The end of farming?

This 'long read' in The Guardian takes the kind of line one would expect, i.e., it is critical of 'intensive' farming and sympathetic towards attempts at rewilding and environmental regeneration: The end of farming?

In my view farmers tend to rely too much on food security arguments as a response. I think there is a need to engage more with these environmental concerns, even if some of them are overstated. Farmers may feel that an urban audience does not understand their challenges, but the UK is a highly urbanised country.

It doesn't help that some farmers still appear to be in denial about climate change according to a recent report in Farmers Weekly. An survey carried out for them by Macleod Research found that more than two-thirds of the farmers interviewed believe the increase in extreme weather events seen over the past five years is due to climate change – but many believe it isn’t.

Some 31 per cent said they believed weather patterns were cyclical and had always changed over the years Many said weather patterns were natural and had little or nothing to do with mankind or the impact of human activity. Of those who believe extreme weather is due to climate change, 68 per cent said it was a threat to their business but 32 per cent of respondents said they believed it was an opportunity to do things different, including growing different crops and starting new enterprises.

NFU president Minnette Batters has recently claimed that farmers are feeling 'hurt and demoralised' by the anti-meat agenda that has labelled them the problem and not part of the solution to mitigating climate change. The simplistic argument that meat is bad and plant-based alternatives are good has been 'enormously detrimental' to farmers’ mental health, she argued. However, she did go on to accept that the farming industry will face huge change.

The Guardian article argues that 'technology is opening a whole new direction for food production, which will take farming away from the farm. Robotics and drones are reducing the need for humans to be on the land, while vertical farming, in which vegetables can be grown in sunless warehouses using LED lighting, gene editing and metagenics – the engineering of specific enzymes or proteins – are coming up with new definitions of food.' Vertical farming in my view is still very niche, but I will examine it in more depth in a later post.

However, if new technology is going to be adopted at a time when farm profits are likely to fall, some government funding to accelerate the rate of adoption would be justified.