning. There are a number of factors that have contributed to this neglect. One of them, which we look at in more detail in Chapter 3, is the declining analytical and explanatory power of the annual agricultural census/survey. This longstanding exercise in data gathering has failed to keep pace with the growing complexity and heterogeneity of agricultural occupancy and business arrangements. Another is the lamentable decline and fragmentation of social scientific interest in agriculture, which we seek to remedy throughout the book. As a society, we may have a reasonable knowledge of the aggregate economics of the industry but what about its people? Who are the farmers now and is the agricultural industry socially and culturally equipped for the era of climate change, the challenge of food security and the uncertainties unleashed by Brexit?

Accounting for the neglect of the social

In a speech to the Oxford Farming Conference in January 2018, the UK government’s Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Michael Gove, lavished praise on small farmers:

There are any number of smaller farm and rural businesses which help keep communities coherent and ensure the culture in agriculture is kept healthy. Whether it’s upland farmers in Wales or Cumbria, crofters in Scotland or small livestock farmers in Northern Ireland, we need to ensure support is there for those who keep rural life vital.

(Gove, 2018)

This was one of the very rare occasions when a UK government minister appears to have considered a broader social and cultural agenda related to agriculture. But what might the ‘social’ mean in the context of agricultural sustainability? There have been some earlier policy attempts to grasp this, mainly focusing on the concerns of food consumers, as though somehow ‘social’ when applied to agriculture has little relevance to farming people. For example, the Policy Commission on the Future of Farming and Food produced a report in the aftermath of the foot and mouth epidemic, following the orthodoxy of sustainability thinking, and grouped their recommendations under economic, environmental and social headings (Curry Report, 2002). The section of social recommendations under the label ‘People’ is the shortest of the three and is concerned entirely with non-agricultural people, specifically focusing on consumers and their concerns (Winter, 2004). The following topics were covered: food labelling, public access to farmland, farm animal welfare, use of antibiotics in animal production, healthy eating and nutrition, public procurement policies and food in schools, and food deserts. These are all highly important issues. They are all of central relevance to agriculture’s economic sustainability. But it seems curious indeed to focus discussion of the sustainability of a particular sector almost exclusively on issues of consumption, important though these may be, while neglecting the producers whose practices so determine sustainability outcomes in the field if not on the fork.

One of the arguments in this book, therefore, is that understanding the social in the context of farmers is vital to developing a way forward on food security and agricultural sustainability. In that context, we need to ask who are today’s farmers and land owners, as we do in Chapter 3. How do they see their role and how connected are they to the wider drivers of policy, consumer demand, science and technology (Chapters, 4, 5 and 6)? In answering these questions we will range into areas not normally associated with studies of agriculture. For instance, the new emphasis on well-being and happiness leads us to look at both the role of ‘happy’ farmers in responding to the new challenges and possibilities but also to the wider social ‘offer’ that agriculture makes, as society as a whole seeks to readjust to the realities of a less carbonised society (Chapter 7). We argue that as land, and how it is used, is so central to tackling climate change, we cannot afford to neglect the social dimension of agricultural sustainability. A sustainable planet needs exemplary land use and that can only be provided by ‘happy’ land managers.

A broad definition of social objectives within sustainable farming policies and discourses remains hard to find and the suggestions given by Bowler (2002) – that the social dimension of sustainable development in agriculture should cover issues such as the optimum level of farm population, quality of farm life, and the distribution of material benefits – remain largely unexplored (although see Alston, 2004, for some insights).

So why the neglect, why even the lack of a suitable language to explore the social and cultural dimensions of English farming? The main explanation for this lays in England’s peculiar agrarian history and the relative economic (un)importance of the agricultural industry in one of the earliest industrialised countries. In contrast to most of Europe, England in the nineteenth century did not have a large agricultural peasantry whose concerns featured strongly in domestic politics. None of the political parties in Britain are rooted in an agrarian peasant politics. Appealing to peasant and ruralist values and concerns has not been a feature of mainstream British politics. Moreover, the extent that agrarian concerns have influenced political parties at all has been long diluted as a result of the tri-partite system of agrarian capitalism built around landlord, tenant and worker. Inevitably the different, indeed conflicting, interests of these three groups prevented the emergence of a strong political or public consensus on what is of social value in the agrarian world. Indeed, of the three groupings it was the farmers who were able to make the biggest political strides in the twentieth century, through the ope...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Sustainable agriculture in a world of food security
• 3 Farming trends and agricultural restructuring
• 4 Farmers and the market
• 5 Farmers and sustainable intensification
• 6 The small farm question
• 7 Farmers and social change: Stress, well-being and disconnections
• 8 Farmers and the environment
• 9 Can farmers deliver?: Prospects in an era of food ‘challenge’
• Index