Last year I was a farmer, this year I'm a park-keeper
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Prostitutes may have syphilis and coalminers silicosis but the occupational disease of farmers is tunnel
vision. Which explains why so many of us have failed to see that the big world the other side of the hedge
has changed so fundamentally in the past five years. No wonder we are confused. Our grandfathers were
exhorted to dig for victory, our fathers were begged to plant from fencerow to fencerow, but today we are
asked by Margaret Beckett to spend less time being farmers and more time being park-keepers. The nature of the new model farmer came home to me as, over the past couple of weeks, I have been contemplating the future of a long thin field on our farm known as The Slipe. When I started farming on the Cambridgeshire prairie in 1972, my job was never in doubt. I had to produce as much wheat as I possibly could. So I used new varieties, new techniques and new chemicals, and I was able to double our wheat yields in a single decade. No wonder I was a hero - at least to Brussels. And they showed their gratitude by tipping a cornucopia of cash into my bank account. It was called the Common Agricultural Policy. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. And it wasn't just the shed-loads of subsidies that made my life easy. In those days there was no green movement to speak of. Hardly anyone worried about pollution, pesticide residues or genetic modification. And agricultural subsidies, like old age pensions, were considered well-deserved and non-controversial. The apogee for me (the nadir if you happened to be a taxpayer) was in the 1970s, when Peter Walker, the Minister of Agriculture, introduced a White Paper called Food from Our Own Resources. The message that it contained was stark and simple: produce as much as possible as soon as possible.
The younger farmers like me began to think that this amazing new policy was not only the norm, it was also
our right. Our fathers, who could remember the Depression and the Bad Old Days, shook their heads and
said it could never last. They were right. It is very different now. The latest reform of the CAP (known as the Mid Term Review) ensures that I will no longer be paid for every acre I plant. Instead I will be paid a fixed sum per acre on condition that I am environmentally benign. The link between subsidy and output has been broken. But if my role is no longer to produce as much food as possible, what on earth should I be doing? The answer, apparently, is that I should become a park-keeper and spend less time growing wheat and more time thinking about bugs and birds and badgers. It was for this reason that we decided not to grow wheat on The Slipe, a field that had long been part of the arable rotation. Two weeks ago we took a deep breath and planted grass, which will be grazed by my neighbour's sheep and provide a far better habitat for wildlife than a field of intensive winter wheat.
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