It’s been a feature of European life for a few years now, but here in the UK we’re not so used to the sight of farm tractors and angry farmers clogging our cities and motorways. On the other side of the Channel frustrated farmers have long since been taking to city centres to blockade traffic and dump mountains of unmentionable agricultural substances outside administrative buildings. Thankfully we haven’t got to this stage yet, but the anger, frustrations and even desperation of many UK farmers and their families was very evident at yesterday’s protest event in London. There was even a moving moment’s respectful silence for those who had resorted to ending their own lives over unmanageable worries about their businesses.

Unpicking yesterday’s tractor protest it was obvious that not only were a number of complex arguments and even contrary issues being flexed, but the whole concept of solidarity with those who produce our food was underscored by varying degrees of neo-nationalist narratives about the apparent relationship between British farming and the imagined landscape of the English inter-war years rural idyll.

Much of what the contemporary British public identifies with when it comes to discussions about native agriculture are narratives drawn down from the dreamy days of 1930s British travel writers and the later interactions with the British rural landscape by TV personalities such as Jack Hargreaves and John Betjeman. Whilst these idyllic constructs of Arcadia have  enormous appeal to a nation pulling itself up from the darkness of two world wars, the reality for those actually working the land at the time was an experience far removed from bustling cattle markets and energetic plough teams.

The experience of English agricultural life between the two world wars was that our nation’s food production was in an utter state of collapse. Not only had so many fit and healthy young workers been buried on the battlefields of Europe, but the need to convert so much productivity to armaments had meant that food production has become a critically under-rated second thought. Farm work was also hugely unattractive to the younger generations who could find far more exciting and better rewarded jobs by fleeing the countryside in favour of a cosmopolitan life in our rapidly expanding centres.

For those who weren’t actually there, the rolling downlands and sheep-heavy hills of Britain were actually a landscape of scrub and neglected wilderness, as a consequence of which the nation was close to the point of starvation. It was into this desperate wilderness of productivity that a number of radical and visionary Catholic and Christian organisations sought to redress not only the isolation and exploitation of our unhealthy cities, but the also the urgent need for a reliable and sustainable food supply – the Catholic Land movement colonies, The Marydown project, Elstead, Parbold, the Biggar farm in Lanarkshire. Many such projects were driven by a biblical subscript of the flight from Egypt and the search for the promised land, encouraged by visionary thinkers like the great Dominican preacher and general anti-modernist Fr Vincent McNabb, who believed passionately that the antidote to urban isolation and grinding food shortages was to return to the example of the Holy Family of Nazareth – a simple, rural life of meaningful and useful production structured around a life of prayer.

All of this may seem a very long way from the problems that our modern-day farmers are having to deal with, but actually there’s a profound connection, both physical and metaphysical.

For a new government that seems intent on politically questionable early confrontations, the current farming protests have very conveniently been focussed in on the issue of inheritance tax. We’ve been reassured that few farmers will actually be impacted by the new changes, and ministers have been at pains to point out that the new 20% inheritance tax is still a long way shy of the 40% that applies to the rest of the population. In case we didn’t already know there has also been some discrete leaking of information regarding the many other preferential and highly advantageous grants that farmers have been able to claim over recent years. The subscript has been that farmers have been a privileged – and comparatively very wealthy bunch – for some time now and this really all just needed to be brought into line with what the rest of the population is having to pay.

As one might expect there has been plenty of information passing around about the alleged material wealth of farmers, and in particular how such large swathes of UK agricultural land is in the hands of a small coterie of landed aristocrats. Whilst it’s undoubtedly true that many farming estates are in the hands of extremely wealthy speculators, it’s also equally true that many smaller farmers are being driven to the brink of extinction. What is bleakly apparent is that whilst many may be asset rich in terms of the land they own, they are dangerously cash poor in terms of the increasingly marginal turnover of their businesses. Whatever the value of a farm, this capital is dead and useless until the property is sold off and the capital realised, and the tradition of farming families passing on estates rather than selling them only adds to the misery.

It is for this reason that farmers are desperately angry, especially as the new impositions on passing farms to descendants comes from a Labour government whose sub-script is fundamentally antagonistic to the whole concept of property ownership and inheritance.

