Tea at Trianon: The Future of Agriculture in Britain

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, May 18, 2022

The Future of Agriculture in Britain

From Country Life:

Then there is the issue of food security. When Covid struck, the lucky ones among us were able to go without the supermarket altogether, by relying on farm shops and local food, driving a rise in meat boxes and suchlike. Small family farms producing food that gets processed — slaughtered, picked or packed — locally are doing their bit for the climate and society. We live in an unstable, uncertain world and farming resilience has to be extended. If that means challenging the supermarkets and their supply chains, so be it. The alternatives are already there. A recent report says that Britain’s farm shops employ 25,000 people, with sales totalling £1.4 billion — and most of them expect business to grow, not shrink.

The trend so far is away from the small producer, but policy can change. The stopper is straightforward: high land prices, sustained by subsidy, tax and investment rules and planning. What we need is not only more small farms to join the thousands already on the land, or more families to join the 150,000 or so people already working out there, but hundreds of thousands of farmers.

Organisations such as the Ecological Land Cooperative try to bring cheap or free marginal land into cultivation by ‘stewards’, whose commitment to agriculture is overseen by the group and who enable small farmers to build and live on their plots. We need thousands more smallholdings, their owners supplementing their income with outside jobs, by specialising, by needing less in the first place. Bring on the micro-dairy, the mushroom grower, the bee-keeper’s orchard, the salad producer.

William Cobbett, the farmer, politician and polemicist who believed in local distinctiveness, saw beauty where he saw rural prosperity: well-fed children, hard-working adults and a pig in the sty. He would have railed against a green sward divided by blown-out hedgerows, visited twice a month by a contractor with a heavy machine. Just as there’s no finer sight than an allotment garden, so nothing could gladden the eye like a countryside of small farms and smallholdings, in a patchwork of tiny fields, with a shack or a caravan or a Hobbit-house every few acres, with polytunnels, sheep shelters and pig arks. (Read more.)