‘The Croft is not the sort of farm from which urban dreams are made.  It’s lacking in several important scenic details;  the land is flat, it’s surrounded by the suburbs of Carlisle, and at night the fields are tinted orange by the glow of the nearby street lights.  A  permanent low-level threat of development for housing hangs over the area, and large parts of the farmhouse kitchen are obscured by thickening drifts of Defra paperwork.  

In all other respects, however, the Croft perfectly fits the city image of how rural England should be. It began conversion to organic status in 2001 and is now a farm of 125 acres stocked with a mixture of sheep, geese, and pedigree Cumbrian Longhorn cattle, all watched over by Borrodale the bull.  All the produce is sold through a local co-operative, and much has been done to restore the soil and encourage wildflower growth.  

Even so, it’s an unlikely place to look for insights into the state of British farming.  Susan Aglionby moved here with her husband and two children in 1989 after a long career in neurosurgical nursing.  Her husband died in 2002 and she now runs the Croft more or less single-handed, taking on additional help only during lambing or in the run-up to Christmas.  But it is not that, nor her passion for organics, nor her articulacy and drive which make Aglionby exceptional among farmers.  It is simply the fact she became a farmer at all.  

More usually, the traffic runs in the opposite direction. Three-quarters of the UK land area is used for agriculture, though it now only employs half a million people - 1.7% of the total workforce.  Most are ageing, and the numbers in every sector except dairy are still falling.  According to Defra’s own statistics, a quarter of farmers had a net income of ‘less than zero’, and a further half had an income of less than £10,000.  And, though there may be no such thing as a farmer who doesn’t grumble, levels of suicide amongst farmers are frightening - double that of any other employment sector, and rising.

They cannot look to the cities for sympathy.  During the recent Surrey Foot & Mouth outbreak, the volume and vehemence of anti-farming comments on the major news websites was striking.  Farmers, it seems, are either a bunch of feckless subsidy-junkies, or they’re trying to poison us with creepy bionic chemicals, or they’re bloodthirsty murderers who would willingly infect their own stock for the chance of a few extra quid in compensation.  
So what went wrong?  Why have we become so suspicious of farmers, and why are they so disheartened by us?  When did the gap between town and country begin, and how did it grow so wide?   

The story starts with a plague, but it goes back a long way further than that.  Twenty-four hours before the second outbreak of Foot & Mouth Disease is confirmed in Surrey, Aglionby sits in the kitchen surrounded by sweet peas and cattle passports, and considers the effects of the first. Carlisle was at the epicentre of the 2001 outbreak, and barely a month after beginning the transition to organic, Aglionby lost all her stock.   ‘My cows were left dead for seven days before they were taken away. They (Defra) changed their minds five times in six days about how they were going to dispose of them.  The diggers actually came to dig a hole to bury them in, and they changed their mind once they’d started digging.’  

A year to the day after the first case of Foot & Mouth was confirmed, ‘We were told what was wrong with my husband, and ten weeks later, he was dead.’  She remains convinced that Defra, the governmental agency responsible for protecting farming’s interests, was partly to blame.   ‘I can’t prove it, but the way the outbreak was handled caused such grief, such anger, such devastating psychological effects.  All of us around this table have probably suffered grief - lost someone in a car crash, had someone they loved die of disease - but with Foot & Mouth, it was compounded by mismanagement.  That was what made people so angry.’

What made the outbreak so horrifying was the knowledge that it might not have been.  Foot & Mouth is not the bubonic plague; it does not slay every cloven-hoofed animal in its path.  In fact, most affected animals recover from it.  It is, as Aglionby puts it, a disease of morbidity, not of mortality.  It weakens, but it doesn’t usually kill. It is regarded with such horror not because it destroys, but because it devalues.  It makes stock uneconomic.   Many farmers were left staring at the carcases of animals which had been culled not because they would have died anyway, but because the government and the supermarkets refused the vaccination program, and ignored the recommendations of the Inquiry into the previous outbreak in 1967.  

Critics of farming point out that most affected farmers received compensation for their Foot & Mouth losses.  In fact, they say, farmers are always getting compensated or subsidised or grant-aided for something or other; farmers can barely put the kettle on without applying for a Hot & Milky Beverage (Production) payment.  They’re dependent on Defra and addicted to the EU.  Under the CAP, they were paid to grow everything; with Set-Aside, they’re paid to grow nothing, and now with the Single Farm Payment they don’t have to do any farming at all. Post-war thinking no longer applies; we’re not under imminent threat of being starved from Britain by the U-Boats, nor do we need flat-out full-on short-term production at the expense of land, wildlife and future.  Everything else in Britain has been privatised, so why do we still pay the farmers so much?

Privately, many farmers agree.  Subsidies - or, since 2005, the Single Farm Payment - gives farming a bad name; it also ensures that most farmers spend as much of their time on the computer trying to work the system as they do out in the fields.  ‘I could be shot by many farming colleagues for saying this,’ Susan Aglionby says, ‘But I think we should go the way of New Zealand - we shouldn’t be subsidised at all.  The general public should pay what it costs to produce the food.’  