At this bottom level of marginal agriculture, we find farmers who are working ever longer hours and in increasingly difficult conditions to meet a nation’s insatiable need for endless iterations of cheap food. Research from the Farm Safety Foundation has found up to 94 per cent of UK farmers under the age of 40 say mental health is one of the greatest hidden issues they grapple with on a day-to-day basis and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) data shows that 36 farmers across the UK killed themselves and 22 died in accidents in 2021.

So, it’s not in doubt that cheap food comes at a heavy price to farmers’ mental health, as productivity demands increase and profit margins are squeezed ruthlessly.

Most of the British public are blissfully unaware of the brutal realities of our food supply chain; so long as the neatly packed, uniform bacon rashers are on the shelf and the carrots are always available. Back in the immediate post-war years we all tended to shop for the day’s needs, making a regular pilgrimage to the local shopping parade where a range of foodstuffs were readily available from their specialist supplier – the butcher, the baker, the vegetable merchant and the dairy (which generally delivered its produce right to our doorstep).

The change from bespoke businesses to general store and supermarket was welcomed heartily by upwardly mobile families in the 1950s and 60s, but the transition will go down in history as one or the most destructive in British agricultural history. The demand for ever more varieties of foodstuffs and the pressure of aggressive competition between emerging superstores meant that British farmers were caught in a destructive vice between the attraction of supplying large retailers and the increasing pressure being exerted by their new masters to continually reduce supply costs – all driven by the threat of switching supplier.

The end result of these past decades of unchecked competition is that we all now find ourselves living in a bizarre world where supermarkets want to carry many hundreds of variations on a slice of pork, and all a farmer can get for an eight-week-old pig is £40. So the only recourse for the poor farmer is to relentlessly push production to meet the customer’s demands, and hopefully create some small profit for the business in the process. Not surprisingly, smaller marginal farms have collapsed under this relentless economic pressure and increasingly it is the larger national, international or even supermarket-owned operations that have been buying up UK farmland to feed this consumer-driven food behemoth we (or more likely, they) have created.

And this is one of the seemingly trivial, but actually fundamental questions that lie at the heart of the UK – and indeed global – food chain supply problem. Who exactly determines that we need 137 flavours and presentations of pork loin, or 87 varieties of yoghurt – customer or manufacturer? It seems many lifetimes ago now that homes enjoyed three varied and fulfilling meals prepared with just a very small range of fresh, healthy products available on the local high street?

Of course it will be argued that an increasing population requires a more substantive means of production, but sadly British agriculture has not been encouraged to increase it productivity for the reason of feeding more people, but rather to satisfy the marketing and competitive ambitions of large food retailers.

As the tractors rolled up Whitehall this week the media narrative was about inheritance tax, but actually what farmers actually spoke about was the increasingly impossible task of meeting such aggressive consumer demands with such low profit margins. It goes without saying that if agricultural businesses were able to operate with fair profit margins, the matter of inheritance tax might not be an issue at all.

It should also be mentioned that all this impossible dash towards intensive mass production of foodstuffs is not only impacting on farmers, but it’s extremely bad news for the environment as well. A recent report by CAFOD has laid bare some stark realities about the whole farming-to-food process. CAFOD has estimated that globally around $635 billion is spent on agricultural subsidies and most of this cash goes on the harmful chemical fertilisers that are needed to sustain such un-naturally high levels of food production. It is also estimated that around 21-37% of global greenhouse gas emissions can be attributed to the current food production system. And just looking at grain production alone, around 80% of the global grain market is controlled by just five companies.

No doubt the arguments about the ‘tractor tax’ will rumble on, but the real issue that needs resolving is not the ownership and transfer of agricultural land, but what we are doing with it. If the viability of British farmers, and the broader well-being of the planet is to be protected, it’s vital that we make a fundamental reassessment and rationalisation of the foodstuffs we are producing, and how these are marketed and distributed. Only a drastic descaling and re-organisation of the British food industry will suffice to protrect our farmers, our foodchain and the environment.

Joseph Kelly is a Catholic writer and theologian