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I poshly call it my ‘sabbatical’. For the past year, I have been in France studying organic agriculture. (The ‘bio’ sector here is way ahead of ours.) Before crossing the Channel I was anxious about integration, assimilation, fitting in. Needlessly, as it happens. I talk to my farming neighbours in deep France about exactly the same things as I talk to my neighbours in Herefordshire profonde. The weather. The state of the crops/livestock. The price of wheat… The local farmer who’s killed himself.
More than one French farmer a day, by some estimates, takes his own life. (And it is almost always ‘his’, which is part of the problem.) Suicide down on the farm is not an international league table one wants to top: in the UK, the agricultural suicide rate is a mere farmer per week (still more than twice the national average). But then we have fewer farmers, 138,000 as opposed to France’s 450,000.
In France, the topic of agricultural sector suicide is currently on the lips of tout le monde, because farmers are part of the national fabric, because of the success of the recent film Au Nom de la Terre, directed by Edouard Bergeon, which recounts the life of farmer Pierre Jarjeau, from 1976 to his self-killing in 1996. It is painful watching: all the more painful because it is true. It is the story of Bergeon’s father.
The reasons for the grotesque suicide rate in agriculture? They are all there in Au Nom de la Terre, and they begin with money.
There is none. In the 1970s, a farmer with a small herd of milk cows, say 30 Jerseys, could make a living. In 2020, a farmer with 300 Holsteins will struggle to make a penny/cent profit per pint. Personally, I do not know any farmers who work fewer than 80 hours a week, or for more than the national minimum wage.
Modern farming is a bonfire of the economic sanities, where prices are continuously driven down by supermarkets, who then take the wolf’s share of the remaining price of the packet on the shelves. The farmer’s conventional answer to the cheapening of food has been to increase production. The Bigging-Up has required pushing machine and man and land ever harder. More hours! More acreage! More technology! (Pierre Jarjeau in Au Nom de la Terre invests in a state-of-the-art, automated chicken shed, financed by the sort of easy credit everybody from City suits to EU bureaucrats like to slip farmers.)
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SubscribeThese is not meant to be a pert piece of cheek but an absolutely serious suggestion.-
EITHER, get the Farmers’ Union to call a general strike until the supermarkets buckle and agree to give all farmers fair proper prices. (If all farmers took part, were utterly ‘solid’, that would soon scare the government. The thought of being ENTIRELY dependent on foreign produce makes any politician anywhere queasy.)
OR join, one by one, Riverford – the organic farms cooperative – who do everything farmers should do and enjoy the rewards farmers should have.
I get much of my groceries from them and am very glad to eat non-poisoned victuals; albeit at much higher prices than one pays in the supermarkets.
Potatoes Full of Flavour and taking only a few minutes to cook…&c.
Given the surge in numbers of clients signing on with this organic cooperative (huge locally) this could be the future anyway.