Bob Hasell-McCosh, who runs a mixed farm of 300 acres near Keswick, also dislikes the subsidy system.  But he is unequivocal; as things are at present, the economics of farming almost guarantee dependency on payments.  Would he, I ask, encourage his own children to go into farming?  ‘No.  The income is so low that it’s too risky now.  What we get for our sheep is the same as we were getting 20 years ago, and the cattle prices are roughly the same.  What other business could you possibly run where your income is static for 20 years, all your costs have gone up, and it’s only buoyed up by subsidies?’  

A 2004 report entitled ‘Hard Times’ on farming in the Peak District backs him up.  Farming incomes in the area have dropped by 75% in the previous ten years.  Average incomes were £7,482 a year for a 58-hour working week; without subsidies, most farms in the area would be in debt by around £2,300 per annum.  

Many now believe that in a few years time, there will only be three types of farm left; the huge amalgamated farms like those in East Anglia, a few small specialist farms, and the hobby farms of the very rich.  For the rest, the economics just won’t work.  But, as Hasell-McCosh points out, a farmer giving up his land finds it as wrenching as a skipper abandoning ship.  ‘There’s very few farmers who will sell unless they’re forced to do so.  Yes, the farm buildings might nowadays be worth a million pounds, but most farmers hang on.’  

Farmers also point out that the subsidies come at a price.  If one were to take a representative snapshot of modern farming, they say, it wouldn’t be of a man in overalls harvesting barley, it would be someone in an office drowning under paperwork.  “I had A Level Geography students out here one day,’ says Aglionby, clearing a space amongst the paper and spooning out home-grown broccoli.  ‘Their teacher had asked them what they thought farmers were.  The first thing was, they were male, and secondly they were dumb.  This teacher said, ‘Susan, can you show them the kind of books you have to keep?’  So we got out the movement books, the medicine books, the passports that every cow has to have, showed them the accounts, and they went away just gobsmacked.  There is no room  for anybody who’s dumb in farming today.’

In many sectors of farming, regulatory interference has increased to the point where, as Linsey Awde, a dairy farmer near Penrith, says, ‘You get the inspectors inspecting the inspectors. There’s the Farm Assured inspectors, the Food Standards Agency inspectors, the Dairy Crest inspectors, the inspectors for the Single Farm Payment, the inspectors from the company we supply beef to, the cross-compliance and rural stewardship inspectors, the Environmental Agency inspectors ... You do feel they’re taking the mick a bit sometimes.  It would be a whole lot easier if they just left us to get on with farming.’ 

Defra is now run entirely from central London; its mindset is urban, and thus so are its solutions.  The younger generation of farmers - those who have not left agriculture altogether - accept that all modern businesses will require some paperwork, but the older generation regard time spent in an office as wasted time.  And all farmers, whether old or young, are exhausted by Defra’s Orwellianisms.  Aglionby recalls a friend ringing Defra shortly after the 2001 Foot & Mouth outbreak to enquire whether he was now permitted to take his fleeces to the wool merchant. ‘Yes,’ said the voice on the other end of the line, ‘But only if they haven’t been near a sheep.’

Tom Oliver is Rural Policy Director of the CPRE (Campaign for the Protection of Rural England).  As he sees it, the 80% of the British population who live in urban areas pay for the countryside through their taxes; since they’re the piper, they must call the tune. ‘Farmers aren’t having a hard time,’ he insists.  ‘They can’t have it both ways.  They’re free to claim the Single Farm Payment for doing very little, and those who own their own freeholds can always realise those assets and sell up.  The farmers who are in difficulty are so either because of previous debt, or because the supermarkets have driven down prices, or because they’re bad businessmen.’

Oliver believes that, ‘There’s a deal to be struck between public expectations and what farming can deliver.  Farmers should be respected for producing something that benefits the taxpayer - for maintaining nice old farm buildings, promoting wildflower growth, planting trees and so on - but they shouldn’t be free to farm irresponsibly, and it’s entirely proper that there are structures in place to prevent that.’

Since 2005, the paperwork has also been supplemented by the introduction of the Single Farm Payment, designed to replace the old subsidy system (based solely on production) with one based on land and stock management.  ‘Defra put themselves in an impossible situation,’ says Edward Culter, a land agent based in Carlisle.  ‘They said they were going to put the SFP into place by 2005, although their own civil servants said it couldn’t realistically be introduced before this year.  Anyway, Defra went ahead, and the first couple of years were total chaos.’

‘There’s such a range of incompetence all the way from the bottom up that it’s difficult to pick out one single factor, but undoubtedly their computer system is a major issue.  You can stand next to someone and watch them inputting the data correctly, pressing the button and then see it come out the other end completely incorrect.  Larger, well-run farms have been fine, but the SFP has been a calamity for small farmers.  It’s caused serious hardship for a number of small farmers, many of whom were already in debt beforehand.’ 

