The Small Farm Future Blog

A land worker at large in London

Posted on April 24, 2014 | 2 Comments

Time perhaps for a brief report on the demonstration staged by the Land Workers’ Alliance outside the DEFRA offices in Westminster’s corridors of power last week.

My colleagues in the LWA did a fine job assembling a generous farmer’s market stall of small farm produce adjacent to DEFRA’s imposing front door, much to the bemusement of its besuited denizens as they scurried out for their lunch breaks. It’s a bad time of year for us veg growers to be trying to demonstrate our productivity (rhubarb and salads featured prominently…) but all in all it was an impressive display. And some of the DEFRA employees even deigned to take one of our leaflets.

An excellent giant effigy of Secretary of State Owen Paterson was also produced, and one of the highlights of the day was the Effigy of State’s enthusiastic liaison with a corporate agribusiness doppelganger orchestrated by my colleagues (pictured). Entertaining, I thought, though perhaps stretching the point a little. But it seems that Mr Paterson has indeed been holding secret trysts with the GMO crowd, and doesn’t want anyone to know about it. Just goes to show how bang on trend the LWA is.

Though regrettably DEFRA wouldn’t entertain any direct engagement with us, the demo has led to some good media exposure and various other opportunities opening up. My colleague Jyoti Fernandes (to whom I’m eternally grateful for attending Vallis Veg’s planning appeal hearing and telling it like it is about small scale farming) has just featured on Farming Today and I think acquitted herself brilliantly in the trial-by-soundbite world of the modern media. Not so convinced by the counter-position sketched by Guy Smith of the National Farmer’s Union, who seemed quite happy with arbitrarily guillotining farm subsidies below 5 hectares (apparently on the grounds of efficiency – on which troublesome concept, more on this blog soon…), but not with arbitrarily guillotining them at £150,000. Maybe by parallel logic income tax should only be levied on those earning over, say, £30,000? Smith’s main argument seemed to be that large farms were putting subsidies gainfully to work by employing people. But since it’s widely agreed that small farms are more labour intensive, that, surely, is a fine argument for levelling the playing field in favour of smaller operations?

There’ve been a few negative responses to Jyoti’s interview in the Twitterverse, complaining that she unfairly insinuated that large farms produce unhealthier food. The LWA can easily be positioned as anti-large scale farming in this way – unfortunate, because as I’ve argued many times before on this blog, small-scale farmers have a lot in common with large-scale ones, and the real problems are with the large-scale food system not large-scale farmers as such. But just to follow up on the debate, Grant Walling asks “Could landworkers alliance explain why wheat from a 1000 acre farm is less healthy than wheat from a 100 acre farming business?” Well, I’m not aware that any of us have argued that it is – though I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody growing wheat on the smaller scale was preserving greater biodiversity and using less environmentally damaging methods. Like Martin Wolfe for example. Or John Letts. The larger point, though, is that nationally and globally we’re over-reliant on a handful of not massively healthy cereal and oilseed crops which scale up well to highly mechanised large-farm and large-retail production, whereas smaller scale farms typically produce a wider range of products, including the fruits and vegetables that pretty much everyone agrees we should be eating more of – except that here in the UK we’re importing most of the already inadequate quantities of these foodstuffs that we eat. It’s a disgrace, really – if only there were more small farms to produce them locally. What we need is a demonstration outside DEFRA…