Farming catastrophe

still.

The farming situation varies between countries but using the UK as an example is eye-opening. Here’s some facts and figures that, frankly, defy belief.

At the moment

There are 209,000 farms in the UK, the Utilised Agricultural area (UAA) covers around 17 million hectares, 70% of the total UK land area. The total croppable area covers about 1/3 of this UAA. 57% of the UAA is permanent grassland.

In 2023 around 2.2% of the croppable area, 133,000 hectares, was put to wheat, sugar beet, and maize. These crops went on to become biofuels.

42% of farms run cattle for meat. 5% are dairy farms. 62% of the value of the UK’s agricultural production comes from livestock

In 2022/23, the surface area of many staple crops declined. The area put to wheat declined by 5.1%, for potatoes, it dropped by nearly 10%, the horticultural crop area dropped by 5.2%, and the total area of arable crops declined by 1.1%.

The farming sector has a huge recruitment problem, most job adverts go unanswered. 67% of farmers are over 55 years old, and only 5% are under 35 years old.

Food insecurity

Lots of farms, lots of land, yet millions of UK citizens are in a situation of food insecurity.‘Low food security’ means that the household reduces the quality, variety, and desirability of their diets. ‘Very low food security’ means that household members sometimes disrupt their eating patterns or reduce their food intake because they lack money or other resources for food.

7.2 million households, 17% of children, 11% of working adults and 3% of pensioners living with food insecurity. It’s astonishing that this situation exists in a country which has the 6th largest economy in the world. Even more remarkable is that people aren’t rioting in the streets.

The number of households living with food insecurity rose by 2.5 million from 2021/22 to 2022/23. Food got more expensive, despite the hundreds of millions of Pounds invested by the major supermarket chains to keep retail prices down. Sainsbury’s invested £560 million to this end. All the major supermarket chains saw a drop in profits. It’s fascinating to note that the CEO of Tescos, the biggest supermarket chain, now has a salary of nearly £10 million. This seems like a lot of money, the average person, in 2023, spent £1542.32 over the year on food. If the CEO had kept £1 million and given the rest away that would have covered the annual food costs of nearly 6000 individuals. Dream on.

Very simplified it goes like this : farmers produce food, most of this goes into the food industry stream and is ultimately distributed by big chain supermarkets, shops and markets. The big chains have enormous purchasing power and farmers make tiny profits. For example the food processor who transform beef into burgers makes 10 times more profit than the beef farmer.

Over the last few centuries Humanity has tried a whole bunch of different policies and strategies to manage food production. The Physiocracy approach. Mao’s Great leap forward that killed an estimated 15 to 30 million Chinese people. We’ve had the Levellers, Agrarianism and onto today where the British Labour government is changing farm inheritance tax.

So, recap, in the UK, millions of people going hungry, farmers moving increasingly to growing biofuels, few people wanting to work in the industry. Supermarkets and food processors making record profits. Intensive agriculture has caused arable soils to lose 40 to 60% of their organic carbon, almost 4 million hectares of soil are at risk of compaction. Over 2 million hectares of soil are at risk of erosion.

Not a lot of people talk about this but 58% of waste that goes to landfill is ….. soil.

Are there any solutions?

Yes and what’s more they are fairly simple. In 2023 a bunch of associations including Sustain set up the Local Food Plan. This goes very much in the direction promoted over decades by Permaculture designers.

We’re talking about community integrated agriculture. Each local community or neighbourhood sets out to ensure food security for it’s inhabitants. This is achieved by filling the public space with orchards and allotments. Running sheep to replace lawn-mowers, making space for beehives and chicken coops. Aquaponic systems and fish farms, the list goes on and on. Coupled to this is encouraging local farmers to sell directly to the local population rather than to the food industry. Ideally farmers would change their agricultural approaches, move towards polycultures, agroforestry and eliminate the need for the use of synthetic chemical inputs.

We have to go back to older varieties of fruit and vegetables which are more nutritious than modern varieties. We have to think in terms of flows, for example, materials being flowed back to maintain soil fertility. Human waste, food waste and agricultural waste can be streamed into biodigestors. The gas produced used to produce electricity and hot water, the digestat spread on fields.

As I said, it’s all pretty simple, we know what the solutions are, we know what we have to do. It’s time now to accelerate the process and for local people to decide that it’s an obscenity that many of their neighbours are going hungry. Having decided that it’s up to them all to change the situation. Waiting for governments to act has never really worked. Waiting for the food industry and the supermarket chains to change their business model is a forlorn hope.

Faced with crises people have often been encouraged to ‘rise up’ and change things. This has led to revolutions but a revolution is just that, it goes around and comes back to the same starting point. Perhaps we need to think more in terms of ‘mulching out’. Mulching means covering the surface of the soil with something that stops light getting to the plants that one doesn’t want. They eventually die off, it’s time to mulch out the supermarket giants, the food industry and wrong-headed farming practices. Let’s mulch them over with community integrated agriculture.