Farming’s voice is struggling to find a clear message about the problems it is facing. Their voice is lost in a noisy media and is not attracting any serious public attention. The greatest challenge for farming over the next few decades will be to get their voice heard.
Farming’s voice tries to squeeze through the different types of media. At the local level it takes the form of articles in magazines and newspapers. But they come across as either a series of grumblings about farming life, promoting local farm shops, which for many people facing the current living crisis is impossible, or lecturing along the lines of ‘without farmers producing food where would you be?’ On social media, TikTokers are posting cute images of animals and misty mornings across the fields, or reminiscing about the ‘good old days’ which based on my experience were rarely good! Then there are those with a large media presence such as Jeremy Clarkson who with his Didley Squat farm has shown the battle that farmers have with bureaucracy but I doubt whether his efforts will sweep any of it away. Amongst the major broadcasters, there is a muddle of voices. BBC’s Radio 4 Farming Today has very little good news which confirms the view that there is never a happy farmer, and Countryfile, which gives a chocolate box presentation of farming. All of these voices fail to show that farming is struggling to overthrow images of its past whilst being slowly crushed between the supermarkets and the heavy handed bureaucracy of the government.
Farming sits at the heart of a very complex food system. How all of the parts of the system interact has been described by the work of Henry Dimbleby in his book Ravenous: How to get ourselves and our planet into shape. He shows in clear detail how the food system impacts on both our health and the climate crisis and how it must change. On top of the complexity of the food system, farming comes under added pressures from lots of different groups who keep banging on about the problems they create but don’t have any solutions other than ‘further discussions with government and farmers’ Then there are groups such as the NFU who seem to be in fire fighting mode and making only glancing blows on government policy and public perception. On top of all of this the government throws in a few reports reviewing topics such as fairness and transparency across sector supply chains or their latest ‘greenwashing’ initiative such as Nature Markets which is trying to turn nature into a market so that private investment will reverse tens of years of decline. If that was not enough then there is the fluctuations of world food prices that can wreck farming’s finances by a few twitches in the wrong direction. It is a wonder that farmers ever get out of bed!
It is against this background that farming has to find a stronger voice so that it can influence the major discussions that are being held about our future. Following on from the end of the second world war, farming started to go down the route of mechanisation, for justifiable reasons at the time, which started to separate us from the land. Farming’s voice needs to reconnect us with the food that arrives on our plates. There are signs that help is at hand with initiatives such as Just Farmers which tries to enable farmers to use their voice for positive change. Then there are local initiatives such as Regather that are challenging the current food system. But a lot more needs to be done.
What we eat and how it is produced is increasingly becoming very important. Farming needs to find a strong voice that reconnects the with the public, whether as consumers or voters, to manage the change that it will go through so that we can stop the nose dive into oblivion.