Most farmers I spoke to had become apolitical; they had lost faith with all parties, not just New Labour.  Blair and now Brown were considered at best indifferent and at worst deliberately vindictive towards rural interests; parallels have been drawn between Thatcher’s attitude to the miners and Blair’s attitude to farming.  Keen to distance himself from the plum-faced end of the old Tory party, David Cameron appears to have done little to restore rural voters’ faith, emphasising general ecological concerns rather than specific rural ones.  

Those ecological concerns tie in with the last public charge against farming; its apparent addiction to agro-chemicals, GM crops, nasty web-toed freak sprays and three-headed fish-killers.  The public (or at least the middle-class River Cottage public) now want proper, seasonal, organic, tastes-of-something food, not packets full of antibiotics rounded off with a pinch of MSG. They also, preferably, want it at a low and constant price.  But at present, only 3.6% of UK agricultural land is fully organic - and, as the recent floods have proved, all land is affected equally by the weather.  So the public can either have conventional food flown in from Israel or Sudan, or it can have British food for what it costs to produce.  

Why does Aglionby think there is such a gulf of understanding between farmers and consumers? ‘I think it’s partly farmers’ fault, because they’ve excluded people, they haven’t welcomed them onto the land.  If people don’t understand about soil, grass, animals, fruit, vegetables, food, supermarket shelf and plate, then they can’t understand what we’re doing.   Even in a village like this, which is surrounded by agricultural land, most children have never touched a lamb.  They think a newborn lamb is soft and fluffy.  It’s not, it feels rough, like corduroy.’

‘I say to the children, ‘Why do you think I keep sheep?’  They say, to look after them, to care for them, to give them a nice home.  Maybe they’ll say, to provide wool.  This year, clipping my sheep cost over £100 and the payment I got for those fleeces is £26.38.  I’m not going to keep sheep for the wool.  It’s getting them to accept that the sheep in the field are actually for food.’

Penny Rogers, ex-NFU branch secretary and farmer in the Scilly Isles, senses a growing disparity between image and reality, and a disconnection between what the urban population demand from the countryside and what they are prepared to pay for it.  ‘People always say, ‘When have you ever heard of a happy farmer,’ but farmers take great pride in doing something well, whether it’s growing strawberries or narcissi or beef-cattle.  But if you feel that the Ministry which is there to support you doesn’t care less, that the public doesn’t care less, and the government - of whichever party - wants to get rid of farming, then it’s very demoralising.’  

‘Most (conventional) farmers are isolated, old, and male,’ says Aglionby,  ‘And even if they have got families, they aren’t good at explaining that they’re worried sick, they’re depressed or they need support.  Fifty years ago, families would work together on the farm, but now the younger generation are getting out of farming, so the older lot are left there working alone.  When it gets too much, they’re not going to go and talk to someone, they’re going to get a gun and shoot themselves.’  The official response to the rise in farming suicide rates is to suggest that making guns less accessible on farms might help cheer the farmers up. 

The nationwide leap in house prices has had another unforeseen consequence.  Unless zoned for housing, most land is worth very little, but the farm buildings can be worth a lot.  So the people who are responsible for maintaining the British countryside - the farmers - are now in the curious position of knowing that no amount of work on or care of the land will ever yield the same kind of profit as a neglected stone byre ripe for restoration.  

As Bob Hasell-McCosh explains, ‘The people who buy farms are people who have got money.  Round here now, the farms are being bought by developers.  It’s not farmers who are buying, it’s people who want land next to their house as a privacy thing, or who want an investment, or as a tax break.’ 

Is there resentment because of that? ‘Yes,’ he says quietly.  ‘We’ve seen them come and go.  That’s the problem.  They have this notion that they can buy a farm in the Lake District, but they don’t realise just how much of a bottomless pit it is.   It’s a luxury, and in 10 years time, they’ll realise they’ve wasted too much money and they’ll sell it again. Because farming is a long-term investment - a very long-term investment - it doesn’t really help to have people coming in and going out again.’

The British landscape as we know and love it is the product of thousands of years of human intervention.  We’ve shaped the fields and coppices and hedgerows, we’ve built roads and pounded out paths, we’ve straightened rivers and shored up embankments.  And, as Penny Rogers  points out, the consequences of farmers giving in and selling up are not, as some utopian urbanites suggest, a sublime English wilderness, but, ‘A moorland monoculture of bracken, heather and brambles.  Land left permanently fallow doesn’t end up being pretty woodland wildflower meadows, it eventually reverts to scrubland.  Wildflowers themselves are the product of farming practices in the past.’

What she and many farmers seek is a bit more balance.  ‘We need an understanding that each field is a true representation of the farmer who manages it - his age, his outlook, his practices and management.  The result of all these overlapping layers of natural development and human involvement, and of the self-interest, care, love and skill of generations of farmers, is this lovely thing called the English countryside.’